Kodak Portra 800 Film Review

Kodak Portra 800 is the most colour-accurate, widest dynamic range high-speed colour-negative film on the market.

It’s not the cheapest, but if you want low-light sensitivity, resilience in high-contrast scenes, and realistic yet unmistakably analogue images out of your camera, this film is your best option. There are alternatives, which I’ll briefly cover in this review, but recent one-to-one comparison experiments show they fall short when it comes to minute colour accuracy in skin tones.

Portra 800 is somewhat grainy, it has a natural contrast profile, and it responds well to exposure corrections and edits in post. You can also push and pull this film with great results (I have samples shot at EI 3200 or +2 stops in this article).

In this review: Colour accuracy. Grain structure, resolution, and sharpness. Dynamic range. Scanning Portra 800. Pastel colours with Portra 800. Pushing Portra 800 +2 stops to EI 3200. Portra 800 alternatives. How much does Kodak Portra 800 cost, and where to buy it. Support this blog & get premium features with GOLD memberships! ☝︎ Further reading: “All the C-41 ISO 800 Colour Films, Compared.”

Colour accuracy.

Kodak Portras and Ektar films are marketed as Professional for their outstanding colour accuracy and sensitivity.

Interestingly, Kodak Pro Image 100 does not belong to this group as it was designed to emulate Portra colours (which it does). You may be able to get a similar look with Pro Image, but it won’t be able to differentiate between slight changes in tonality like the Pro emulsions. This can make the skin tones lack some colour dimension in comparison. The same goes for Gold, ColorPlus, and Ultramax, which are all excellent films in their own right, yet they would not be able to reproduce the same range of colours as the Portras or Ektar.

In addition to differentiating and registering minute colour changes better than other films, Kodak Portra 800 is much easier to scan. This film is less likely to show colour shifts in the shadows and highlights (whites, greys, and blacks are more likely to conform to greyscale after inversion). Both Portra 800 and Portra 400 share this property; however, Portra 160 and Ektar can shift teal (for the 160) and navy blue (for Ektar) despite their finer grain.

✪ Note: I use this method to scan all film for my reviews, including Color’92. It provides consistent results that make understanding and comparing the emulsion’s attributes possible.

Grain structure, resolution, and sharpness.

Portra 800 is certainly not grain-free. I’ve shot it with a half-frame camera, which produces the smallest format you can reasonably expose this film at, requiring the greatest level of magnification. My results showed prominent (but not overwhelming) granules, especially when scanned in high-res and viewed full-width on a large screen.

If you like the analogue format but prefer to see zero grain in your scans, you can shoot Portra 800 in medium format or choose another film, such as Kodak Ektar or Ektachrome (you can also try the very expensive Fujicolor Natura 1600, which boasts the finest grain for that speed). But thanks to Kodak’s T-Grain technology, the grain on this film is a lot finer than on most earlier emulsions; it’s even smaller than on some modern ISO 400 films, like Lomochrome Color’92.

Kodak uses the Print Grain Index to measure Portra 800’s granularity in its datasheet. PGI is an updated human-centric experiment-based method of understanding grain. In contrast to RMS, which provides just one number, PGI is an observer survey that considers variations in grain size across various layers (whereas RMS sometimes produces non-sensical readings).

Portra 800’s PGI for a 4×6 enlargement from 35mm film is 48. This is comparable to Kodak Gold 200’s PGI of 44 for the same enlargement — a film that is two stops slower than Portra 800. As you may know, slower films usually tend to show smaller grain; however, Kodak engineers managed to turn this around with the innovations used to create this emulsion.

Dynamic range.

Kodak Portra 800 features an incredibly impressive dynamic range of 12.5 stops. This is more than most films I can think of and is quite possibly the widest DR for all colour-negative films.

This dynamic range is estimated and converted from lux-seconds found in the film characteristic curves graph for Kodak Portra 800.

In addition to being a very wide DR (compare that to most slide films with four stops), the film’s gradual skewing in the toe and shoulder portions gives it additional latitude that may place this medium above even the most impressive digital cameras in its ability to simultaneously register the brightest and darkest regions of a scene.

This extensive dynamic range makes Portra 800 suitable for most light conditions, including the ones with extreme contrast. And by the same token, you can depend on this film to give you a usable image even if you or your equipment can’t make an accurate reading (i.e. if you’re using a toy camera with few to no exposure settings).

Kodak notes that this film has best-in-class underexposure latitude. In practice, Portra 800 can still lose image information and render chunkier grain in the deepest shadows. But unlike most other colour stocks, when it does so, the results are easy to fix in post; as long as you have anything on your negative, there’s a good chance you can revive your under- and overexposures later.

