White Balance on Film..?

[Austin_HXC]

This past year I took a course on film photography, and will be taking the next course which is geared more toward digital. Anyway, during this course we only took pictures outdoors and I don't recall ever hearing anything about white balance in film. Thinking about it, we usually took pictures outside so I never had an orange tint from tungsten or anything.

Oh man. I just remembered that course was Black and White film. I feel really dumb right now.
But can anyone answer the question, is there a White balance in film?

[candleman]

not to my understanding.
WB for film is controled by using cooured filters on the end of the lens.

there may be some dark-room corrections possible but i know nothing about that.

[AlanWillis]

Film generally came with two possible color temps: daylight and tungsten. If you needed to manipulate the color balance, you needed to use filters. Most flashes and strobes were set to daylight so that the far more common daylight balanced film could be used with flashes and render color appropriately.

[OsmosisStudios]

Litterally the old fashion way

Filters. And LOTS of them. There are red filters and orange filters and blue filters and green filters and so on and so on. They all have their uses, but generally affect contrast (in BW) or colour (in colour). Generally people use red 25A filters on BW film and orange warming filters on colour film

[kencaleno]

Negative film for prints has always been daylight rated,and for color negative film,you used cc(color correction) filters,usually gels,which came in a selection of varying grades, for adverse lighting conditions,although some were glass.For rainy overcast days wedding photographers often used a "tobacco" filter,an 85c glass filter, to warm images up.For black and white negative film,usual filters were yellow,green,and red and sometimes blue,to control tones of grey.
Positive,or transparency film(for slides) was either daylight or tungsten rated.
Black and White negative film could be bought in 6;12;25;32;125;320;400;800 1250,1600 and 3200 ISO-while color negative came in 100;200,400 and 800 ISO-and I believe Konica made one at 1000 ISO-Transparency film came as 50;64;160 ISO,and although black and white negative film had a latitude(Dynamic Range) of up tp 7 EV stops (Kodak Tri-X 320 ISO Professional) Slide film had a latitude of only 1 and a half EV stops, and like digital, it paid to err on the under exposure side ,preferably 1.3 stop. AGFA (Germany) Actually produced a black and white positive(Slide) film for documents. regards, Ken

[OsmosisStudios]

Ken I think your lists, while good, are terribly incomplete. I remember shooting with BW film at 50iso (youre missing one between 32 and 125, at least) and I've seen modern colour film at 1600iso. Its terrible but it exists.

Your remark about underexposing digital isnt totally pertinent if one shoots RAW: you can pull more from highlights with RAW headroom than you can from shadows. of course, you get everything right in camera and directly to jpg, so not to worry.

[LoveDSLR]

For mixed indoor light sources, I often used a Gossen SixtiColor 2-colors color meter to determine the proper filters and gels back in the old SLR days.

With the Sixticolor, you can read the temp in degree Kelvin or in "mired" values (1,000,000/Kelvin values).

For example (from the Sixticolor manual), 29.3 decamired (3,400 K) - 17.3 decamired (5,800 K) = 12 decamired, equivalent to B 12 filter (Gossen Bluish B 12 reading = Kodak Wratten 80B).

Other color meters such as the Minolta Color Meter II calculated the MIRED shift from the Kelvin reading. Minolta calls this shift the light-balancing (LB) index number. This number indicates the amount of amber/red or blue correction gel needed to match the source to the color temperature of the film stock.

[kencaleno]

Originally Posted by OsmosisStudios

Ken I think your lists, while good, are terribly incomplete. I remember shooting with BW film at 50iso (youre missing one between 32 and 125, at least) and I've seen modern colour film at 1600iso. Its terrible but it exists.

Your remark about underexposing digital isnt totally pertinent if one shoots RAW: you can pull more from highlights with RAW headroom than you can from shadows. of course, you get everything right in camera and directly to jpg, so not to worry.

We don't get all the films available here in NZ-we never got Kodak 2425 film a double layer one positive,one negative,which were separated in processing and gave slides,prints and negative from the same film canister.We did get kodak technical pan, however 12-25 asa(ISO) developed in Agfa Rodinal for 7 minutes at 20 degrees (2ml per 200mm water) Ken

[AtlantaTerry]

Ken:

I must correct you. There were many color negative films that were Tungsten. As a matter of fact I have a stack of 4x5 sheet film holders right now that are loaded and ready to go with just such film.

Terry Thomas...
the photographer
Atlanta, Georgia USA