Kodak Pro 400 PMC

Pro 400 PMC was Kodak's professional medium-contrast color negative aimed at portrait and event shooters before Portra took over the segment. The PMC suffix stood for Professional Medium Contrast, positioning it between the punchier saturation films aimed at editorial work and the lower-contrast portrait emulsions that came later. Kodak phased it out around 2000 when Portra 400NC and 400VC absorbed the market.

What made it interesting was the curve. Latitude was wide, color rendition leaned slightly warm without going amber, and skin tones held under mixed indoor light better than the consumer Gold 400 it shared box-speed numbers with. Wedding labs ran a lot of it because the contrast suited diffused window light and the proofs came out flat enough to dodge and burn.

Compared with the eventual Portra 400NC, the PMC is slightly warmer and slightly grainier. Compared with Fujicolor Pro 400H, the closest peer until Fuji discontinued it in 2021, the PMC runs warmer in yellows and softer in blues. People who shot both will tell you the choice came down to whether the venue had a lot of tungsten or a lot of overcast sky.

Use the surviving rolls the way they were meant to be used. Portrait, available-light event, daylight family work. Push processing was supported officially up to EI 800, though the color shift past one stop is noticeable enough that most labs told clients to overexpose at the meter instead. Box speed is 400. Rating it at 320 in shade gives cleaner shadows.

Formats were 35mm and 120. Production ended quietly. What is left is freezer stock from the late 1990s, and the dye couplers in expired PMC have held up better than most Kodak color negatives of the same era thanks to the heavier silver content.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.10. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second, which is gentle for a color negative. A metered 8-second exposure becomes roughly 11 seconds at the negative. For tripod indoor portrait work, the correction is small but worth applying.