Color Negative Film Research Articles

«Красный плафон» в дальнем зале Игнатиевской пещеры: новая документация

In 1980, V.T. Petrin, S.E. Chairkin and V.N. Shirokov discovered Upper Paleolithic images in Ignatievskaya Cave. Valery Petrin's expedition was exploring the site from 1980 to 1986. Since 1995, Vladimir Shirokov has been continuously researching the cave. The final monograph by Valery Petrin was issued in Russian in 1992 and displayed only black & white photographs, contact copies and sketches of ancient drawings made with a scale grid. Later in 1997, this monograph was published overseas in French and complemented with several additional color photographs. Since 1995, shooting color negative and positive films has become more affordable. A selection of a significant number of frame-by-frame slides by V.N. Shirokov and V.E. Shchelinsky from Ignatievskaya, Kapova and Muradymovskaya 2 caves was published in Germany in 1999 as a book about Paleolithic rock art of the Southern Urals. In Russia in 2013, a monograph with color illustrations was published to tell about the decorated Southern Ural caves of the Upper Paleolithic. However, it displayed only the results of time-lapse photography. Significant sections, such as the Red Panel and the Black Panel (names given by V.T. Petrin) from the Far Hall of the cave, were copied from the sketches using a scale grid. Currently, the shortcomings of these copies can be corrected by combining time-lapse mosaic and photogrammetric surveys of the ceiling sections in Far Hall of Ignatievskaya Cave. The ‘panel’ on the ceiling should be names ‘plafond’, therefore the article suggests changing the name of the Red Panel to the Red Plafond. Graphic patterns and graphic units were counted in this location of the ceiling of the Far Hall. In total, according to the new documentation, there are 163 graphic units on the Red Plafond. In 2018 a Canon D6 camera with a Tokina 16-28/F2,8 lens was used to make photographs. The interior and drawings in the Far Hall were illuminated by LED panels that do not emit thermal radiation. Better visualization of the pictorial patterns and their color filtering was ensured with Adobe Photoshop® and ImageJ with the DStretch® plugin.

Effect of scanning parameters on dose-response of radiochromic films irradiated with photon and electron beams

Proper dosimetry settings are crucial in radiotherapy to ensure accurate radiation dose delivery. This work evaluated scanning parameters as affecting factors in reading the dose-response of EBT2 and EBT3 radiochromic films (RCFs) irradiated with clinical photon and electron beams. The RCFs were digitised using Epson® Expression® 10000XL flatbed scanner and image analyses of net optical density (netOD) were conducted using five scanning parameters i.e. film type, resolution, image bit depth, colour to grayscale transformation and image inversion. The results showed that increasing spatial resolution and deepening colour depth did not improve film sensitivity, while grayscale scanning caused sensitivity reduction below than that detected in the Red-channel. It is also evident that invert and colour negative film type selection negated netOD values, hence unsuitable for scanning RCFs. In conclusion, choosing appropriate scanning parameters are important to maintain preciseness and reproducibility in films dosimetry.

Color Ultrafast Photography Study of a High-Current Discharge Initiated by Exploding a Short Wire in the Atmosphere

In this paper, we describe the ultrafast slit-scanning photography of light phenomena arising at the stage of the electrical breakdown in the atmosphere and in a channel initiated by a wire explosion. The characteristics and features of the photographic registration of the SFR-1 camera using color and spectrozonal negative aerial films sensitive in the visible and near infrared regions of the optical spectrum are presented. Using photograms in color, we were able to visualize small-scale inhomogeneities, a current-carrying channel and its “shell,” emissions of matter, and shock waves in the plasma. This technique made it possible to record a secondary shock wave in the plasma on the discharge axis during the explosion of short (length ≈15 mm) copper and nichrome wires with a diameter of 100–150 μm at a stored energy of ~100 J. At the moment of cumulation in the plasma, a “hot spot” with a minimum size of ~0.5 mm was formed on the discharge axis. It may be the source of narrow-beam coherent radiation with X-ray photon energies of 10–30 keV. The cumulation mechanism is discussed based on the regularities of the z-pinch phenomenon in a discharge initiated by a wire explosion.

