Film scanning at local 1-hour lab

Hello everybody,

Just recently I dropped off several rolls of film at a local 1-hour lab for

development, prints and scanning. Well, it seems that some of the labs are worse

than others and this one is one of them. First, the prints were horrible (paper

quality was extremely poor and pictures turned out to be very grainy due to

satin finish of the paper) and then I discovered that the scans are no better

either. I was under impression that film negatives are supposed to be scanned.

After looking at some of the scans a friend of mine said that they look as if

they were made off prints. So what do these cheap labs scan? Negatives or prints?

Thanks and please see this example of a pretty bad scan.

 

<img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1023/837686564_466108e227_o.jpg">

I think many of them scan negatives to make the prints so it doesn't cost them much to provide you a copy of the scan data. But their scan quality is only good enough for a 4"X6" print.

Yes, they scan the negatives. In general "pictures-on-CD" from one-hour labs are not very good, neither in terms of resolution or in terms of grain. What you have posted is fairly typical, no surprises here. It's possible to get better scans but that takes good equipment and a lot of time, something you won't find in a one-hour shop.

 

Not sure about your prints though - there is a certain type of paper that's supposed to look more grainy, quite the opposite of the typical gloss finish. But that has nothing to do with the scan.

Don't scan at local labs. I once tried to convince my local lab that their default 600 dpi may

be "fine" for smaller prints, but could they please crank it up to at least 1300 dpi? The answer

was a blank, "no", since 600 dpi is "fine".... I got my own 4000 dpi scanner shortly thereafter.

Big difference in quality in the final image.

Is this the original scan, or something you edited? The scan has no

header comment, lacks EXIF, and in a ludicrous JPEG encoding with

Quality 100 and 1x1 chroma subsampling. Noise reduction, in this

case PaintShopPro's salt+pepper filter, improves the image somewhat.<div></div>

Sorry I meant "is in a ludicrous JPEG encoding with Quality 100 and 2x2 chroma subsampling."

The typical drug store scan is horrible, low resolution and heavily compressed. You can easily do better yourself even with a $100 Epson flatbed scanner. Get a dedicated film scanner like the Nikon V if you need excellent scans.

It also depends what kind of film it was to begin with, and what machine they were using - if it was pro film or something uncommon, the 1-hr lab might not have the "channel" settings for it for printing/scanning, and you got it with just a default, unoptimised setting. Also, if it was say, Kodak film and their machine is a Fuji, sometimes unoptimised results can occur (most Kodak labs use Nortisu machines) - although by and large I've noticed locally at least that's becoming less of an issue.

 

You might want to try taking the negatives to your local pro shop and having them scan/print it properly just to compare.

 

Finally, if the pro shop prints still come out grainy, the last thing to consider is underexposure - a lot (most?) colour films tend to get grainy with underexposure, and the 1-hr photo's machine was doing it's best to correct for it.

And, of course, if the shot itself was underexposed, no lab can completely fix it - you can sort of manipulate it digitally as above.

Where was this done? Name of Drug store?

At least once a week there is a posting from someone who took film to the local drug store, discount store or other place where the minilabs are run by minimum wage employees who were stocking shelves in the shoe department the week before, and they wonder why the lab work is so bad. You get what you pay for. You can find good lab work at such places, but it's the exception rather than the norm. If you want good lab work, go to a real lab. A camera store at minimum -- but the chain places at the mall may still be hiring kids off the street instead of real photographers or lab techs. With FedEx and even fast service from USPS, even a lab across the country is virtually local these days, so why not stick with one of the major professional labs? They're not cheap but you get what you pay for. Perosnally, I used a local MotPhoto for snapshots -- I've goten to know the franchise owner and she does good work -- and CPQ, a major wedding/portrait lab (www.cpq.net) for paying jobs.

No-where is going to scan at higher than about 6x4" or 7x5" @ 300dpi unless either they are sitting about twiddling their thumbs and feeling charitable or you pay them a lot more for the simple fact that using a typical lab scanner such as a Fuji SP3000 a whole film scanned for 6x4 prints takes less than a minute. For 18x12 @ 300 dpi it takes about half an hour per film. No lab with any commercial sense is going to be tied up for that length of time on one film unless you pay a lot for it.

Craig, great point

 

When in a junk-store, you can only expect to buy junk

 

It wouldn't even be such a big problem if it weren't for terrible image processing that is applied to these scans by the scanning software, that only an idiot would willingly apply to an image if they were working on their images in photoshop.

As in a modern digital consumer lab the technician's role in scanning the film is usually limited to feeding the film leader into the automatic carrier and pressing 'start' whether he/she is a photographic expert or a minimum wage teenager is quite irrelevant.

 

Of course one can add and remove density and cyan, magenta or yellow manually but at least in a busier lab there simply isn't time.

 

Thus except for the odd thing like colour matching a print, skill doesn't come into it. Far more important is that the lab is maintained and calibrations and control strips are done frequently enough.

Embrace it!

 

You've heard of Lomo photography? Now have your film scanned by the drug store and you won't need a Lomo, a Lens Baby, or other degradations of your image. The drugstore can do it all for you!

 

Consider this official notice that I will be trademarking "Lomolab" ;)

I am sorry that I have to agree with you. I have a great optical printer for 35mm and aps negative film, but a really REALLY crappy Sony film scanner. Just like someone mentioned, we feed the film in and it does the rest. Actually, we can make some color corrections, but it doesn't help the resolution which theoretically is enough for a 4x6,. They are ok to email, but I wouldn't make a print at all from one of our scans. Also the scans are way too contrasty. So I just tell my customers when they order one that it is useless for making a print. Some people are ok with that, and others appreciate my honesty.