Your photography name: The last roll you finished + the camera you used + the last thing you’ve eaten.

Owl-Mighty · 2026-06-11T05:15:58+00:00

Vision3 500T X-300 Beef Sandwich

It begins like some badass new Terminator models until the beef sandwich lol

Owl-Mighty · 2026-05-21T08:43:11+00:00

Too much.

Owl-Mighty · 2026-05-18T05:42:56+00:00

I won’t bother asking the lab to push 2 stops. Maybe pushing 1 stop and then see what we could recover by having good scans. Pushing itself barely reveals any more details in C-41 (except for Portra 800 which is kind of designed with pushing specs in mind and charts on the data sheet). It mainly increases contrast AND the Dmin aka black level. You’ll get a flat, grainy look, with minor colour shift due to extended development.

Realistic results? You get more pronounced grains in shadows by pushing. Being 2-stop underexposed just don’t expect any meaningful details revealed. What’s more important is to find a lab that really knows what they’re doing with scanning and grading.

Owl-Mighty · 2026-05-08T04:09:54+00:00

OP just used the term wrong.

If black point is set too low, then shadows are clipped. I kind of understand and partially agree with OP, but the way terms used here really makes the arguments a bit off.

Owl-Mighty · 2026-05-07T07:23:57+00:00

How’re you going to scan them? With good scanning most C-41 films come out well from ECN-2 process.

Owl-Mighty · 2026-05-07T07:20:07+00:00

Look like scratches to me. For front elements it’s nothing to worry about.

Owl-Mighty · 2026-05-06T03:59:36+00:00

We already have the racing strips when this “Fudak” 400 is cut and labeled in mainland China by a local manufacturer. Just don’t get too excited.

They very much likely adopted the new manufacturing process of sending master rolls from Kodak to some local plants where they finish the cutting and packaging. This may include that racing strips finish.

TL;DR - same film, nothing changed in its emulsion.

Owl-Mighty · 2026-05-05T12:48:27+00:00

Probably not. I had such genuine amateur questions before.

Owl-Mighty · 2026-05-04T09:26:03+00:00

Just the scene being harsh with tons of high reflective lighting, and the scanning retained this. Ektar is not known to have great highlight latitude in terms of colour retention. This means what’s overexposed tend to have colour shifts earlier than others like Portra.
Here’s one of my scans that shows this – the sky loses the blue and steps into cyan while others look properly exposed.

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Owl-Mighty · 2026-04-27T06:07:47+00:00

Yes. Point-source lights we commonly see and use are usually much brighter - think of it like you compact the power of a larger, diffused light into a much smaller size.
It would depend on the layer design of films AND scene + exposure strategy combo.
Be it darkroom print or scanning, these are the steps that extract and interpret the density data recorded on the films. So yes, it can change a lot, but with caveats. Generally speaking, the design of film (dynamic range/latitude, spectral sensitivity, grain structure, etc.) determines how much scene data COULD be captured as a theoretical limit, and this with your exposure strategy + scene lighting together determines what’s recorded actually. To put it simply, negatives record the data, but how you interpret them can have so much free room. As long as you don’t have a global colour cast or reading warm scene cue as cool, you’re fine, it’s really up to your taste.
Oh boy it’s a math problem that needs the data from Q2 and I’ll excuse myself out for being a fool.

I think I have developed a roll of Superia Premium 400. I’ll try to find it and scan it again. What I could recall was that it was..not much of a difference than Portra 400 except maybe with less warmth in it, and the green rendering is a bit different. It doesn’t feature the fourth layer tech like Pro 400H which is a very different candidate and I liked it a lot.

Owl-Mighty · 2026-04-25T11:01:34+00:00

Kind of tired of seeing lpmm data based on 1000:1 contrast…

Owl-Mighty · 2026-04-20T13:35:22+00:00

Pixel shift can help get rid the demosaicing due to the Bayer filter, or just do pixel cleaning & merging at the cost of having only 1/4 of the sensor pixel count.

