Choosing The Best Film II

Colour
Modern 100-speed films give a superb balance of image quality with speed. Nonetheless, 400-speed films are excellent and produce results in which the loss of sharpness and increase in graininess is acceptable. However, contrast is higher and the subtlety of colour discrimination is lacking.

Colour films come in families these days, so you can choose speeds of film that are appropriate for different tasks while still enjoying family resemblances in terms of contrast, saturation, and colour palette. For weddings and social portraiture, for example, where you may need to retain detail in the highlights of the bride's dress or in light-coloured clothes, you need a film with lower contrast and moderate colour saturation. For general family photography, you may prefer to use a film that offers punchier colours and more lively contrast. Industrial, travel, and commercial photographers may go for even more vibrant colour rendering with high colour saturation.

If you are working in mixed lighting - tungsten lights combined with daylight, say - use colour negative films. These show a greater tolerance to both exposure and colour balance variations compared with colour slide material, thus allowing corrections to be carried out more easily.

Colour negative scans
With no silver to scatter light, lower contrast than slides, and a wide exposure latitude, colour negatives often produce good scans. Problems come when translating the negative colour information into a positive, as you need to correct for the overall orange cast of colour negative film. There is also the problem with colour negative film of knowing exactly what is the right colour when you cannot see for yourself what it is.



Steve J. Wilson is living in the United States and is a freelance writer since 2006, in digital photography related topics. If you are interested in some useful Digital Photography Classes, than you are in the right place.

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