Kodak Gold 200 Exposure Test

If you’re not familiar with colour negative film, one thing to know is that increasing the exposure will increase the density of the negative, and that the brightness of the image is interpreted during scanning. The labs job is to give you a normal image and that can be somewhat subjective.

Starting with the normal exposure flagged in green we can see the typical Kodak Gold look, with fairly good shadow and highlight detail. These negatives were scanned with a Fuji Frontier with no special preferences.

Stepping back to -1 we can see the shadows close up significantly and an increase in contrast. I would not be too upset if this was the only image I got back from the lab.

Jumping back to -2 stops and we now have large areas of pure black which are quite ugly, and the grain is very obvious even in the brighter areas.

Now on the other side we have 1 stop overexposed and it’s a very similar result to the normally exposure image. The shadow areas have opened up very slightly giving the image overall less contrast, and there’s perhaps a very slight shift to cyan in the sky.

Two stops over is where we get quite a dramatic shift away from magenta and towards green, which you can see in the wall here, the trees in the background, and the brown grass around the building. I don’t think I would use this image unless I was specifically aiming for this look beforehand.

Three stops has even less magenta and takes another hit in contrast. There’s definitely still an image here that you could bring back to life if you were desperate. Four stops is quite ugly because the highlights have lost their brilliance, little change at 5 stops, and then 6 stops really has just a completely destroyed image.

So there you have it, Kodak Gold 200, 1 stop either way seems totally fine and even 2 stops either direction is not a disaster. I will put the full size JPEGs as a download in the description, and I would be interested to hear about your experience with Gold 200 in the comments.

If you want to see more of this, I’ve already shot some test exposures of Ultramax 400, so check for that video on my channel soon.

Full size JPEGs: https://www.icloud.com/iclouddrive/0k...

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