Color Negative Film

[Robert28]

Hey everyone,

Allright here's a question for all the people that still shoot film. :D I am in an experimental stage now, I had been shooting mostly 200 or 400 ASA Kodak Royal Gold film and was happy with the quality of the prints. But here lately it has been hard to find the Royal Gold. Does anyone know if Kodak is still making it? In a pinch I'll shoot the Kodak 400 MAX but with indifferent results. High grain and weak color saturation. The 400 High Definition is about the same, I didn't see anything to make it stand out from the Max 400. The last two rolls of film that I have shot have AGFA Optima II at 200 ASA and AGFA Ultra color at 100 ASA. They both looked good and have potential. Bottom line is what kind of print films is everyone using and what are your thoughts on them.

Here some samples of the AGFA shots.
Optima II 200ASA:
http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=31446
Ultra Color 100 ASA
http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=31447
http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=31335
BTW the GP50 is alittle less sharp than I would like because I got rattled :D They were going full track speed and hitting the horn wide open.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be appriciated.
Robert

[iCe]

maybe it's because I'm a newbie...but those shots don't even look like scans to me! :D

[Robert28]

Thank you ICE :) All the pictures that I have uploaded are either scanned by me on a HP 6200 flatbed scanner or I take my slides to a lab in Knoxville and have them scan them. I suppose that I should make a note in the remarks as to film type. That is the primary reason that I shoot prints is so that I can scan them and upload them here.

Robert

[Chris Starnes]

Robert,

The scans look pretty good, however they are just a little soft. I am not sure if this from the scanning or from the shot. How sharp are the actual photos?

If it is the scanner, most scanners have some sort of auto-sharpening feature which can be 'tweaked' to get the best results.

Chris

[Robert28]

Chris,

The photos look good under a loupe except for the GP50(31447). I think that they were running a little fast to be shooting with 100ASA. OK here are the settings that I can remember 31446 and 31335 were both done with manual focus and apeture priority metering. 31447 was shot full auto. Camera is Pentax ZX50 and the glass was Tamron 80-210mm zoom. No filters were used. 31447 and 31335 were on 100 ASA film and 31446 was on 200 ASA. Scans were done at 600dpi as .bmp and sent to Paint Shop Pro 7. The order for adjustment was despeckle and hit any spots with clone brush. Apply unsharp mask to sharpen and then resize down to 1000Xwhatever pixels. Make color adjustments on 31446 Icranked the red up a little to add to the afternoon light. Save copy as .jpg and then upload to RP.

Robert