labs and exposures

[JamieB]

Hi everyone

If you under or over expose a street scene by, let's say, a full stop, can a lab ''take care of'' that in most cases? Would you have to tell them you think you underexposed or do they kind of correct for it themselves thinking you made a mistake? I am curious about the input of labs in decision making. Also, if I am getting scans, I can simply alter the exposure after, right? Except getting detail back from shadow areas is hard in film, yes?

All quite general questions, I know. I just wonder about using old automatic cameras that might mess up the exposure a bit. Old cameras where the meter is not accurate and so on. I guess film type makes a big difference too. Latitude. I want to use Fuji Superia and Ilford XP2. I am not trying to produce large beautiful prints. No pro portraits or landscapes but street photography and on-the-fly shots.

 

[Chan Tran]

If you can tel them, tell them how you want your pictures to look like. Otherwise, they would print it they way they think is good.

 

[Wallendo]

Consumer labs will develop the film normally, scan them and let their scanner software "correct" the image. Consumer labs don't do optical prints.
With the films you are using, an exposure error of one stop is not significant, and you should get decent prints (or scans).

 

[Ricardo Miranda]

Consumer labs will develop the film normally, scan them and let their scanner software "correct" the image.

Some consumer labs don't let the software correct the picture, rather doing it manually image by image.
Certainly the lab / camera / film shop I work for does so.

 

[tedr1]

Negative films (the ones you mention are both negative types) tolerate over-exposure pretty well. However underexposure leads to loss of shadow detail, which cannot be recovered. If you expect errors, try to push them in the direction of over-exposure rather than underexposure.

Scans come in different variations. The most common is the jpg type which is 8 bit and allows a small amount of editing for things like brightness changes however it quickly runs into quality problems. If you have an image editor that works 16 bit the image format tiff can be used and there is more room for adjustment. I do not know if you can chose image format when purchasing the film develop and scan package, it probably varies between labs.

PS as you may know things are different with color transparency film, this is more likely to suffer from blown highlights or empty shadows than negative films.

 

[Theo Sulphate]

In my experience, labs will brighten an image that looks dark and vice versa. This is a problem if some of your photos deliberately have darker areas in them that you want to keep dark (e.g. a nice lake that you've exposed for and where you want the foreground shadows and surrounding tree leaves to be darker - as a sort of partial frame of the lake).

In cases like that, I have to tell them what I wanted and have the photo reprinted. If it were B&W, I'd be better off doing it myself, but I don't print color.

 

[albada]

Negative films (the ones you mention are both negative types) tolerate over-exposure pretty well. However underexposure leads to loss of shadow detail, which cannot be recovered. If you expect errors, try to push them in the direction of over-exposure rather than underexposure.

In my experience, C-41 films look better when overexposed by one stop because their grain becomes finer, especially in shadows. I regard the ISO-rating of these films as the minimum exposure needed, but I give them an extra stop whenever I can. This advice does not apply to traditional black-and-while films.

Mark Overton

 

[jim10219]

It depends on the lab as to what options are available, and how they'll treat it. My experience has been it's best to just let them develop it normally and make any adjustments in the computer. I'm assuming you're not having traditional prints made since you're sending these off to the lab. You could ask them to push or pull the film to compensate (if they even offer that service), but I've never had much luck with doing that.

This is one of the arguments for developing and scanning your own film. You have more control over this stuff and can adjust your processes accordingly. The downside is cost, time, and since you're doing it all by hand, you increase the chance of errors. I generally develop B&W by myself (since it's easy and cheap) and send C41 and E6 off to the labs. Then I always scan them myself (even if I wind up printing them later using an enlarger). I've yet to find a lab that does a decent scanning job for a decent price. But by scanning them yourself, you can make corrections to the exposure during the scan, and have a raw, uncompressed file to further edit in the computer.