Getting some strikingly odd blue skies on some Portra 400 scans taken on a semi-cloudy morning within an hour of sunrise.
As you can see, the colors of the Tommy’s Hamburgers stand look normal in the sunlight. (Love that red!) But the cloudy-sky background certainly did not look that blue when I took the shot. Instead, it was a deep gray/black as a dark cloud hovered over the distant hills. Once I exported a Tiff to Lightroom, I was able to use the Point Color to dial back the saturation of the sky to something within my comfort zone.
To the Portra 400 shooters out there: Is this something one would expect in such a situation? Should I just embrace it as one of the characteristics of the film?
Just a hypothesis but might it be that our eyes are adept at effectively cancelling out the blueness in shadow areas when there are also areas lit by bright sunlight and that this is a truer depiction of the scene? Alternatively do you have an alternative way to scan the negative (is this a camera scan?), a film scanner perhaps?
My scan was with a Nikon Z8 with the 105 macro, using WB defaults in NLP v 3.02.
I totally agree with your theory about the human brain (and digital cameras) interpreting colors that film does not. Coming off of several years of using Nikon and Hasselblad digitals, it seems that when shooting film my own brain needs to do some adjusting, too!
I think my scans are “within range” of the lab scans; I just didn’t think that Portra would be this funky. But actually, I’m really liking it, as I prefer “cool” images over warm. (I’ve read that Portra really brings it home with pleasing skin tones, which is probably why the wildflowers in the photo with the yucca below portray nicely.)
Thanks for supplying the other shots, and particularly the lab scan of ‘Tommy’s Hamburgers’. I haven’t downloaded them to view them in Lightroom side by side (yet) but to me the lab scan has much less blue overall than your original scan (‘much’ being subjective of course) and as a result is more pleasing.
However, hopefully someone with specific knowledge of Portra (and NLP) will reply to your actual question.
I got another helpful answer to my question over on the Nikon Cafe forum. Basically, with Daylight film being calibrated for noon light, photos with elements in the morning, evening, or shadows may show some blue.
I’ve just discovered the French artist Dolores Marat. To get a taste of how she uses film’s blue tendency to great advantage, check out her page: https://doloresmarat.com/
(Also just got her new book through Amazon. I can highly recommend it to all film lovers.)
