B&W Filters with color Film?

[Shaun Lawless]

Hello,

 

I'm just wondering if anyone has used B&W Contrast filters successfully with colour film when ending up in B&W final grade? I've used contrast filters tons with B&W Film but never tried it with colour film thinking it wouldn't work...but maybe it does? Has anyone tried this before and had any successful results?

 

Shaun Lawless

[Jarin Blaschke]

I would suspect that with a strong filter, there would be a noticeable loss in sharpness - particularly with a red filter (maybe others as well), since you're greatly overexposing one layer of the film and hardly using the other two. Only using a third of the film (especially the grainiest layer), and then giving it heavy overexposure, might yield shaky results. I might be wrong, any other opinions/ expertise out there? I just know that color scenes shot under intense red light usually look quite soft and very noisy in telecine.

[John Pytlak RIP]

Expose the color negative film normally. During transfer, you can then select the percentage of the red, green, and blue image (cyan, magenta, and yellow dyes) to end up as your monochrome transfer.

 

For example, if you use 100% of the red signal, and none of the green or blue, the effect would be very much like using a Wratten 25 or Wratten 29 red filter with B&W film --- clouds would be greatly enhanced against a blue sky. Using the red and green signals would be similar to using a Wratten 12 filter to filter out the blue with a B&W film.