IQ of scanned negs - Lighting, film or dev?

thecornflake

thecornflake

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Simon
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So I just got back 3 films that I sent off to be dev'd, and have started scanning in using VueScan and my Epson V600 -

1) Agfa Vista 200 from Canon AE-1
2) Superia 400, Olympus XA
3) Spotmatic, TMAX 100

Some of the AE-1 pictures were taken in a studio, firing 2 flashes from a hotshoe sender. They're quite grainy and not great compared to what I was expecting. I mainly used the 50mm 1.8, at f12, 125\s. Generally, do you think the image quality is down to the film, the developing or the camera\lens? I'm thinking the film. Hope the links work...

Scan-140705-0002 by simon-berry, on Flickr
Scan-140705-0003 by simon-berry, on Flickr
Here are a couple from the XA -
Scan-140704-0011 by simon-berry, on Flickr
Scan-140704-0013 by simon-berry, on Flickr
And the Spotmatic (very annoyed that I have no idea what lens I used) -
Scan-140707-0001 by simon-berry, on Flickr
 
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Think I got it sorted. You wouldn't believe I've worked in I.T. for over 15 years.. :)
 
SImon, I think the Agfa Vista film is the weakest link in the chain. The image quality improves to some extent with the Superia and then significantly so with the TMax. The colour is not attractive in the Vista shots; whilst they may be capable of some improvement in postprocessing I just wouldn't go to the trouble of using a model and setting up the lighting then restrict myself to Vista. Portra is a very safe choice for portraits (at this point I should admit to having zero experience of portraits as I'm more of a landscape guy, but there are lots of examples on the net of portraits shot with Kodak Portra to look at.)

It's worth spending a little more time on presentation before uploading, as the first shot has some scratches that could be removed with the healing brush and the XA shot shows the neg border at the top edge.
 
Forgot to mention, I havent done any editing yet :)

I was mainly shooting digital in the studio and it was someone elses shoot anyway, but I took the film camera to see if it fired the lights ok.

I actually think that tmax shot was done with a Jupiter-8 which may have something to do with it as well :)
 
Also, have heard a lot of good things about Portra. But shot some Ektar in my tlr recently and loved the colour on those shots. Will try a roll of both in the Canon now I know it works ok.
 
Simon, the other issue is possible problems with the colour processing; I had lots of problems earlier with Vuescan and Fuji C200 (which is the film sold as Vista 200). In the end it needed an uncorrected positive scan to TIFF and then inversion by [EDIT] someone else with ColorPerfect to get reasonable colours out of it. I tend to get my colour scans done commercially; Photo Express in Hull does process and scan (2000 dpi) for £5 per film less 50p per film for TP members, and average around 3 days including post time. They only charge £1 to post back; the pain is paying £3.20 to post to them. :( They do give excellent results and great colour even from Vista, though. (BTW I'm not disagreeing with Kevin that a better film would help, and I do like Portra, specially 400.)
 
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Well you would get much better quality if you used your Yashica-mat? But I've had very good results from 35mm if you pay for a lab to do the scanning and produce a 12" X 16" print.
 
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