Kodak Professional Ektar 100 Film

This new film with ISO 100 speed, high saturation, and ultravivid color offers the finest, smoothest grain of any color negative film available today. This film incorporates KODAK VISION Motion Picture Film Technology to achieve its extremely fine grain. It is ideal for scanning and offers extraordinary enlargement capability from a 35 mm negative. This paper will describe the new components and their features. These include emulsion improvements: optimized tabular grain technology, advanced cubic crystals, antenna dye sensitization, and improved spectral sensitivity. Chemical improvements are also described: advanced development accelerators, a new high-efficiency masking coupler, and improved DIR couplers.

<i>Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow: Color Design in the 1930s</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow: Color Design in the 1930s Lisa Schmidt Scott Higgins . Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow: Color Design in the 1930s. Austin: U of Texas P, 2007. 312 pp. $55.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper). From where we sit in 2008 it may be tempting to assume that color in cinema is a vanquished territory. With the technology available to us we can modify the color of the light in a given shot with the click of a mouse button. We can alter the hue of an object, a scene, or an entire film. As for the name "Technicolor," it signifies a different Hollywood, a different time and place in moviemaking. It invokes the palettes of that time, shades of the real, the hyperreal, and the little-too-intense-to-be-believed. All too often these shades have faded with time; in some few cases we have reconstructed glories available to us, such as with the restored Vertigo of a few years back. The fact is, few of us have seen a film in Technicolor. As Scott Higgins explains, original but degraded prints were restored to something different from what they once were, reissued, transferred to video, and restored again. Once we realize this we are only part of the way toward understanding how elusive color continues to be both in cinema and in a wider sense. Higgins's masterful work is, in his own words, an attempt to "answer color's challenge" (8). Color is highly subjective, changeable, and, in the context of a medium like film, vulnerable to a myriad of factors that alter how it is perceived by an individual set of eyes. In a very real sense, then, Technicolor is lost to us, yet Higgins brings us as close as possible, via an act of intense academic energy combined with perceptual imagination, to seeing some of the old Technicolor classics "as they were." Following an outline of the familiar history of color in cinema—from hand tinting, stenciling, tinting and toning, to some of the more well known color processes such as Hanschiegel and Pathechrome—Higgins proceeds to examine Technicolor as business venture, as process, and as aesthetic history. He explores in fantastic detail the history, objectives, and accomplishments of the Technicolor Corporation. Initially a venture to "solve the problem of color in motion pictures" (4), Technicolor became all but synonymous with color cinema, holding a virtual monopoly until the broad adoption of color negative film (Eastmancolor) in 1952. There was a time, however, when the motion picture industry had its doubts about the viability of any color process as more than a novelty. Higgins takes us back to that time in the early 1930s; indeed, Higgins's historical energies focus on the transition from two-strip to three-strip Technicolor and how the latter eventually became incorporated into the vocabulary of filmmaking throughout the 1930s. He traces a fascinating bit of reception history in relation to two-strip Technicolor, from wonder at the technological accomplishment, to a perception of overuse and abuse, to weariness with the method's limitations. As is well known, the two-strip method could not produce a "true" or full color spectrum; the results are flawed but oddly beautiful artifacts like The Toll of the Sea (1922) and The Black Pirate (1926). Click for larger view View full resolution As Higgins demonstrates, Hollywood was conscious of the challenge faced by Technicolor, not merely to meet the demands for a truer color range but also to prove that color cinema could be aesthetically credible. Technicolor had to prove that it could be a part of the filmmaker's standard vocabulary. It had to be capable of depicting reality rather than providing an occasional visual novelty in the form of mere spectacle. [End Page 72] From the perspective of Technicolor's chief officers, the two-strip process had been a temporary stop along the way to a three-strip solution, but the viability of three-strip was not merely a technological puzzle. It also depended upon a successful and consistent aesthetic strategy. One of the many historical gifts of this book is a glimpse into the role of Natalie Kalmus...

New KODAK PROFESSIONAL PORTRA Films: Re-Engineered for Improved Performance

The Kodak Professional Portra family of films was originally launched in 1998. Since then, Kodak has made many advances in color negative film technology. The films introduced at Photokina 2006, the Kodak Professional Portra 160 NC and VC, and the 400 NC and VC films, have been reformulated to improve performance. This paper will describe the new components and their features. These include emulsion improvements: optimized T-Grain technology, antenna dye sensitization, and improved spectral sensitivity. Chemical improvements are also described: Advanced development accelerators, a new high-efficiency masking coupler, and improved DIR couplers.