Scanning Portra 800.

Kodak Portra 800 is one of the easiest films to scan.

Various films have different degrees of curl when they dry. This depends on the design and composition of the base layer. Those who scan film, know that curls can cause mounting challenges and introduce blur. Kodak Portra 800 addresses all of these issues by remaining one of the flattest-drying colour films on the market.

Like most colour-negative films, Portra 800 relies on an orange mask to improve colour accuracy. Subtracting this mask during the scanning process requires an equalization step (or a comparable computer vision task) in addition to colour inversion. For various reasons, many masked colour-negative films also need an additional colour-correction step, which can be laborious or difficult to perform in some cases.

Thankfully, the colour-correction step is either unnecessary or easy to perform with Portra 800. Well-exposed frames come out looking good from most scanners and their associated software or when scanned manually — without having to make any substantial adjustments. Under- and overexposed frames and push processing are also easy to interpret or fix.

Due to its extensive dynamic range and relatively fine grain, Portra 800 responds well to edits beyond colour correction. This film can handle substantial increases and decreases in contrast as well as artificial colour shifts without loss of fidelity or enlarged grain.

Pastel colours with Portra 800.

Pastel palette styling is an example of a look that may require significant edits after scanning.

➡️ Learn how to get pastel colours on film.

Portra 800 is one of the few colour stocks that can be used to create a particularly popular effect used by wedding and travel photographers today — pastel colours.

Pastel colours in photography is an effect of lessened contrast and increased overall brightness without any loss in saturation. This type of look is sometimes associated with Wes Anderson’s cinematography.

You can create pastel colour palettes with the right combination of films/exposure, post-processing, and scene selection. Portra 800 can make a good starting point due to its extensive dynamic range. A big part of the pastel effect is the dominant bright colours, which can be achieved by over-exposing your film +2/+3 stops. For Portra 800, this means rating and shooting it at around ISO 200 and developing it normally.

Most films, including Portra 800, will produce colour casts when over-exposed significantly. This will need to be corrected. I use the Colour Balance layer in Photoshop to do this.

Of course, edits won’t give just any overexposed photo the pastel look. You’ll need to consider light, scene colours, weather, and other facts, which I outline in this guide: How to Get Pastel Colours on Film.

Pushing Portra 800 +2 stops to EI 3200.

If you need more speed from your Portra 800, you can push it a stop or two without overwhelmingly degrading its contrast or colour accuracy. The grain size on pushed 800 remains very fine.

When I was testing Hasselblad XPan for my earlier review, this was exactly what I needed: more light sensitivity for the relatively slow 𝒇4 lenses during the dark rainy season in Vancouver.

The results I got with pushing Portra 800 to EI 3200 did not significantly increase the grain size. However, the two extra stops made it a more saturated film, and the shadows showed a much more apparent loss of detail.

Tip: When pushing Portra 800 two stops, you may also like to overexpose it by one or half a stop to preserve shadow detail and improve colour reproduction.

Portra 800 alternatives.

As of September 2024, there are multiple ISO 800 colour-negative alternatives to Kodak Portra 800. Many of them are cheaper than the branded film, but the results they give will not necessarily look identical to the original.

Daren, Yvonne, and I compared all the available alternatives, which I summarized in the article: All the C-41 ISO 800 Colour Films, Compared.

We used the same lens, camera, model, light and camera position by loading multiple Hasselblad backs with all the various emulsions. I then scanned those films with my Nikon Super Coolscan ED500 and inverted them manually to preserve the original colours.

In the sample above, Portra 800 is #2. Despite all of the compared films being supposedly manufactured by Kodak, Portra remains the most colour-accurate, at least when it comes to skin tones in daylight.

Of course, minute colour accuracy does not make Portra the only right choice. Some photographers find Lomography Color Negative’s tendency to add reds to skin tones flattering, while Aurora 800, despite looking relatively flat in the sample above, is nearly as good in some settings, especially when not compared to Portra 800 directly.

How much does Kodak Portra 800 cost, and where to buy it.

Kodak Portra 800 is not a cheap film. Its price has risen steadily over the years thanks to consistent demand and its unique properties. In Q3 2024, it averages around $22 per roll (although some stores still sell it for less than $19).

You can use this app to track this and other films’ prices. It will also show you which stores have the best deals.

❤ By the way: Please consider making your Kodak Portra 800 film purchase using this link so that this website may get a small percentage of that sale — at no extra charge for you — thanks!