colour film lab stuff-ups (rant)

[lynnb]

thanks John! When I've shot my existing stock (4x35mm, 5x120) I'll take you up on the offer! I'm quite sparing in my C41 shooting due to the cost, so it might be quite a while before I get back to you.

Cheers,
Lynn

PS Were you on callout to the Belrose fires?

 

[Johnmcd]

thanks John! When I've shot my existing stock (4x35mm, 5x120) I'll take you up on the offer! I'm quite sparing in my C41 shooting due to the cost, so it might be quite a while before I get back to you.

Cheers,
Lynn

PS Were you on callout to the Belrose fires?

No Lynn. I have just got back from 5 weeks in Belgium and France, with 30 rolls to develops 🙂

 

[Ong]

Foto Riesel is always good for C41, Wayne hasn't really let me down yet with a proper well maintained machine and a Noritsu AF film scanner as well so scans are good.
The only issue is that they're in the city.

Big W's tend to be a hit and miss depending on which store you go to and who they send it to (if your local store still does it as well. Alot of stores stopped about 2 years ago when the machines started breaking down and they never repaired them)

Otherwise you might want to check out the dropbox system at the Australian Centre for Photography at Paddington where they're sending off the film to Hillvale photo lab in Melbourne for dev and scan. I haven't personally used them but friends have and no complaints so far, as always YMMV.

That's all I can really think of. We're limited down here in places that do good dev and scan services.

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

I'm in the U.S., but have these same problems here. Finally made me give up on color film. Even the custom labs leave something to be desired. So, for me, film for b&w and digi for color. 🙁

I'm shooting digital for color and film for BW for the same reasons. I've never been happy with labs, they ALL make mistakes and none of them ever take responsibility for their f--kups. The lazy *******s can give you a roll covered in scratches and dust, unevenly developed, total crap, and they'll look at you with a straight face and declare that "We never make mistakes."

The closure of most pro labs due to the rise of digital in the commercial photo world made it even worse. Prices rose, quality declined. No thanks.

 

[lynnb]

It's emulsion side. At first I thought it was dust but a micro fibre cloth has zero effect. Here's a close up of the neg (apologies for thin dof, shot at an oblique). It looked this way before I tried to gently wipe the neg with the micro fibre cloth, after first trying to blow it off.

This was the first frame, but similar damage is on every frame, to a greater or lesser extent.

I suspect my roll was the first to go through the machine first thing in the morning. Looks like operator error or mishandling to me.

 

[btgc]

I think low volume, irregular maintenance and under-educated staff all contribute to this. I also have had damaged negatives caused by, I think, poorly maintained machine.

 

[farlymac]

I used to take my camera test films to a pharmacy (CVS) because I could get them back quickly, and they were close by. The scans weren't as good as what I could get at the local lab, but then they cost only as third as much, and were adequate for judging the operation of the camera. I figured if I got any really nice shots, I could just re-scan them at a higher resolution.

But then they started hiring some real idiots that didn't know how to run the machines correctly. One gal would pull out the first three or four frames before loading the leader. The one guy that worked there kept wrecking the machine, and I'd have to wait a week until the Kodak rep showed up to repair it, as they wouldn't give me my film back. When I got half a roll back one day, that was when I gave up on them.

I have to drive four times as far, and pay twice as much now, but I very rarely have an issue with the lab. Especially since they replaced their aging scanner that liked to put lines in the image, making you think the neg was scratched.

It's getting harder to find a place for developing these days, and unless one lives in a large city, it's looking like mail order for a lot of us that don't want to deal with the chemicals. The pipes in my place are bad enough without pouring stop bath down them all the time.

PF

 

[mwoenv]

I've been developing my own C41 for years and get great results without any special equipment. I use Unicolor 1-liter powder kits ($19 at Freestyle) and develop 16 rolls with it. I develop 2-120 or 3-135 rolls at a time and complete it all in a few days (Unicolor recommends completing within a week). I use clear 1-liter PET plastic bottles (good oxygen barrier), squeezed to eliminate air before capping and filter with coffee filters between uses. I add 1/2 teaspoon PhotoFlo concentrate to 1-liter of stabiizer, and repeat after 8 rolls, and this eliiminates water drying marks.

