Finally got around to the images I took at the carshow with the new Kodak Portra 400UC (Ultra Color). Holy silver halide crystals! This stuff is phenomenal. Grain? What freaking grain?! This is a section of one of the photos. Just to get it to upload here, had to reduce the JPEG quality in PS to 61 so take that into account. The original image this crop is from is 2639 x 3657. I quickly color corrected this. No cleanup. I did do a tiny bit of global sharpening (note - global sharpening, no mask to control what got sharpened) to get rid of the softness. No grain reduction techniques of any kind. This stuff is AMAZING. This is now my print film of choice for location/event photography. Oh sweet! Can you tell I'm excited about this stuff? -=>Donald

Wow! 9.6Mpixels, and FAST! How's the battery life? ;-) [I'm going to have to try this stuff. I gave up on the Kodak consumer films, but this shows they still know something in Rochester.]

That's really cool! That's even better than the provia 100F, wow! Lemme look up an example for a comparison....the provia should have les grain, but I can't imagine that's really true :)

Nice....I'm a big fan of Portra film...haven't tried the UC yet....

Not only do I love the fine grain of this (especially for a ISO 400 film), but the color is brilliant while keeping skin tones really nice. This one again has no grain reduction done to it. No increased saturation, just white balanced it. Rork - Nah...I'd be surprised if it had grain as fine as Provia 100F. That stuff is insane. Has an RMS of 3.2 or 3.4. I do know that it has as fine (or finer) grain than Portra 160VC and it is the best scanning print film I have ever tried (it scans better than some slide films too - where grain is concerned). -=>Donald

Erm, yes, colors are, erm, brilliant. Got more of these, erm, colorsamples for us boys? .n

I thought at first this is the full-frame version of the small crop above, but I see it is not. Your original post is 843X771, which was cropped from a 2639X3657 full frame? So it was roughly 1/3 of the full frame width? Do you still have the high resolution scan of your second picture? It would be interesting seeing a detail blowup to evaluate the grain. [Any shots of these models or similar are greatly appreciated, BTW.]

Running late so just did a fast crop. The 1st shot is a full head portrait shot (still need to get to that one for the full shot). Original on this group shot is 2574x3028. No time for fiddling with this (sharpening) etc and again take jpeg compression into account. -=>D

Hey Donald, have you ever tried this: Duplicate your layer in photoshop, go to Filter -> Other -> High Pass. Set it to 1.0 and click OK. Change the blending mode to 'Soft Light' for soft sharpening. (or one of the others for more sharpening). And then just duplicate that layer and erase the parts that are perfect, and duplicate that layer, etc untill ever part of your shot is completely right. Ever tried that ? Once read about what you can do with high pass in some article somewhere. Works very well :)

It's all a bit analogue for me, but I'll tell you what - the girl on the left in the second pic looks like a transvetite to me...... I'm sorry, but that IS a chick with a erm....added extra...... that just HAS to be customised bodywork!!! (",) (even the hands!!! blokes hands!!! arrrgh!)

Thanks, Don. That's pretty impressive. Jordy, I did wonder about the hands.

Jordster - you gotta let it go man...just because you had that one embarrising incident in Spain, it doesn't mean anything man. Could have happened to anyone. Although I think the Adam's apple was a give away...hehe. I think it's just the photo ... shrug. I dunno, I found it hard to stop looking at the one in the middle. Beautiful green eyes. Rork - yea...high pass/soft light and high pass/hard light (the hard light variant gives extreme sharpening). But I find it to be a little more time consuming than I like. Using masks to only sharpen what you want is more my style. :) -=>Donald

Here's one that's Fuji Superia 800 (taken at same show). Had to do a good deal of work to reduce the grain on these and not accentuate it when I sharpened. But I kind of expect that with 800 film. -=>Donald