Logistic model of D–log H curves and goodness of fit test for colour negative film

A logistic model is applied to fit the photosensitivity characteristic curve D–log H of colour negative films and to calculate the relevant photographic characteristic parameters. A simple and effective novel method of optimizing the maximum estimated density Dmax is proposed. The curves of the goodness of fit tests are provided for evaluation of the logistic model. The results of the statistical analysis show that the estimated density values from the logistic model agree well with the practical density values. The precision of calculation of the relevant photographic characteristic parameters also meets the standard of the International Standardization Organization (ISO).

A New Color Negative Film for the Digital Future

With the design of the Kodak Vision2 500T/5218 color negative film, a new film technology optimized for both the conventional optical and digital post-production worlds, has been introduced. Though resolution and grain improvements comprise a large part of the advances offered by this new technology, film sensitometry and color reproduction have also been carefully engineered to facilitate improvements in neutral scale control and digital post-production productivity. All of this is made possible by silver halide technologies that significantly reduce grain, and film-building technologies that shape a new standard of photographic performance in a world of digital applications.

Development of Color Negative Film for Portrait in Response to the Expansion of Needs

Development of Color Negative Film for Portrait in Response to the Expansion of Needs

Damage to High Speed Color Negative Films from Natural Background Radiation

The effect of natural background radiation is one of the most important determining factors for shelf life of high speed color negative films. Namely, high speed color negative films are inclined to suffer from increase in fog, decrease in speed and deterioration in graininess during their preservation. This damage is caused mostly by natural background radiation. We divided natural background radiation into three components: cosmic rays, environmental radiation, and self-contamination, and determined the fraction of the contribution of each component to this damage. As a model experiment of the above phenomena, we proved that the sensitivity of a silver halide photographic emulsion to gamma rays was in proportion to its intrinsic sensitivity to blue light and to the amount of gamma rays absorbed by the emulsion grains.

Application of the Latest Technologies to a New Negative Film

Due to the increased use of high-sensitivity motion picture negative film and the widespread adoption of daylight lamps as a light source, a new daylight type motion picture color negative film, REALA 500D, has been developed utilizing fourth color layer technology. This film is expected to further expand the choice of locations for film shooting.

Photomedia for Digital Minilabs

Digital minilabs can facilitate the enhancement of prints from colour negative films as well as printing from digital cameras and a wide range of digital storage media.A number of printing technologies have been considered for digital photofinishing including ink jet, thermal dye transfer (D2T2), electrophotography and AgX technology. In the last couple of years a number of photofinishing solutions, based on these technologies, have appeared in the market place.The expectations of the consumer are that the digital photos will match those produced from colour negative film using AgX technology. The different output technologies will be considered and contrasted to AgX output.