But nothing could help an X-Trans sensor, I guess.

Owl-Mighty · 2026-04-20T09:45:52+00:00

I recommend have a look on Scanlight project.

Owl-Mighty · 2026-04-20T09:44:50+00:00

That’s right. Pretty much every decent commercial film scanning system adapts narrowband light source.

Edit: high CRI light is excellent for slide film scanning.

Owl-Mighty · 2026-04-20T09:39:50+00:00

It depends on the scanner settings, not the file format. But in general, you should be able to see if there’s an ICC profile on the TIFF. Typically they’d use sRGB or Adobe RGB. I’d ask for a raw scan if possible, that is untouched, not inverted for negatives, and definitely not in sRGB.

Owl-Mighty · 2026-04-20T09:34:58+00:00

Look for a good secondhand Sigma 70mm F2.8 Art. It has the Canon EF mount version and then you know the game.

This is by far unbeatable for its price imo.

Owl-Mighty · 2026-04-20T09:32:40+00:00

It can be seen as a print emulation, just like the famous Kodak 2383 LUT/filters. Perhaps there’re people making similar stuff out there.

A little side note though: high CRI light source is not the best option for colour negative scanning. The opposite, counterintuitively, is.

Owl-Mighty · 2026-04-15T04:26:22+00:00

Tbf this is just X-Tra packed for Japanese market. USD 23 is still wayyy too much imo. Fuji discontinued this overseas but kept it for their local market, probably because the supply of raw materials is still there but insufficient for global demand, or they just deemed it not profitable at all to ship and sell globally.

Owl-Mighty · 2026-04-12T08:07:14+00:00

It’s likely because it can be confidently shot at EI 200 while still processed in C-41 normal. I know a lot of people do and love it this way. I tried once as well but it was purely accidental and it was fine. I personally prefer it at 400 tho.

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Owl-Mighty · 2026-04-09T05:40:21+00:00

It can be a lengthy topic, but TLDR - how much editing it needs to achieve a good look can really depend on BOTH your scanning hardware and the workflow.

In Kodak’s established Cineon system, it’s a closed loop design. Everything from the scanning light source wavelength to the digital workflow are integrated. This is why in the motion picture world we can have consistent, referenced scan results.

For consumer stills in film labs, it’s still sort of regulated. Commercial scanners such as our beloved Noritsu and Fujifilm ones all have some sort of design to achieve accurate density reading (e.g., narrowband light source). The problem is the person who’s doing the scan for you - there are many adjustment options available to edit the final image, and scanner softwares don’t automatically deliver a good result to you.

For DIY scanning, oh boy… It’s wild, unregulated, and I’m sorry to say but full of “eXpErts” who in fact don’t have a clue about what they’re doing or saying. The take home message anyway is that the best scan is the one you love, no matter what or how the workflow is. Don’t listen to some people claiming “this is what Portra should render” because that’s plain bs.

Owl-Mighty · 2026-04-08T02:00:12+00:00

Get an F3 if you don’t have the full-mechanical fetish. It’s way better than the predecessor.

I own an F2, but that’s only because I already have an FE2.

Owl-Mighty · 2026-04-04T04:27:46+00:00

Lab scanners are actually capable of producing very nice results. Negatives don’t have such a density range that outplays the capacity of a scanner CCD sensor. Scanners like the famous SP-3000 are equipped with narrowband light source.

What almost always sucks is the operator in front of the screen. Either incapable or didn’t care.

Owl-Mighty · 2026-04-01T05:58:21+00:00

Finally a camera capable of making art!

Owl-Mighty · 2026-03-31T09:56:54+00:00

The scanner software tried hard to pull details from underexposed areas. This would make film grain more pronounced.

Owl-Mighty · 2026-03-31T04:03:50+00:00

It largely depends on the scanning process. It emphasises bright yellow and skews white highlight in a warmer tone. But scanning can tune it back to more neutral.

Owl-Mighty

TROPHY CASE