Ektar 100

Ektar 100 is Kodak answering slide film with a negative. It is the most saturated colour negative in the range and the finest grained, so it holds a huge amount of detail and puts a lot of colour into it.

That combination makes it a landscape and architecture stock. A red roof, a blue sky and a green field all come back stronger than they were, and the grain does not get in the way of any of it. Nothing in this file resolves fine detail better.

Name the stock, then name the saturation and the grain in the same breath. High saturation, the finest grain of any colour negative, high micro contrast.

Give it strong light. Ektar has narrower latitude than Portra and it does not like heavy overexposure, so ask for bright, direct daylight and correct exposure rather than one stop over.

Steer the three carriers, and know that one of them is a warning. A blue sky goes deep and saturated. Green foliage goes vivid. Skin goes red and can turn orange, which is why the prompt should keep people small or leave them out.

Use it for landscape, architecture, transport, product and any picture where colour and fine detail are the subject.

Leave it alone for portraits. The red bias does a face no favours, and the narrow latitude removes the safety margin that makes Portra easy to shoot.

Portra 400 is the opposite Kodak choice at every point: low saturation against high, wide latitude against narrow, neutral skin against red skin. Velvia 50 is the slide film that goes further still, with even stronger greens and reds and even less latitude.

Cinema publishes Bleach Bypass at /techniques/cinema/, and the two are easy to confuse because both raise contrast. Bleach bypass raises it by taking colour out, so the picture goes desaturated and metallic. Ektar raises it by putting colour in.

Kodak released Ektar 100 in 35mm in 2008 and in 120 and sheet film the year after, and called it the finest grain colour negative film in the world. The Ektar name is older than the stock: Kodak used it on lenses from the 1930s and on an earlier film in the 1980s. It is now the default choice for a landscape photographer who wants to scan at a large size, and for architecture work where a saturated sky matters.

The result comes back with visible grain, which is the one thing Ektar does not have. Say the finest grain of any colour negative, and ban visible grain outright.

Faces come back orange, which is the stock behaving correctly. Either move the people away from the camera, or change stock and prompt Portra 400 instead.