Couplers in colour photography—chemistry and function Part 2

Part 2 deals with magenta and cyan couplers and—in addition—white couplers and scavengers, centred about the years between 1960 and 2000 as in Part 1.Magenta couplers have been a domain of heteroaromatic compounds. This fundamental situation has not changed, except for the fact that the predominance of pyrazolone type magenta couplers has been broken. Today, 3-acylamino- and 3-anilinopyrazolones are still used, but mainly in colour negative film, and pyrazolotriazoles of the pyrazolo[5,1-c](1,2,4)triazole and pyrazolo[1,5-b](1,2,4)triazole classes have taken a larger share, despite the fact that suitable syntheses had to be explored for both classes.In colour negative (CN) paper, where the lower reactivity level of pyrazolotriazoles does not really bother, the inherently clean absorption and high tinctorial strength of the azomethine dyes from pyrazolotriazoles plays an important role. While the stability level of azomethine dyes from 3-anilinopyrazolones was considerably improved between 1960 and 1980, it does not compare favourably to the stability achieved today by azomethine dyes from pyrazolotriazoles. This applies equally to stain resistance, light fading and dark fading.Within the anilinopyrazolone series, valuable two-equivalent couplers have been found by the introduction of arylthio groups as leaving groups. Within the acylaminopyrazolones this has been achieved by the introduction of pyrazoles as leaving groups. The chemical problems encountered in these—and in comparable, but less successful—transformations must not be underestimated. Within the pyrazolotriazole classes, chlorine presents itself as a trouble-free and readily introduced leaving group.Throughout the years, phenols and naphthols have been used as cyan couplers. For both classes of cyan couplers a strong need for improvement in dye stability was recognized. In CN film, the cyan dyes from 1-hydroxy-2-naphthoic amides showed low resistance to reduction by exhausted bleaches and were replaced by 2-phenylureido-5-acylaminophenols or 5-amino-substituted 1-hydroxy-2-naphthoic amides. In CN paper, 2-acylamino-4,6-dichloro-5-methylphenol type cyan couplers were replaced by 2-acylamino-4,6-dichloro-5-ethylphenols which show high stability to light fading. Thus, improved dark fading resistance of the cyan dye in colour paper has turned out to be a major objective of continued chemical research.Research on, among other options, the field of polyazapentalenes, a large group of bicyclic acidic heteroaromatic compounds, comprising also the well-known pyrazolotriazoles, has yielded some classes of new heterocyclic cyan couplers giving cyan dyes of outstanding tinctorial strength and absorption, of which the pyrrolo[1,2-b](1,2,4-triazoles) are the most prominent examples. The dyes from presently known pyrrolotriazole couplers are stable to dark fading, but they need some improvement in light stability. An entirely different approach to solving the dark stability problem without any sacrifice in hue and light stability has been found within the class of 2,5-diacylaminophenols, by introduction of a sulphone-modified acyl group.White couplers and scavengers are expected to function without additional problems, and in most cases do. Nevertheless, the compounds under discussion are interesting under theoretical aspects. True white couplers, e.g. of the 4-methylpyrazolone class, show incomplete coupling and do not fix the developer residue permanently: it can be shown to be split off by oxidation. Scavengers of the 2,4-disulphonamidophenol class and also of the 2,5-disulphonamidophenol class do not show the coupling reaction of a two-equivalent coupler; instead they undergo electron transfer to an oxidized colour developer.

Development of High Speed Color Negative Film

Development of High Speed Color Negative Film

Improving the Ease of Use of Consumer-Design higher Speed Color Negative Films

Improving the Ease of Use of Consumer-Design higher Speed Color Negative Films

Development of a Newly Designed High Speed Professional Color Negative Film

Development of a Newly Designed High Speed Professional Color Negative Film

Analog Image Processing in Modern Color Photography

In the context of this article, analog image processing comprises methods to chemically control and improve image quality in color negative films during photographic processing. The chemical control applies to the generation of image dyes and to the optical interaction of partial dye images. The image dyes are generated in two consecutive steps: silver reaction and coupling reaction. Yield- and distribution-parameters of these reaction steps are relevant for image-quality aspects. In this review the various chemical methods to achieve image processing (e. g. inhibition, (dye-) amplification, dye spread) are discussed.

Defects and the photographic process

The high imaging efficiency of today's color negative film depends on the unique defect properties of silver halides. We have chosen two important defect topics to highlight: defect-induced anisotropic crystal growth, and shallow electron trapping at surface defects and transition metal dopant sites. High imaging efficiency depends on the ability to concentrate photoelectrons and thereby to form a single latent image center per crystallite. This requires electron localization at a partially-charged, shallow electron trap at the surface followed by a shallow—deep transition to a metastable atom state. Subsequent ionic and electronic trapping processes that build the latent image occur only at this site. In some cases, doping the bulk of the microcrystal with extrinsic shallow electron traps can improve latent image formation efficiency. Electron concentration does not occfur at these dopant sites since they are not partially charged. Magnetic resonance and photoconductivity studies of the dynamics of shallow trapping by dopants and of the shallow-deep transition at surface sites are presented.

Interlaboratory comparison of photographic modulation transfer function measurements

The precision of sine-wave modulation transfer function (MTF) measurements of a color negative film was investigated at three laboratories within the Eastman Kodak Company. A spatial frequency range of 0.19 to 40.0 cycles/mm on Kodacolor Gold 100 film was em- ployed for the measurements. The precision of the measurements at two of the laboratories was found to be equal, with the third set of measure- ments being less precise. The precision was measured by the standard deviation, at discrete frequencies, of replicate MTF measurements. This work may provide necessary supporting experimentation for an ANSI/ ISO color-negative-film MTF standard, which would enable meaningful comparisons of results between laboratories. © 1998 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers. (S0091-3286(98)02405-2)

The Design Concepts and Technologies of Monochrome Film for Processing Color Negative Film Chemicals

The Design Concepts and Technologies of Monochrome Film for Processing Color Negative Film Chemicals