Lack of orange cast on colour negatives

[ackers8888]

Hi Guys,

I took a batch of 35mm portra 160 to be processed at a local 'professional' lab.

I'm scanning the results and it's obvious something went wrong somewhere. The images are very grainy and de-saturated. They look terrible.

I am comparing the negatives to another batch of negs I shot in May using the same film with perfect results. The perfect negatives appear to have much more of an orange cast to them

The image below is a good negative

This image is a new/bad negative.

Is this likely to be caused by bad developing? Lack of fixing maybe? Any ideas would be great.

Thanks

Claire

 

[Pherdinand]

to me they look the same (also after a quick inversion). The second one has more grain/dark area in the bottom left, but that is related to less light available there, i think.

edit: photoshop resize 50%, invert, auto levels - i think they both look good!!see attach

 

[Pherdinand]

sorry, rff software reduces upload sizes considerably

 

[Gabriel M.A.]

If it's grainy, it could be a symptom of bad storage conditions: sudden temperature changes (which I don't know if with C-41 that could be possible without showing reticulation), being stored in very hot conditions, etc.

The change in mask color may indeed be a symptom of inadequate processing. I hate being surprised like this, which is why I like to find a good lab and stick with it.

I had some XP2 rolls messed up really bad by a lab in the U.S. that used to be very good...but "cost savings" led to costly negative losses, which led to me never using them again. Such is the short-sightedness of "cheap".

Were both rolls developed by the same lab? In any case, I'd shop around. My strategy is to give them a test roll. Doesn't have to be your best batch, perhaps some Fuji 400 X-tra (or whatever is called...they love to change their names depending on the market) with some lame flower shots.

It's never pleasant to get a poorly developed roll back.

 

[ackers8888]

I just resized them to 800px on the longest side.

The lab has always done a great job for me in the past, so this is a real surprise, especially with it being 15 rolls of film! I'll have to take them back and show them, i just wanted to be sure that it is a development problem.

Thanks Phredinand. The 2nd image generally looks bad to me compared to the one of the boy, it is quite grainy whereas the other is smooth.

 

[ackers8888]

Just adding an example now.

To me, this picture just looks abysmal. Grainy, awful.

 

[Fotohuis]

No, this is not good at all.

But from the web very difficult to make a final conclusion.

IMO there could be two problems:
Under-exposed or
Wrong temperature (too low) or too short (less then 3:15 minutes) C41 developer. When the C41 developer is too old, or have had the wrong re-generation it's also looking like this.

Maybe time to do your C41 development yourself. At least you know from yourself when you have screwed up the negatives. It's not very difficult. The only practical problem is how to maintain the 37,8C/100F developing temperature.

Bad luck if they spoiled 15 35mm C41 films for you.

Robert

 

[sevo]

The mask is positively there in the negative - unmasked negatives are entirely blank in the unexposed areas. The film might be underexposed, underdeveloped or past its storage life - but which cannot be determined from a scan, the results look quite the same even on the negative, and the scanner exposure adjustment and colour balancing hide all subtle differences. You can only find out by exposing and processing test samples.

And it might even be a issue of scanning with the wrong settings/profile - neither of your samples looks particularly good to me...