Why do these look like sepia?

[cambolt]

I just scanned my last roll: 35mm Tri-x developed in ID-11 1+1 for 10 Minutes (massive dev chart time). Strangely, a few of my shots have come out with a strange brownish cast, almost like sepia, while others have been fine. Examples are below. I am assuming the problem is my cheap, outdated scanner: an Epson 3170 photo. I scanned these as black and white film in 24 bit colour @3200 dpi. I found this strange because I have never had anything like this happen before. Any ideas what the specific problem might be?

Thanks



File0074 by d40monster, on Flickr



File0070 by d40monster, on Flickr

 

[raytoei@gmail.com]

... not that its a bad thing....

 

[cambolt]

The sepia example above is a little extreme, you are right, some of the shots looked quite nice in "sepia". But the shot above is unacceptable. Luckily the photo itself is a tosser. I can fix all these in lightroom, but I can't quite figure out how they became that way in the first place.

 

[ChrisN]

WRT the digital file - probably an RGB image, rather than greyscale. Open it up in Photoshop (or similar) and check the Mode. Some scanners don't have a native greyscale mode for capture.

 

[sepiareverb]

I don't think they look like me at all.

 

[rodt16s]

I get the same thing with a Coolscan (scanning in monochrome mode), would also like to know how to avoid.

 

[roadmouse]

I like the sepia effect. I've had similar results when I scanned b/w negatives as color negatives. (see below)
So maybe the software is confused with it's settings?

 

[tlitody]

if you scanned them as colour neg maybe its tried to take out the orange cast and resulted in what you got.

 

[Tim Gray]

Don't scan as 24 bit color. Scan as 8 or 16 bit monochrome. If you can't do that, do what ChrisN suggests. Open it up in Photoshop and convert it to grayscale or desaturate it.

 

[Neare]

I scan without any of the scanning software corrections and they always come out sepia (and that is scanning in B&W mode), I just desaturate them in ps.
The scanner is inverting the film and b&w films aren't perfectly greyscale. The film emulsion has often a very slight hint of blue. Invert it and at the other end of the spectrum you end up with your sepia colour.
Scanning software will automatically colour correct it or not depending on how you've set up the software.

 

[AJShepherd]

I've found that odd tints can be applied to black and white negatives when scanned in colour mode. Sometimes, it just works, and sometimes you just need to desaturate the image to lose the tint.
Sometimes, you get something really strange happen. This is a shot where I removed the film spiral from the tank halfway through development, as a kind of cack-handed solarisation.

solarholga010 by Antony J Shepherd, on Flickr
So where did it get that golden tint from?

 

[Pherdinand]

a grayscale image cannot end up sepia. For that you need to have at least one of the RGB components have different values than the other two.
If that is the case, you either scanned it as color negative, or you (or your scanner) did some color profile conversion the wrong way.

My epsonscan software has two positions: one about the film type and another about the output. I can set it as bw negative film input and as rgb color file output (at least in theory; i never tried to see the result).

 

[Gabriel M.A.]

I am assuming the problem is my cheap, outdated scanner: an Epson 3170 photo. I scanned these as black and white film in 24 bit colour @3200 dpi. I found this strange because I have never had anything like this happen before. Any ideas what the specific problem might be?

If you have Auto compensation (color and/or level and/or contrast), I'm sure that's what happened: one of the channels went "off". If this is not something you select, perhaps some runaway click/keystroke made your scan different. Because it's a color scan, I am actually surprised this hasn't happened to you before. I would do 16-bit greyscale if I were you.

 

[AJShepherd]

My epsonscan software has two positions: one about the film type and another about the output. I can set it as bw negative film input and as rgb color file output (at least in theory; i never tried to see the result).

The image I posted above was scanned in using Epsonscan software (on a F-3200 scanner), with film type set to black and white negative, but file output as colour.
(it used to be the case you got more 'bit depth' scanning in colour than in bw - and as I've long lost the manual I've never checked to see if this is still true!)

Most of the time this works fine and no desaturation is required. But now and again it throws out something unexpected, and occasionally it kind of works for the image.

 

[MartinP]

Probably some sort of auto-thingy, seeing sufficient blue-grey film base to try to 'correct' it?

The opposite of blue-grey is orange-ish brown, apparently. If you can remove any auto-balancing then you should find that the scans are more consistent (as it won't make 'corrections' for each frame separately) but if you scan as greyscale, or convert after the scan, then you should be able to lose the colour in any case. Stating the obvious there, sorry!