Level of grain on Kodak portra 160

cedric07 · Sep 4, 2014

Hi!

I've recently shot a few rolls of Kodak portra 160 with my Olympus OM2. I then had them developed andscanned at high resolution at a local kodak lab.
The picture are high quality (>30Mo each) but I find them quite grainy for something shot at 160 ISO with a supposedly low grain film (pictures attached)

Questions :
- Am I right to find them grainy? Or is it the grain level to expect?
- If it's too grainy, who's the culprit : my camera, my lens, the lab, me?...

Thanks for sharing your experience!

Cedric

gsgary · Sep 4, 2014

I'm only looking on my phone but they look fine will have another look when I get home

limr · Sep 4, 2014

The screen on my netbook is not large, but it's bigger than a cell phone, and at this size, they don't look grainy to me, either. Like Gary, I'll try again on a bigger screen later.

cgw · Sep 4, 2014

Too many variables in play for a definitive answer. I can say grain has never been an issue for me with fresh Portra 160 in 35mm or 120. Culprits could be underexposure(iffy meter accuracy?) and/or sloppy development. Try another lab?

cedric07 · Sep 4, 2014

Thanks!
Another example where its maybe more visible (attached).

$Capture d’écran 2014-09-04 à 15.04.55.png

AlanKlein · Sep 4, 2014

They look OK to me but it's hard to tell when you look at an image that was reduced in size. If you're getting what appears to be "grain" I'd say it's the processing or scanning. Try another roll and use a different lab and compare.

SoulfulRecover · Sep 4, 2014

you would have to link these from a site like flickr that will allow full resolution viewing. From here it looks perfectly fine. If it is too grainy for your liking, you can reduce the grain in photoshop. From my personal experiences, I have found that Portra 160 has quite a bit more noise than their Ektar 100. I have yet to decide which is my favorite yet but so far I am leaning towards the Ektar.

I have also noticed that when I scan the images myself, there is less grain as well. So its kind of up in the air as to where its coming from. Like other have said try another roll but have it developed and scanned else where.

maybe I should start a scanning business :mrgreen:

cedric07 · Sep 4, 2014

You're right. Here is a screenshot of one of the pictures, not reduced in size but with a 100% zoom.

$Capture d’écran 2014-09-04 à 15.24.06.png

limr · Sep 4, 2014

Yeah, that shows it a bit more clearly. What photo editing software do you have? I've sometimes gotten what looks like grain but it gets better when I run a digital noise reduction or jpeg artifact reduction filter on the image. You could try having them rescanned at a higher resolution to see if it's really grain from the film or noise from the scanning.

Derrel · Sep 4, 2014

It's color negative film. There **is** grain....millions and millions and millions of particles, creating the image. Grain is most noticeable in UNDER-exposed areas, like the corner area in the photo with the stacked chairs; See on the wall, where the light level drops and the exposure in "under"? THJAT is about the only place where the grain shows up in these small captures when seen on-screen. Portra 160 is a fairly fine-grained film, if it is exposed properly, or even over-exposed a bit. I've shot it myself. It's a great color negative film, but it DOES like to be exposed fore the shadows, not for the highlights, which is fundamentally the opposite way one meters for color slide film, and to a large extent, digital capture.

See the colored nature of the grain in the shot in post #8? The COLORATION shows me that you under-exposed the shot, and the lab made the best print it could from your under-exposed negative. The more you under-expose color negative film, the worse the images look. Try setting the ISO dial to 100, instead of 160; that alone will favor the shadows zones by 2/3 of a stop. Deliberately OVER-exposing modern, high-grade color negative materials actually leads to better images, and this has been a standard operating procedure for decades, to deliberately over-expose from the baseline when shooting color negative stock for prints.

Josh66 · Sep 4, 2014

Derrel said:
See the colored nature of the grain in the shot in post #8? The COLORATION shows me that you under-exposed the shot, and the lab made the best print it could from your under-exposed negative. The more you under-expose color negative film, the worse the images look. Try setting the ISO dial to 100, instead of 160; that alone will favor the shadows zones by 2/3 of a stop. Deliberately OVER-exposing modern, high-grade color negative materials actually leads to better images, and this has been a standard operating procedure for decades, to deliberately over-expose from the baseline when shooting color negative stock for prints.

That's what I was thinking too - underexposure.

And, yeah, most color films can easily take a full stop of overexposure (set the ISO on the camera to half what the film is). I haven't shot much Portra (I just have never really liked it much), but I've shot a ton of Fuji Pro 160, and I usually exposed that at an ISO of 80 or 100.
Anyway, I HAVE shot enough Portra to know that the grain is comparable to the Fuji Pro 160 films - at that stuff was very sharp and had very little grain. I really have no clue why they chose to discontinue 160S - that was probably the best film they made...