An In-Depth Look At The 35Mm Kodak Portra Film Family

Mastering C-41 film photography: the three Kodak Portra films in both scanning and printing workflows

What you'll learn
Master the exposure and postproduction workflow for all three films
Master over- and underexposure tweaking for creative purposes for all three films
Differentiate and evaluate skin tone and color performance between the three films
Make an informed choice for the ideal use case scenarios for each of the three films
Requirements
Ideally you have an understanding of Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Camera Raw and Adobe Photoshop
You need a functioning 35mm film camera and some rolls of Kodak Portra to make your own tests, but you can still enjoy the lessons without that!
Description
Ever wondered: how does Portra 160 at box speed compare to Portra 400 exposed at ISO 200? If you're that type of photographer, you've come to the right place!The three Kodak Portra films are without a doubt the most popular choice for analog photographers working in color. Coming in the speeds of ISO 160, 400 and 800, these films offer a professional level of image quality for even the most demanding applications. While conceived as portrait films, they are also widely used in fashion, commercial, lifestyle and fine-art landscape photography. If you see a high quality editorial shot on film today in 2022, the likelihood that it was shot on Portra is high.However, beyond Kodak's data sheets (which are somewhat of a riddle in themselves…), the information on Portra found online seems rather unreliable. Results vary greatly - because everyone has their own workflow, and because the many variables at play make comparisons difficult to carry out. This is where this course comes in: offering a detailed, in-depth analysis of the three films and how they respond to under- and overexposure using a color checker and gray card as a reference point. There's a portrait setup as well as a landscape one, to really evaluate the film's performances. As a bonus, there's a comparison to digital and we also look at some analog C-prints of all three films to compare them with the findings from the scans.

Overview

Section 1: Preliminary Remarks

Lecture 1 Introduction

Lecture 2 Methodology

Lecture 3 Caveats

Section 2: Normal Exposure Comparisons

Lecture 4 Portrait comparison

Lecture 5 Landscape comparison

Lecture 6 Comparison with Digital

Section 3: Over- and Underexposure Tests

Lecture 7 Portra 160

Lecture 8 Portra 400

Lecture 9 Portra 800

Lecture 10 Cross comparisons between the films

Section 4: Print Comparisons

Lecture 11 C-Prints comparison

Lecture 12 Contact sheets comparison

Section 5: Closing Thoughts

Lecture 13 Conclusions

Lecture 14 Outro & Goodbye

Professional and beginning photographers aspiring to get started in film photography,Filmmakers, DPs, Producers and Directors looking to shoot on film,Analog photography enthusiasts and professionals looking to master the Kodak Portra films