Reports of (Colour) Kodachrome Home Processing Emerge from Sydney

[wblynch]

Sal, you could not be more correct! That is why Fuji had the E6 market cornered.

Bill, when you are trying to help someone with information, you don't ignore them. OTOH, you have to tell them that enough is enough.

PE

I understand Ron, we all admire you immensely and thank you for all your contributions. I just hope you can save yourself a little sanity.

Take care, Bill

[Photo Engineer]

Roger, thank you. I'll shut up!

K.S., Roger, in surveys, most people pick garish color over muted color as long as the color is accurate. And so a red can be a red, not an orange, but the customer inevitably selects bright red rather than red. If you look at a Munsell or CIE chart: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIELAB. You will find that people expect high saturation and brightness. See the enhanced color photo compared to the original on the CIE page.

PE

[Photo Engineer]

Please, I don't need any flattery! But thanks. I appreciate your comments.

PE

[RPC]

Since Kodachrome is, for all intents and purposes an obsolete item, and due to its cult-like popularity, why not start a forum on this site devoted just to Kodachrome? Everything Kodachrome could then be posted there, for those interested, sparing others the continually popping-up Kodachrome threads in this forum. If someone started one on this forum, it could just be moved there. Just a thought.

[Klainmeister]

I think almost every segment of film has become cultist, so we'd have to do that for everyone. Good god, if we gave Kodachrome a forum, could you imagine the uproar from the Leica folks that they don't get their own?

[wblynch]

...Good god, if we gave Kodachrome a forum, could you imagine the uproar from the Leica folks that they don't get there own?

They have entire SITES. And control a number of others

[Roger Cole]

Roger, thank you. I'll shut up!

K.S., Roger, in surveys, most people pick garish color over muted color as long as the color is accurate. And so a red can be a red, not an orange, but the customer inevitably selects bright red rather than red. If you look at a Munsell or CIE chart: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIELAB. You will find that people expect high saturation and brightness. See the enhanced color photo compared to the original on the CIE page.

PE

And I prefer the right side of the photograph in the Wiki article, or at least I do assuming that sky is accurate. I like the bright blue sky of the left side, but I've seen skies that appear that blue plenty of times. I don't like the garish neon green of the plants on the left. Plants just don't look like that, at least outside of cartoons. When I go visit family back in east TN I always marvel at the much more vibrant shades of green in the grass and trees (during times of year they are green of course) as opposed to here in Georgia, but even they are not THAT green.

Isn't there an inherent conflict between saturation and color accuracy at some point, where to make the color more saturated it has to be more purely one wavelength, whereas the original was more mixed?

In any event, when I started photogtraphy Kodachrome was known for its saturation, compared to the E4 and early E6 films, and especially compared to, ugh, Kodacolor II consumer C41. We used Vericolor II type S, later III, when we wanted saturated prints. I liked the more saturated look of Kodachrome then, but somehow the race was on and I thought it got kind of carried away later.

OTOH, I did shoot a fair amount of Agfa Ultra 50 so I'm hardly one to talk. But that was for very specific subjects that worked with high saturation, like I agree Velvia does, not for general use (and talk about garish Caucasian skin tones, ugh! But it was great for bright cars, some sports in bright enough light etc.) I much prefer today's Ektar 100 though: not quite as saturated but very saturated, an extra stop of speed, much sharper, and decent flesh tones if people wander into those shots.

I always liked Kodachrome but didn't shoot much of it because I could process E6 myself, and also because 64 is pretty slow never mind 25. When they came out with 200 I tried it but found it quite grainy. Besides, it was such an icon it would always be available and I could always shoot it later. Sigh. I did shoot quite a few rolls I could find in 2010. I had one left over I just didn't have time to shoot. I'm not even sure where it is now, not that it would be worth $250 to me to process.

[Poisson Du Jour]

Isn't there an inherent conflict between saturation and color accuracy at some point, where to make the color more saturated it has to be more purely one wavelength, whereas the original was more mixed?

Roger, as one who works in colourimetrics in a hybridised workflow, I draw your attention to the following statement:

"Additionally, many of the "colors" within Lab space fall outside the gamut of human vision, and are therefore purely imaginary; these "colors" cannot be reproduced in the physical world."

The garish rendering of the image on the left is an oversimplification of the way LAB tweaks the gamut (saturation and brightness) to try and approximate human vision, but we do not see the view this way. The colour space is just awful for practical use and certainly should be avoided with films like Velvia, Provia, what remains of the Kodak emulsions and anything with high RGB values. I've noticed that LAB is routinely applied to photographs in Royal Auto, (e.g. AAA in other countries). The colourisation is terrible, a joke.

Kodachrome was not a very saturated film to my eyes. The many hundreds of slides I have in archives could be described as bright and lively, but not saturated. If saturation was required, a polariser would be slapped on, an in many landscape images I have of the 80s and early 90s, that's what I did.

That Wiki article, while informative and well researched, is bogged down in a welter of grand technical methodology and resource that in modern colourimetric work is totally unnecessary beyond basics because so much of the work is automated (it has to be; photographers and artists would never get any work done puddling around all this!). An example is the deep CIELAB-CIEXYZ conversions and the incredibly foggy CIELAB explanation.

[StoneNYC]

And practically all AF-finder film-cameras used the contrast detection (either in the active or passive version).

Oh ok, I guess since all new digi cameras have it it's not a notable feature so that's why I've never heard of it. Thanks


~Stone

The Important Ones - Mamiya: 7 II, RZ67 Pro II / Canon: 1V, AE-1 / Kodak: No 1 Pocket Autographic, No 1A Pocket Autographic

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[StoneNYC]

Kodak worked on a t-Grain and an ISO 400 Kodachrome but none of this went to market. The photo magazines who got samples were "ho-hum" about it in the face of the new E6 films.

PE

Do you have some? That would be cool to have just for coolness purposes haha


~Stone

The Important Ones - Mamiya: 7 II, RZ67 Pro II / Canon: 1V, AE-1 / Kodak: No 1 Pocket Autographic, No 1A Pocket Autographic

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk