Help with Washed Out Edges on 35mm

[Alan Wyles]

Greetings, I am new here to Photrio. I am also new to developing my own 35mm film at home. I have so far processed about 10 rolls.

I've often come across a problem where-- after digitizing the pictures-- I can see the edges (particularly the left and right edges) are more washed out than the center of the image. Here's an example picture (Kodak Gold 200).

I could certainly fix it in my photo editor but I'd like to know if this is normal or if it's a timing issue with the chemistry. Or if my scanning process has a light bleed at the edge. The edge washout is present is nearly every photo.

I am using CineStill's CS41 Powder Kit, which combines bleach and fix into a single mixture. The above image was processed with a fresh set of chemicals in a 2-spool Paterson tank. These are the instruction I follow.
- Presoak/warm the film fully submerged with tap water at 102F/38.8C for 1 minute, then poured out the water.
- Developed for 3.5 minutes at 102F/38.8C fully submerged with agitation every 30 seconds plus 2 knocks of the tank on the table to knock out bubbles after each agitation.
- Pour out developer.
- Blix for 8 minutes at 102F/38.8C fully submerged with agitation every 30 seconds plus 2 knocks of the tank on the table to knock out bubbles after each agitation.
- Pour out blix.
- Rinse with tap water (temperature as is out of the tap): fully submerge film, then dump water. 8 times.
- in 800ml of distilled water (room temperature), add a few drops of Kodak Photo-Flo 200, pour into tank and let film sit for about 30 seconds and then pour it out.
- Hang film on clips with weights at the end to keep the strip straight while drying.

The digitizing process:
- Valoi easy35 attached to a Canon R5 with a 100mm macro lens.

Thank you.

 

[koraks]

The problem is in the scanning/digitization process.

Keep in mind that the frames on 35mm full frame 24x36mm are sitting side by side with the short ends adjacent to each other. The development process can never, ever create density differences consistently along those frame edges. The only two things that 'know' about the frame edges are the original taking camera and the digitization/scanning process. The original camera is pretty much off the hook on this one since there's no typical light leak scenario that will produce this kind of defect; note that it's also present at the top edge of the frame shown. On the other hand, light falloff on the setup used in 'camera scanning' is a sure-fire way to get exactly this result, making that the plausible cause.

if my scanning process has a light bleed at the edge.

It's the opposite; light bleed would result in darker edges. This is color negative, so it gets inverted.

You'll have to test that Valoi setup to see under which conditions it produces even lighting across the entire frame.

 

[loccdor]

Yep, that is in the digitization.

Lower contrast films (less range in your digital camera's histogram) will show this problem more easily.

Try taking a digitization of a unexposed frame on your film. You can slightly blur that and layer it over your negatives with the Divide blending mode before you do any other edits to help reduce these kind of problems. Ultimately though, you'll want to fix the problem physically, if possible.

Looking at your Valoi easy35, nothing is jumping out at me as being a source of this, but I haven't used one. Do you use it in darkness? Is anything shiny in there, maybe even the front of the lens or the step-up/step-down rings? Are you using it with all the parts in their place, nothing removed?

I had similar problems in my digitization setup - I needed to reduce stray light coming from the light source, as well as bring the light source a bit closer to the film.