Is there really a single Kodak Gold Look?

General Film Photography
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Hi everyone,

A recent discussion made me think about a broader question: what exactly defines the “Kodak Gold look”?

I’ve seen people say that a particular scan or conversion does not look like Kodak Gold. But with NLP, different color models, scanner profiles, and editing choices can already produce different results from the same negative.

My theory is that the term comes from a time when film manufacturers provided very specific guidelines for printing and processing. If a lab followed Kodak’s recommendations, the customer received what could be considered the original Kodak Gold look.

Today we have scanners, software, profiles, presets, and countless adjustment sliders. Two people can start with the same negative from the same roll of Kodak Gold and end up with very different images.

Because of that, I wonder if “Kodak Gold look” is more of a collective term for a traditional color rendering style that many people remember from decades ago, rather than a single objectively correct appearance.

What do you think?

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You’re absolutely correct to say that originally Kodak Gold (and all other colour negative films) would be processed in C41 chemistry and printed using the RA-4 process and then you would see the character or ‘look’ of that film compared to another, either from Kodak’s range or from another manufacturer, the processing stages were the same for all other films though manufacturers had their own versions of the chemistry. All the advertising for a new film would relate to that look and indeed their claims would have to stand up in the darkroom or from a commercial lab. Generally there would be low contrast films for weddings and portraits and higher contrast for products and architecture with punchier colours.

Both these chemical processes relied on very specific timings and extremely tight temperature control which incidentally are very difficult to achieve at home, for example the crucial C41 developer stage is specified as195 seconds at 37.8 ºC and +/- 0.15 ºC.

All that is still true today if you go for straight darkroom prints but of course 30 years ago labs (and minilabs) began the move to scanning the negatives and digitally printing from the scan so then you got the Noritsu or Frontier look where as you say almost anything is possible and simulations of the Noritsu or Frontier profiles are built into NLP.

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Thanks. That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to explain in another discussion.

It seems to me that there will always be someone who says “this doesn’t look Kodak Gold enough”. The question is: compared to what?

If we really want to verify how close a scan is to the original Kodak Gold rendering, we would probably need a traditional optical RA4 print made directly from the negative and compare against that. Otherwise we are comparing one interpretation with another.

Once a negative is scanned, it passes through software, profiles, displays, and often additional editing. At that point, personal perception and perhaps even memory of what Kodak Gold should (!) look like become part of the equation.

So maybe the Kodak Gold look is not a ‘fixed’ destination, but rather a range of results that share a common character while still allowing for different interpretations.

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It would be good to hear from a commercial lab or minilab operator to see how they deal with keeping the character of the film. Also there are photographers such as the late Martin Parr who used colour negative widely before moving to digital but they seem to maintain consistency across all their work.

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I worked at a photo lab decades ago, when we did pure analog prints (not the era when the negative was scanned and a print was made from that digital file). Even then, we did color correction on prints and tried to achieve a neutral result. Sure, the amount of control we had was vastly less than what exists today in the digital domain, but it’s not like we were just doing straight uncorrected prints.

I was a teenager working at a run of the mill consumer photo lab (though we did do work for some local professionals), so it’s very possible things were different in a high-end lab. But I don’t recall ever giving any thought to what a particular film “should” look like. I just did my best to create prints that had the right density and didn’t have any color casts.

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This is what Kodak say about it now:

KODAK GOLD 200 is a versatile, medium-speed, daylight-balanced color negative film designed for everyday photography. It delivers fine grain, vibrant color saturation and sharp detail, with reliable and consistent color reproduction across a range of lighting conditions.

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Yes, a long, long time ago I would photograph Weddings and relied on the professional lab to get the balance right because I would pay up front for 10"x8" package deals on medium format, so unseen of course. Fortunately they did a great job so like you they would adjust the colour balance for interior lighting, or dull overcast days etc. What they couldn’t do was change the relationship between the colours, or the contrast. That really only became possible when digital scanning and printing came on stream, and I’d say that for me that’s a mixed blessing. It seems very difficult to maintain consistency with software across a roll, something that is simply routine in the darkroom.

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I will say, while I didn’t give a lot of thought to the look of different film stocks, there were a few that made me (internally) groan when they came in. I particularly remember Konica and 3M/Scotch film being always a challenge to get a decent result from, at least with the paper and chemistry we had. And of course it was left to me to explain to the customer why their pictures didn’t look as good as they expected. (Don’t even get me started on the rolls of expired and heat damaged 110…)

As I’ve gone deeper on home scanning and negative inversion lately, it’s been interesting to see how many of that (extensive, but in the distant past) color correction experience still applies, and how much I need to relearn…

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I built a custom achromatic light source with small-bandwidth R, G, and B LEDs that have peak wavelengths roughly corresponding to the sensitivity peaks of RA-4 paper and I negate the orange mask on a piece of unexposed film by changing the intensities of the three light channels until I see perfect neutral grey on the unexposed piece of film. What I do not know is whether the R, G, and B cells of my sensor pick up the LED peaks with an identical sensitivity. Anyway, I thus basically set my whitepoint with hardware, import the raw file with a linear profile (the one that NLP is using, which according to Nate is indeed truly linear), and then convert either within NLP with everything set to neutral, no white point, and no LUT, or simply flip using the curves in LRC. Both seem to give quite the same result without color cast. I tend to think that in this way, I do get to see the colors as recorded in the C, M, and Y layers in the film without any additional “flavors” and, hence, tend to think that I get as close as possible to the “look” of a specific film, provided that development was done according to spec. When comparing, for example, Ektar 100 with Portra, I do see the bold colors that Ektar seems to be known for, and the more pinkish tones of Portra. I’m currently on a Vision 3 250D experiment, which should give rather flat files, since it is designed to be printed on positive film which produces the required contrast for the to be projected film. The caveat with Vision3 is that it needs to be developed using a full ecn2 process and in theory that should give eventually true to life colors with 14 stops dynamic range. Time will tell…

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I worked in a school portrait lab for 33 years, 1979 to 2012. I saw everything from full film and optical printing to scanned film and digital printing to digital capture and digital printing. In the film/optical days, we used Kodak Vericolor III and later Portra 160NC films, and printed on Kodak Portra Endura paper. That combination evolved, but it had a consistently neutral look and a rather low contrast appearance, compared with Kodacolor or Kodak Gold. With Kodak Gold and Royal paper (typically used in mini-lab operations), you got lots of color saturation and higher than normal contrast. Kodak always thought that was what the general public wanted to see, at least for general snapshot work.

Our goal was always accuracy. When we started scanning film, we used nine high speed, high resolution Kodak Bremson scanners. I set them up, calibrated them, created custom film terms for them, and generally matched them to the look of a film negative printed on optical printers to Portra Endura paper.

When we started using digital capture, we tuned our cameras’ JPEG output to match that same look as closely as possible. After a season working with a couple million images, we fine-tuned that look to taste, and stuck with that look until the lab was sold.

Yes, there is a Fujicolor look, a Kodak Gold look, a Portra look, etc. It is unique to the particular brand, type, speed, and even the emulsion batch of film, although the manufacturers do stay within a reasonable tolerance range for spectral response of a given film. If you get the neutrals right from shadows through highlights, you will see the unique spectral response of a film. Some films respond differently to different light sources. Some are heavier in the greens, while others are heavier in the flesh tone parts of the spectrum. But if you calibrate for a full tonal scale and get it neutral from black to white, the film will scan the way it is supposed to look.

In the end, though, you can get any color balance you like. Just tweak the sliders to taste. But first be sure your monitor is correctly calibrated and profiled, and that you use a simulation profile or proofing profile when making final adjustments.

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