Never trust a lab scan

[Clancycoop]

I just had an unusual experience. About a year ago I shot two rolls of Lomo's mystery X-Pro film. I used two different cameras, a Minolta AL-s and a Leica M6, to shoot each roll. I took the rolls to the local lab and had it cross processed, as is intended, meaning that is what they advertise it for (I prefer Elite Chrome for that, but I wanted to try it).

Anyways, when I got back both rolls, they looked like the green/yellow monstrosity below. Since the film was from Lomo, I thought that might be the intended look, you never know. I didn't even look at the negatives because they seemed obviously destroyed/useless.

This evening I had the urge to look at some negatives and try scanning them myself with my scanner that I obtained this last summer, and I came across these rolls. I looked at them with my eye and saw that there was much more detail than I remember seeing in the scans. I threw them on the scanner and find that the negative, although bearing a distinctly cross-processed look, is fine! The lab totally messed up! This is a pro lab, not Walgreens. They have done fine in the past.

With a little color correction, I wound up with this beautifully toned image. I purposefully aimed towards a 1940's color film type look.

Anyways, DON'T TRUST YOUR LAB! If the negatives look off, it might not have been your fault.

 

[Clancycoop]

As mentioned in my post, this was not Walgreens, but a pro lab. The color you see on the 2nd plane picture was very close to the negative with no corrections. I lowered the contrast and made the green a little less punchy.

Many of the photos on the roll were even more blown out than this on the lab CD, even though when I scanned it they were visible.

What I was trying to convey is that a lab scan will not always meet the full potential of the negative. Perhaps there are details in what looks like a black shadow, or maybe it seems that you blew an exposure when really the lab tech did with the scanner.

I am familiar with cross processing. I usually try and achieve something like this, rather than one dramatic color cast:
But perhaps the tech assumed I was looking for toxic green with blown highlights.

Not sure what you expected with cross processed film, but the color is either a shift of yellow/green for Kodak, or red/blue for Fuji when cross processing. When Walgreens scanned the film, they didn't compensate and correct for the color shift of cross processing. When you scanned them, you corrected for the cross processed colors. The X-Pro stands for cross process, so the green/yellow is definitely the intended look.

 

[DrTebi]

I had film scanned by at least eight different labs, from Wolf's Camera to pro labs. I could never help myself thinking that I could get more out of the film than the lab did, and scanned everything again myself (on a Minolta Dimage Multi Pro, or a CanoScan4000US). In most cases I was right... and my scans turned out better. Some labs just did plane horrible jobs.

The best scans so far I got from Dwayne's and NCPS; Dwayne's was always consistent in color and sharpness. However, their scans are not very large. NCPS scans are not cheap, but they are really good and big. The only thing I could complain about their scans was, that when I went to "pixel level," I could see that some sharpening (or maybe some anti-alias or anti-newton pattern) was applied, which left a bit of a pattern. My scanner could not beat their D-Max, and was just a tiny bit less sharp...

The best proof is shooting slides and looking at them on a light table. The scans should match what you see on the table (assuming your monitor is calibrated and all that). The sad part however is, that slides always look better on a light table... so the last resort is to get out a slide projector to enjoy the full glory of the images, which I actually enjoy the most anyway 🙂

 

[edftwin]

Your scan looks miles better than the lab scan !
It could be the lab tech's fault as human error always happens.

Btw, what scanner do you use? I'm just curious.