Scanning and printing

I have just carried out a small job for an old friend of mine which involved scanning and printing a mixture of 126 and 35mm colour negatives, going by the negative envelope they came in, the date on the packet showed that they were originally processed in 1975, so that would mean they were possibly the old Kodak C22 process.

Scanning without the colour restoration feature, the scans all showed a severe colour change and the images were almost lime green, including the rebate with very little of the original colour

After getting around the problem of scanning the 126 square negatives and using the colour restoration feature (Epson V600) the images were not too bad. The 35mm negs were scanned with my Nikon LS50 scanner with the restoration feature with this equipment.

I then started to print them on my Epson S600 printer .......Oh dear!

I have never had a problem with printing, even straight out of the box with this printer, but with these old negatives, they all printed quite dark and required quite a bit of lightning of the image to get something close to acceptable. Even though the image on the screen was perfectly normal.

As a test, I then scanned a recently exposed C41 negative via my Nikon scanner and then printed it. The result was quite normal with the same brightness, colour saturation and contrast as I have always had. Has anyone any idea why the old negatives should appear on the screen as being perfectly normal, but but when printed are too dark?

I just want to emphasise, this anomoly has only happend with these old negatives. It does not affect prints from recent negs. so that rules out lack of callibration between screen and scanner..

This may be way off base since I am far from a digital wiz. Try saving the corrected scans on a disc or flash drive then open them in PhotoShop or whatever editing program as a different type of file ie TIFF or PS and tweak as needed and then print from there. (a wild guess)

http://www.jeffreyglasser.com/

John_M_King said:

I just want to emphasise, this anomoly has only happend with these old negatives. It does not affect prints from recent negs. so that rules out lack of callibration between screen and scanner..

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John, this may be of no relevance but if your negs are from 1975 they could be either C22 processed film (eg Kodacolor X) or early C41 process (KodacolorII). Despite the protestations of various Kodak evangelists whenever I've seen the topic raised, EK did not get everything right with C41 from the outset. I don't think there was anything wrong with the film but there certainly was with the processing. I have dozens of C41 films from around 1972 to 1978 that were variously developed by two different pro labs and Kodak itself. None of them can be either scanned or printed today to an entirely satisfactory standard and neither could I print them very well back in 2003 when I last printed my own colour. Yet I have prints made from some of the negs back in the early 80s that today are in better condition than the negs and I can still scan and print C22 negs. Excessive green content is one of the common characteristics of these faulty C41 negs as is the "fading" of the integral mask over time. BTW you can generally tell a C22 neg from a C41 by the general colour of the mask. C22 is mostly a relatively bright orange while C41 is less intense and more brownish. OzJohn

If the images that print correctly and the ones from the old film look the same on the monitor they should print the same, assuming your printing workflow is correct. They fact that they don't tells me there is something amiss. The most likely culprit is your color management process isn't quite right. Check that the images both have the same profile assigned, that you are printing each the same way. If you can describe your editing and printing processes that might give a clue as to where the issue is.

To respond to the above. Everything was done the same way - no variation at all which is what I am puzzled about, I have done too many to make a silly slip up like that. The only thing I could see that could make the old negs print dark is the restoration software results built into the scanner is not being fully recognised by the printer and it is trying to print faded negs even though they have been worked upon with Photoshop.

I have some more to do tonight from a film I processed yesterday, lets see how they turn out.

If they are truly done the same way they should print the same way. There must be some difference. I'm willing to take a look at them and see how they print here if you wish.