I’ve added new spaces on Analog.Cafe, where I’ll be organizing some of my thoughts on film photography.
You’ll probably notice #editorial the most since it’s where I write about product launches and share announcements like this. Comments under this tag may end up in your RSS feed, Community Letters¹, or you may hear about them from me on Mastodon and Bluesky.
A #video tag lists all the comments with a YouTube link. I’ve added a whole bunch of these, including this epic trilogy of Kodak factory tours: analog.cafe/comments/tnq0.
There’s a lot you can do to clean up even the worst examples of scratches on film.
I’ve recently fixed an image that came out appallingly bad. I needed it for my review article (analog.cafe/r/peak-design-…) and couldn’t re-shoot it in time.
Cleaning this frame up was a gruelling process, but I wanted to document it on video to give some context for what the process may be like for whoever is about to attempt something similar.
I’ve compressed about three hours of my recorded work into this 15-second video: youtube.com/shorts/F-6kp5t….
This photo of the Kowa E camera I reviewed recently is my first attempt at focus stacking with Photoshop.
The process is very simple if you have the app. There are just two steps:
1) Edit > Auto-Align Layers
2) Edit > Auto-Blend Layers
Focus stacking is a technique of combining multiple images of the same thing taken at various focus settings. This is useful for photos of objects taken up close with large apertures as those factors combined create a very narrow depth of field (more about it here: analog.cafe/r/what-is-aper…).
In my case, I had two photos, one had the lens in focus (with the camera body blurry), and another was focused on the body. Neither looked good on their own.
Surprisingly, the focus stacking technique worked well, despite the difference in geometric distortions and perspective, as the photos I had were taken on a half-frame SLR (analog.cafe/r/my-olympus-p…), hand-held. The only thing the app struggled with was blending the blurry background, which I ended up blending in from one of the original photos manually.
Notice the tip of the pentaprism bump — the dark artifact behind it is the result of Photoshop not coping well with the samples I gave it.
Just watched grainydays (Jason) push Portra 800 +1 to EI 1600. He didn’t seem to like his results, but I think this film is still worth a push if needed. If you do that, I advise using better scanning techniques and beware of the sharp falloff in the shadows.
I happened to have recently shot mine pushed +2 stops to EI 3200: analog.cafe/r/kodak-portra…. Coincidentally, I also used XPan with it (reviewed here: analog.cafe/r/hasselblad-x…), which indeed needed those extra stops of light sensitivity in the dusky Vancouver winter.
Whereas some shots didn’t work out as well as I hoped they would, I had no trouble getting rid of the colour casts and haven’t found the grain that bad in my scans.
To get my results to look as they do now (no colour casts in the shadows, accurate overall colours), I inverted the negatives by hand and added a touch of colour balance adjustment in Photoshop. This is what I do with most of my colour film. And this is the guide I wrote on how to do this, should you like to push your Portra 800 and get results that do not suck: analog.cafe/r/how-to-scan-….
Unfortunately, that didn’t work out. I tried making one out of a frame exposed 10 minutes before, which ended up having the emulsion and a lot of the white crumbly stuff stuck to the front of the frame. But the film that I exposed about two hours prior ended up splitting in a way that let me remove just the clear front plastic cleanly (to do this, I followed the technique described here: analog.cafe/r/polaroid-emu…)
I happened to have scanned the frame before opening it up and I made another scan with the clear plastic gone, which I then overlayed digitally to compare the results (attached). On the left is the scan with the plastic gone and on the right is the original frame.
Even on a crappy flatbed, I could see that the highlights were a lot clearer, there were obviously no Newton rings, and the dirt and scratches were gone (with the protective plastic). And I am sure the results would yield even better sharpness/resolution on a decent scanner as well.
I’ve been testing ORWO Wolfen NC 500 for months, trying to understand how to use this film best. It demonstrated promising results in promotional samples ( analog.cafe/r/film-photogr… ) and in some examples mentioned by other reviewers.
But the testers’ feedback is very inconsistent — this film seems to have impressed them at one point and disappointed at another.
This film seems to shine in specific light/scenes/applications.
I’ve got results that looked like expired Portra: excellent skin tone reproduction with chunky grain and low saturation. Hoping to find a strategy to make the most of this film consistenly.
I’ll test another roll and publish my results soon.
When using the Spot Healing Brush tool in Photoshop, I default to the “Content-Aware” type brush. However, if you’ve got scratches that run parallel to gradients or edges of objects, it’s best to switch to the “Proximity Match” type. This will preserve your gradients better.
YouTube Video