Kodak Portra
family of daylight-balanced professional colour negative films
Portra is a family of daylight-balanced professional color negative films originally introduced in 1998, it was made mainly for portrait and wedding applications. They are successors of the professional Vericolor films (VPS and VPL), which succeeded Ektacolor films earlier. The films are available in three speeds — 160, 400, and 800 ISO — with the 160 and 400 speed formerly available as "natural color" (NC) and "vivid color" (VC) varieties before the 2011 update.
It is still manufactured by Eastman Kodak but distributed and marketed by Kodak Alaris, as with other products under Kodak Professional banner.
The film has been upgraded by newer versions several times in the last few years, starting in 2006, to improve grain and scanning performance.
2010 Portra 400 upgrade
Kodak introduced a new version of the Portra 400 film which replaced the NC and VC versions in late 2010. The new film incorporates a number of technological advances from the Kodak Vision line of motion pictures films. Kodak lists finer grain, improved sharpness over 400 NC and naturally rendered skin tones as some of the improvements over the existing NC and VC line.
Kodak also lists improved scanning performance as a feature. The "NC" and "VC" varieties of the film were introduced to address the need for different levels of contrast and color saturation when printing, and adjusting these image attributes tend to be more difficult with traditional color darkroom printing than with digital imaging.
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