Jump to content

Vision3 to BW in post


Stephen Perera

Recommended Posts

Vision 3 is the most modern emulsion that Kodak make. It’s fine grained and has great latitude. Double X is an old emulsion that hasn’t been updated in years. It’s kinda contrasty and grainy by today’s standards.

Shooting color and then converting will give you lots of flexibility in being able to fine tune the RGB channel mixing to get the exact range of B&W tones you want, but it’s not going to have a classic look without some help.

Jarin Blaschke posted here recently about shooting Tri X rather than Double X, so that’s definitely worth reading if you decide to go down the B&W neg route.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member

Hey Stuart thanks for the reply And it was me he was advising as regards TriX thing is I'm invested in Double X.....have 900ft in the freezer and Cinelab London don't touch TriX.....so I'm still debating whilst I prepare to start shooting.....waiting on a Zeiss 16mm f2 lens with an Arri standard mount and waiting on Les Boscher.....what a nice man......to manufacture an Arri standard to Aaton mount as I'm going to try y hand at some steadicam for the project I'm doing.....

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...
On 12/26/2019 at 2:40 PM, Stephen Perera said:

 I'm invested in Double X.....have 900ft in the freezer 

Then maybe still follow that old B&W advice of overexposing a stop and then pull processing.

You'll have no problems with one of Les Bosher's adapters. He does top notch work.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm not too knowledgable about this sort of thing, although I recall once that I did print Kodak Ektar to b&w paper. That worked... fine, I think.

Quite a few feature films have been finished in b&w but shot in colour, for the same reasons that Stuart described. I'm sure there is an established method to get good b&w from colour negative stock. The Man Who Wasn't There was originated on colour stock - I recall well because I read about it after seeing it during its theatrical release.

Photographers have to deal with this sometimes (and I know you are one yourself!) and I think looking up that kind of thing might help - maybe. Out of curiosity, I did a little bit of a search and found a couple of comments worth quoting here.

Quote

Concerning print a B&W picture from Color Negative Film I have succesfully experienced it using Ilford FB Variable Contrast paper on a Besseler enlarger setting Magenta at 200 and Yellow to 0, this correspond to Grade 4.5 or 5, the developer was a paper developer based on the formula PQ, not a great gradation, maybe a softer developer would be better.

From: https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/printing-color-negatives-on-blackand-white-paper.46586/page-2#post-2113643

Quote

All colour negatives are developed to the same gamma and in the same developer formulation (C-41), so a negative of a typical outdoor subject usually prints quite well on glossy surfaced multigrade paper, perhaps with the aid of a pale magenta filter to increase contrast slightly. The exposure required is not very different from what would be expected when printing a black-and-white negative to a similar degree of enlargement.

From: https://www.photrio.com/forum/threads/printing-color-negatives-on-blackand-white-paper.46586/page-2#post-2113901

So it seems that you have to pay attention to magenta filtration, for the sake of contrast, if making an optical darkroom print on b&w paper. I imagine that scanning will make this much easier. In fact, I'm sure that Resolve has negative profiles to make his a one-click action.

  • Upvote 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member

Thanks for this Karim.....I've been an APUG member since March 2009 (I checked out of interest Haha) now Photrio.....there is a LOT of knowledge in There I'm sure you have read Photo Engineer posts as he's a former Kodak employee and a guru in there highly revered....

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 years later...
  • Premium Member
18 hours ago, Jonathan Martin said:

Hi @Stephen Perera ! I was interested in your post, having been debating wether or not doing just that for an upcoming project of mine. I'd be very interested in your experience. Cheers

Well I just shot Double X and never entertained the BW conversions after all........Vision3 to BW gives you the film grain of course and the BW conversion is doable in DaVinci etc and it all costs less.....grade it to BW to your heart's content.......but Double X is a special film......has a special look.....not to untrained eyes of course......I shoot it for its heritage, its history, for the love of BW film.....

its not an easy film to shoot.....latitude is narrow, plenty of people like Ed Lachman talk about it, Jarin Blackse etc.....you have to know how to use a light metre...the highlights can blow easily.....in post when you see there's no grain in the highlights you know you're not gonna get anything back hahahah.....beautiful film, long live Eastman Double X!!!!

I only know this stock in 16mm format though......

Edited by Stephen Perera
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 5 months later...

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...