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On Thursday, 1 October 2015 09:44:52 UTC+1, NY wrote:

film. Negative is less critical because they can (and do) correct at
printing - confession time: if room light was fairly dim I didn't even
bother with a blue filter which would have "stolen" about 2 stops of
light,
and I used to let the printing take care of the adjustment.

wise, I've suffered the result of too little blue light. At some point you
get nothing but noise in the blue, making anywhere near proper colours
impossible.

Yes, you want to make sure you still get a reasonable amount of signal in
relation to the noise. It's like overexposing parts of a picture that's got
very contrasty light: once one or more of the channels reaches maximum you
get featureless colour (typically a blue sky becomes a horrible cyan, or
parts of the face become fake-tan orange). Any sensor (digital or film) has
its minimum and maximum values, and one of the few problems with digital is
that the maximum can be a bit of brick wall rather than a gradual roll-off,
which is why, as for slide film, I expose for the highlights and correct in
post-processing.

And then there were the joys of push-processing. HP5 push-processed to
1600
ASA resulted in grain that made the pictures look like pencil sketches!
Ektachrome 160 tungsten pushed to 640 was vile: very saturated and very
contrasty, though in fairness the stage lighting was probably a bit harsh
and shadowy as well.

Actually you can make some very nice pictures by pushing that effect to
its limit. Get yourself a ton of grain in the negative, then push process
the paper print after very heavily underexposing it. The result is many
areas/details stay completely white, and what dark you get is extremely
contrasty with heavy & saturated grain. It's hard to describe how it looks
good, but it really does with the right subject. I used to love it for
portrait - you need to get the shadowing right for it to really work well,
as a lot of the scene detail is lost completely. It's a technique I've
never seen anyone else use.

Sounds intriguing. It's sad that a package like Photoshop or PaintShop Pro
could achieve this with a few button presses whereas you really have to work
at it with film and feel as if you've really achieved something then.

I experimented with printing a slide onto B&W paper (which gives a negative)
and then contact printing this onto another piece of B&W paper (wait till
it's dry otherwise the emulsions stick together - been there!). Results can
be quite good for some subjects - you have to allow for the fact that the
"negative" will be very non-panchromatic so red/orange shades in the slide
render as white in the neg and hence black on the final positive. Printing
from colour negs yields horribly muddy results (and very long exposures)
because the orange base of the neg behaves as a safelight! The paper can
only see the reddish tones in the original picture (which come out as blue
on the neg), so it's like taking a B&W photo in red light.