Super informational video! I'm glad we have you and Kyle who are willing to spend the money to do these tests and take the same photo over and over again on 120 haha
A bunch of RU-vidrs did this comparison but yours is excellent, really love the direct comparisons and shifting from one image to another. Great work, my guy!
Very useful comparison! I’m surprised to see Gold perform so well, and even outperform Portra at underexposure. I’m still mostly shooting Portra because I trust it more, but after seeing this I might have to start considering Gold a lot more!
You said you didn't edit these, but it looks like the lab did when scanning. Notice how at 6:17 for example, at 5 stops over the sky is actually darker than at 0 stops over. And the under exposed images have brighter shadows and midtones when they should be darker. Now obviously those adjustments were made to compensate for the over/under exposure, but I'm not sure that's a fair representation of how the film looks when over or under exposed ... but it's more of a representation of how you could edit these images to make them look properly exposed. In other words, it looks like the scanner did auto-exposure for each frame, so you don't really see the actual differences between exposures. That said, showing exposure-corrected images like these makes some sense, because in a real like situation where you over or under expose you would scan/edit them like this to get a "usable" image. But I think that's an important distinction to make. Hope I don't sound like I'm nitpicking, I love your videos and photos, but this is just something that has always bugged me about exposure test videos, including Kyle McDougal's. In almost all of the film exposure tests I see on youtube, it looks like each frame was scanned with auto exposure so you don't see the real differences. Hope that made sense... cheers
Yes, I mentioned that the lab would be balancing all the images in this video as that is the most applicable result for the majority of people shooting film. It will be interesting to take a look at the density of the negatives once I get them back. I still think there are interesting differences to be seen like the color shifts and grain prevalence. But I will note this for any future exposure tests.
Thank you for taking the time, spending the $$ and all the effort it took to make a video with such precise comparisons. The film community owes you a debt of gratitude. So thank you.
This is incredibly useful! Great test. I guess my two take-aways are that Gold is, of course, more "golden" in color rendering at pretty much all exposures, and that these seem to really both be the same "native" speed. Overall, the Portra images look much more real to me. Thanks for doing this!
Oh interesting stuff, cheers for the info Brae 👍 Love the warm look of Gold so looking forward to shooting my first roll of it. Also how about El Cucuy eating that front kick, JEEEEZZ!! Tough night.
Highly educational, even though I don't do photography, I didn't realize how much of a difference the type of film, and variables all went into it. Seems like it does take a lot of patience at times! ✌️
Thanks for this video - I was waiting for Kyle McDougall's video, but you beat him to the punch. Just a suggestion in case you do it again. I'd find it interesting to see the negatives as well maybe just side-by-side on a light table. I find I can tell a lot just by seeing the density (or thinness) of the negative. It shows just how much the lab is having to work to pull detail out of underexposed shadows for example.
Would have liked to include the negatives in the test for sure. Unfortunately, I left on a trip shortly after filming this video and couldn't run to the lab to pick them up. Noted for future test though, thanks for the feedback!
Did you direct the lab to disable correction on the scans? By default, the Noritsu will auto white balance. If this isn’t turned off you really can’t draw any conclusions from the tests. You have a digicam macro setup, yes? Shoot a Macbeth color chart under controlled lighting, e.g. strobe. Scan the negatives yourself, use the same broad spectrum daylight light source when scanning and fix color balance to specific color temperature. This is a trustworthy way to really understand the behaviour of both films.
No matter how much I enjoy Brae's videos for the sake of entertainment, finally one person who is not commenting on how informativ and educative the comparison videos is. No insights whatsoever if you send them to the lab and start noticing more purple/greenish hues in one film stock compared to the other one.
I was pleased with the overall results of Gold 120, but definitely more contrast, but yet somehow simultaneously dull colors compared to Portra. Part of it might be that I’m in the southwest, so it could be the natural terrain and subject matter I’m shooting here. I just find Portra hard to beat. But I have 2 more rolls of Gold 120 to shoot, so I appreciate this video
Photo labs will make some adjustment to give balanced images. For future exposure tests I will scan myself and refrain from any compensation in post. This was just meant to show how much info can be retained even with overexposing by that much
Since you don't know exactly what adjustments the lab performed when scanning, it becomes hard to conclude with certainty what is an artifact of the film and what is from the scanning (and color correcting, if any). If there is a way to scan the negatives yourself so you can make sure the settings remain exactly the same over all images, then the conclusions based on the film stock might be more certain. I can imagine that lots of color differences you noticed could have been introduced by any kind of white balance adjustment done at the lab.
