Retouching by labs

bjorke · Aug 10, 2006

My son went to visit his grandparents and cousins, and came home with a stack of minilab prints.

Every one contains faces that look like the lab has printed digitally and used some sort of featureless skin-smoother.

It's freaky, and the fact that it's from film negs makes me sad.

rogueish · Aug 11, 2006

I have found that some of the 35mm film I put in to the local 1 hour lab has a similar problem. The film is processed in chems, than scanned and digitally printed. I ask them to reprint certian pics without overdoing the colour intensity. I really dislike super saturation. Green plants should not look like they are neon or radioactive.

frugal · Aug 11, 2006

The one that gets me is all the noise you get in certain types of shots. I've mostly had it come up with shots where a lot of the scene is in shadows (such as around sunset). I've also seen it in other peoples' prints when there's a lot of haze or mist. And that's not even talking about the over-saturated colours.

Fortunately, one of my friends works at one of the local drugstores and maintains the processor as if it were a pro lab. I get him to run all my C-41 now and when he gives me digital "contact sheets" he keeps the saturation down and prints them pretty low contrast so I can really see all the detail that's in the negs.

bob100684 · Aug 12, 2006

frugal said:
The one that gets me is all the noise you get in certain types of shots. I've mostly had it come up with shots where a lot of the scene is in shadows (such as around sunset). I've also seen it in other peoples' prints when there's a lot of haze or mist. And that's not even talking about the over-saturated colours.

Fortunately, one of my friends works at one of the local drugstores and maintains the processor as if it were a pro lab. I get him to run all my C-41 now and when he gives me digital "contact sheets" he keeps the saturation down and prints them pretty low contrast so I can really see all the detail that's in the negs.

digital printing isn't the problem, poor printing/proscesing is. I've run a frontier(digital) and an SFA(optical). At first I prefered the SFA because of the above mentioned problems, but once I figured the damn thing out I'm able to make way better prints than I ever was with the SFA.

Retouching by labs

bjorke

rogueish

frugal

bob100684

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