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Do you also notice this in C-41 film scans shared online?

Certain Exposures

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I often see film scans online with noticeable, oversaturated orange-yellowish blobs/spots across the frame - particularly on the skin of portrait subjects. I also often see unexpected magenta or greyish patches and a really hard to describe "speckling" of color areas where it looks like the color breaks down into noticeable patterns.

I see these things in professional lab scans shared by customers. I have also found them in some of my scans and scans done by people who develop their own film. I have checked for this on multiple devices so I know it is not just my screen.

Do you also see them? What are we getting wrong here?
 
The image below is not mine. It is an example of nice, lab scanned portrait I saw online with at least one of the flaws I mentioned. I mean no harm to the original photographer.

The photographer wrote in the comments that the film was scanned with a Fuji Frontier by the lab. Since it's an ECN-2 film I am unsure if the lab did the development. I only know of one lab (Silbersalz) developing and scanning ECN-2.

 
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What do you find objectionable in this? Looks like a good scan to me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
 
kkiippyy said:
What do you find objectionable in this? Looks like a good scan to me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Do you notice the strange, highly saturated orange-yellow blotches on her neck and in her hair? They stand out to me. I know it is not her skin or hair itself because I have seen the same thing so often in C-41 scans online and in some of my scans.
 
Certain Exposures said:
Do you notice the strange, highly saturated orange-yellow blotches on her neck and in her hair? They stand out to me. I know it is not her skin or hair itself because I have seen the same thing so often in C-41 scans online and in some of my scans.
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No As another respondent has said it looks like a good scan to me as well

pentaxuser
 
There is a large obvious patch of oversaturated orange-yellow coloration that looks like staining in several spots. I checked a few devices and the flaw is always in the same places. I know it is not her skin or hair because I have seen the same thing over and over again online and in some of my own scans.

I have always assumed this is caused by either a poorly developed negative or a bad scan. Maybe it is an undesirable (to me) quality of C-41 color film that most are okay with?




mshchem said:
Tungsten film ??
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Yes, the photographer used a motion picture film stock. I have seen the same flaws in scans from Portra 400, Kodak Gold, Ektar, etc.
 

From my overview of this photographer's work that I've seen on Flickr (he has a really nice and rich gallery there) I judge, that these are digital post-processing artifacts. In my eve he is using sharpening or dehaze 'brush' in selected spots, you can see that these artifacts appear only selectively mostly on subjects faces. It could have been introduced with Photoshop or similar, since from what I recall about processing TIFF files produced by Nikon Coolscan scanner is that they required some strong changes before starting falling apart
 
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Has nothing to do with the film. Implicating the film is all too common a default blame game. It is either in the scanning or web manipulation, or both, probably in relation to small 35mm originals with so-so scanning and editing. People like me who enlarge color neg film directly onto color printing paper in the darkroom never have issues like that. I was just out in the darkroom a few minutes ago looking at a 20X24 inch print I optically enlarged from Ektar earlier in the week.
 

Could be makeup
 
@neuromantism @DREW WILEY If it is true that this is caused by scanning/manipulation that would be a relief. I would rather have a scanning or editing problem than a development problem.

I scan 35mm with a Plustek 8300ai and Silverfast. Have either of you tried that combination and noticed something similar? I have seen the flaws on frames without sharpening applied.
 
It’s not possible to know if what you’re seeing is an artifact of some kind, or merely a feature that was actually present in the scene. Maybe that’s just what the subject actually looks like, you don’t know because you weren’t there.

Actually I’m fairly certain that’s the case as the photographers posted these photos you’re suspicious of, so they must have looked at the image before posting it and decided they look good enough to post
 
Yellow banding could represent uneven development or uneven scanning. It's difficult to detect unevenness of yellow and orange and skin tones looking at the film atop a light box, due to the overall orange color neg mask. Sometimes looking through a medium blue filter will help detect such hypothetical development anomalies. But one would not expect something like that to be common unless there are a lot of film labs out there with very poor quality control. But I don't have any experience with surplus motion picture stock remarketed for still camera use - one more thing I don't wish to gamble with. The claim that the same kind of blemishes have been detected on more conventional color neg film images still leaves me skeptical that the film itself it to blame.
 

