What is a 35mm LOG Film Scan
© Justin Cary - Kodak 5213/200T - Developed ECN2 - Scanned via BlackMagic Cintel
After receiving an email from a customer this last week I was once again reminded about how confusing some of our “motion” nomenclature is to the stills world. It’s concerning to think that the lack of knowledge may be keeping some film photographers from loading Cinema, ECN2, Motion Picture, whatever you wanna call it, film into their cameras to create.
Cinefilm isn’t the only film stock that receives a “LOG” scan from Midwest Film Co. We scan all 35mm film stocks on our motion picture scanner, therefore all stocks have the same deliverable in the end.
So, what is a LOG scan? “LOG footage was invented by Kodak with their Cineon system for scanning film. This system scanned film into a LOG format that corresponded with the density of the original film, thus maximizing the amount of information from the film that could be stored in a video format.” I stole that straight from this article from Artgrid, why - because it was the first thing that popped up when I googled it ;)
Essentially what that paragraph says is this… The image is scanned in a way that gives, you, the artist the most latitude to push the contrast & color around when processing your images. The highlights are there and the shadows are there, as well as all of the color information from the film negative. You decide what the image is going to look like in the end. On the motion side of things, colorists spend years learning their craft. Just check out the list of amazing artists at Company 3 who color grade most of your favorite films. That being said, there are some simple guidelines for success.
1.) Start with a really well scanned image. Scanning your film on a motion picture scanner like our BlackMagic Cintel gives you a really great starting point as it is a LOG image with tons detail, not to mention very high resolution by today’s stills standards at 6000px wide.
2.) I like to start with balancing the color of the image - this will shift around as you introduce contrast for sure, but get to a place where you like the overall tone. As of late, Adobe Lightroom has introduced the Color Grading tool which gives you a glimpse of what professional colorists use to balance the color and overall look of an image or scene. They achieve this with the Lift/Gamma/Gain color wheels which help separate color out into Darks/Mids/Highlights. That’s all the further I’m gonna go into that - I’m not a colorist but have been pushing film images around for the past 20 years.
3.) After the image feels balanced color wise the only thing left to do is add contrast. This can be done a number of ways. One way to build the contrast back into an image is to use the sliders on Lift/Gamma/Gain. That can help refine the contrast in a more controlled way than the second which is using the contrast slider to dial the contrast up or down.
4.) Add or take away saturation and your image should be pretty well there! We’ll leave masks and fine tuning to the pros!
Let’s have a look at this shot by photographer Max Delsid (@24fpsmax). Nevermind the amazing shot and the fact that the deliverable is 10,270 x 4098px! Let’s get not so technical in the details. Max shot this frame on Kodak Portra 400, we processed it in it’s native chemistry (C41 Process).
© Max Delsid - Kodak Portra 400 - Hasselblad X-Pan - BlackMagic Cintel Scan
A perfect example of a flat image with tons of detail. This is where the fun really begins as an artist. Instead of handing over power to the scanning tech, which there’s NOTHING wrong with that, they are very good at what they do, you have the ability to craft this image anyway you see fit. Your analog acquisition has just become a very high resolution digital file for processing! I did a quick pushing of the image around in Adobe Lightroom and this is what I came up with. This is NOT the artists interpretation of this image, this is my own, which will vary from person to person no doubt.
So, the long and short of it. There’s no wrong way to grade your images. Do it the best way you see fit for your work flow! Keep shooting great images and the rest will fall in place, no doubt!
Justin - MWFC, Founder, Lab Tech, Scanning Tech, Mail Guy, Blog Writer