So I save up the rolls and do them all at once. I've also used a Rollei Digibase liquid kit, which enables you to make up a smaller volume of chemicals so you don't have to save up as many rolls.

I use a small 6-pack cooler to bring the empty tank/reels/film up to the developing temperature (102F), monitoring the cooler water temperature with a digital thermometer with a wire probe (calibrated to a color thermometer), adding small amounts of hot water as it cools down while the tank heats up. When there's no change, the tank has reached the proper temperature (takes about 30 minutes while I do other things). I bring the chemicals to temperature and keep the tank in the cooler when not agitating. Only the 1 minute water pre-soak and 3.5 minute developer steps need to be 102F; blix can be +/- a few degress and stabilizer is at room temperature.

Results are great, no marks or scratches and you know depleted chemicals are not being used. I make my own RA4 color prints from these negatives as well and they are beautiful.

It's not hard once you do it. But I do think that you have to enjoy processing if you are to do your own.

 

[Highway 61]

I'm shooting digital for color and film for BW for the same reasons. I've never been happy with labs, they ALL make mistakes and none of them ever take responsibility for their f--kups. The lazy *******s can give you a roll covered in scratches and dust, unevenly developed, total crap, and they'll look at you with a straight face and declare that "We never make mistakes."

The closure of most pro labs due to the rise of digital in the commercial photo world made it even worse. Prices rose, quality declined. No thanks.

+1

Sold all my E6 and C41 films stocks some years ago for the very same reasons.

Film for B&W, digital for color.

Lynn : the labs now have fewer and fewer films to process, so the machines are not serviced regularly any longer. The baths are not rejuvenated and so on.

Your film has been scratched by a dirty machine.

Having E6 or C41 processed in labs now means getting scratched films with unproper colors.

For about 300% of what it costed 10 years ago...

Home processing C41 sounds tempting, but because of the demise of good labs and the death of Kodachrome I now see things in black and white... and have almost fully given up shooting color.

 

[rjstep3]

The OP has identified a key problem with modern film photography: the quality of the labs now left doing the job.

I have tried several, and sometimes it looks like the negatives have been rubbed, emulsion side down, along the floor before cutting them up and putting them in their sleeves. I get exactly the same - odd dust patterns and scratches on the emulsion and water marks and, worse than that, much, much worse, dirty, greasy fingerprints over the neg itself.

If you really like the neg, you can clean up dust using PS, but there is no easy way to remove thumbprints or bad scratches - the neg is simply ruined.

I recently went through the job of scanning in all my thousands of old negs/slides: the interesting thing is that, while many had suffered colour shifts due to age, or had some dust where they had not been in a protective sleeve, NONE of them had thumbprints or scratches. It seems to be an entirely modern phenomenon.

It does make me think about using film, to which I am otherwise dedicated. In reality, I am using specialist labs in the centre of London, England as well, where you would expect consistently good quality. However, it appears not.

I don't want to get into darkroom stuff, don't have the facilities, I have to be able to trust the lab, but at the moment, I can't.

Rant over.

rjstep3

 

[GarageBoy]

Worst I've gotten are the scratches that run the length of the film
Glad the NYC "pro" labs are still able to spoil me

 

[Ronald M]

While I got pretty good results with a tank and stick agitation every 30 sec.

Does not work. Patterson instruction call for twist on first agitation cycle only. The problem is you get better replenishment along edges, and less in the center.

For C41, 1 inversion per 15" is equal to continuous and works well.

For Jobo, turn rotation up fully, add developer, and then after 30 sec decrease . The Idea being to distribute developer as fast as possible over film surface.

Fo not omit stab or get it on the plastic.

Hang film and use a spray bottle.

 

[GarageBoy]

That is really awful. Just when I was kind of warming up to maybe shooting some Fuji. But the labs in NYC are not great these days.

What lab did you use?