Strange green-blue tones on fujifilm superia xtra 400

superkattt · Jan 31, 2019

I recently purchased a film camera (Nikon L35AF) and decided to use Fujifilm Superia Xtra 400 film. After sending my first roll for developing and scanning, I was disappointed to find that some photos had a very strange green-blue colour!
https://flic.kr/p/QKvmCk
https://flic.kr/p/SnELbm
Any ideas on what went wrong for these photos? I remember setting the ISO of my camera to 100 in an attempt to overexpose the shots. Other photos taken with the same settings and lighting conditions were fine though.

koraks · Jan 31, 2019

Your scanner software became confused by the vibrant and large red surfaces and automatically attempted to correct for this by boosting the cyan by a few miles. The negatives are likely fine and your scans can likely be salvaged.

Rudeofus · Jan 31, 2019

That's definitely very odd, and definitely does not look like typical Superia. There are proper black and white tones in these two images, but some tones in between look very strange. An overexposure by two stops should have been handled without any issues.

As you probably know, these scans you got are most likely not straight scans, or just inverted to get positive images. These scanners try to apply all kinds of corrections to get you contrasty and colorful images, and sometimes these auto corrections get it very wrong. If you are familiar with image editing software, you can probably correct these images, otherwise you'd have to contact the lab to get these scans redone.

superkattt · Jan 31, 2019

Thanks for the replies! Looks like I'll have to find a better lab.

Rudeofus · Jan 31, 2019

superkattt said:
Thanks for the replies! Looks like I'll have to find a better lab.

There are two parts to each lab as far as your images are concerned:

the chemical processing of the film
the handling of scanning and automated post processing work flow

Both can and will go wrong at some point, and only the second part can be redone/fixed as often as needed. If you are happy with the film processing and most pics look alright, contact them about the few poor scans and allow them to resolve this. You can't expect them to manually fine tune each scan unless you pay a much higher price for this kind of service. If your negs turn out to have been poorly developed, or if the lab refuses to come up with a viable fix for these poor scans, then it's time to look for a better alternative.

pentaxuser · Jan 31, 2019

What might help us identify the nub of the problem is a digital photo of the "affected negs". In saying this I take it that it is possible to recognise a difference between properly processed negs and those that exhibit what appears from the scans, a cyanish/green cast?

My gut feeling is that it is not the processing that is the problem but that's what it is - a gut feeling and not a definite conclusion

pentaxuser

Rudeofus · Jan 31, 2019

pentaxuser said:
What might help us identify the nub of the problem is a digital photo of the "affected negs". In saying this I take it that it is possible to recognise a difference between properly processed negs and those that exhibit what appears from the scans, a cyanish/green cast?

In a perfect world, a negative would always have correct contrast in all three color channels, only a linear filter factor should be required to get correct looking images from a color negative. So yes, your test with a digital photo of the affected negatives could be very helpful, because we could easily verify correct processing. As I stated before: if processing is good, it would be trivial to rescan these negatives. If processing if way off, the lab owes an explanation.

koraks · Jan 31, 2019

Given that other frames on the same role are apparently OK, and the very clear red/cyan issue I pointed out earlier, I stick with the hypothesis that it's simply a digital correction issue.

cmacd123 · Jan 31, 2019

this was known as "Subject Failure" in the past. the large red areas throw off the printing process. back in the day.... we would send them back to the lab for a redo, and the operator would have to push a button to tell the printer to ignore that much red.

Strange green-blue tones on fujifilm superia xtra 400

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Strange green-blue tones on fujifilm superia xtra 400

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