If any of you are on Reddit, please ask the photographer if the blotches were present. I am certain the photographer will confirm they were not or ask, "what blotches" like others here have.

Again, I see the same phenomenon all over the web and in my own frames from time to time. This is nothing new (to me).
 

You’re jumping to the conclusion that these features are a problem with the systems of a large number of photographers when it’s much more likely that you’ve simply never noticed that this is a common feature of the reality of light
 
The image below is not mine. It is an example of a nice portrait I saw online with at least one of the flaws I mentioned. I mean no harm to the original photographer. There are no notes about who developed or scanned the frame.

 
_T_ said:
You’re jumping to the conclusion that these features are a problem with the systems of a large number of photographers when it’s much more likely that you’ve simply never noticed that this is a common feature of the reality of light
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Is it a common feature of the reality of light? People often say "what are you talking about?" when I bring it up.
 
Certain Exposures said:
The image below is not mine. It is an example of a nice portrait I saw online with at least one of the flaws I mentioned. I mean no harm to the original photographer. There are no notes about who developed or scanned the frame.

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There are no problems that either of the images you have posted.
I only see colour shift due to lighting in shadowed areas.

Have you checked your own monitor ? Perhaps it is exacerbating the slight variation you see.
Is it calibrated and if so, with what?
 
gbroadbridge said:
I only see colour shift due to lighting in shadowed areas.
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Yes I agree ... let's say, in the first example, the model's long hair was thrown over her shoulder instead of hanging down as it is, then there would be no orange "blotch", because her neck in that part would be lit with white light, but as it is, her hair is hanging down and is causing a shadow, but that shadow has an "orange" hue because light is shining through, and also reflecting off her brown hair. It seems the combination of brown, her slightly suntanned skin, and color temperature of the light source, has created the orange hue.

I think that first example is correct, trying to change anything, would probably ruin it.
 
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@Certain Exposures assume that all color negative scans you see online are very heavily edited to make the colors look pleasing and that many of these edits are non-linear and introduce anomalies. This can be exacerbated by problems with ICC profile mismatches (saved in a non-sRGB profile and then misinterpreted on the viewer's end as sRGB, etc.), lack of monitor calibration either on the editor's end or the viewer's end, application of film 'profiles' that were made under suboptimal conditions and a whole slew of additional issues.

I wouldn't spend too much time trying to understand what's going wrong in the random photos you see online. It's usually impossible to determine what happened exactly because no processing data of sufficient granularity is available (e.g. it really doesn't say much on what kind of machine a negative was scanned). The main thing is that you evidently have a keen and critical eye for color and that this likely results in certain expectations of how you want your own work to look. I'd focus on that side of the matter and optimize in your own work for what you want to achieve.
 

I can't agree more, this perfectly rounds it up. I would add, @Certain Exposures, that this is rather very naive to assume that people posting their film pictures on the internet don't apply any sort of post processing, especially when they post pictures made with use of negatives. Moreover, people may claim that their pictures haven't been edited and yet they have applied all sorts of digital editions to their pictures before publishing them. Looking again at the gallery of photographer whose pictures got brought up (Adolfo), I am 100% certain that he is somehow digitally post processing some of his pictures, maybe with locally or globally applied tools and global saturation boost/ further color corrections. If he doesn't do it after the scan, then he surely does it through scanning. Maybe inadvertently. He has really beautiful pictures, and I am surely jealous of his eye and approach to portraiture, but he certainly doesn't obtain them, the way he shows them, in camera only, or straight out of film inversions.
When I scan my 135 film pictures using dedicated macro on digital 35mm camera, they certainly don't look that way just after the inversions and color channel adjustments, and I also tend to edit them further, in about one third or half of the cases.
 
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