Cyan cast

I've found a lot of pictures I take of green levels come out with a heavy cyan cast in

the dark areas. The cast is in the prints, but is much more noticeable in the scans.

Why is this, and is there any way to correct it? BTW I'm using Royal Gold 200 ISO film.

Sean, your question refers to both scans and prints. If you are referring to a traditional color print made with an enlarger on color RA-4 type paper, then the filter pack is off.

 

When figuring the filter correction for a particular negative if you wish to remove a color cast you add that color. It's counter intuitive.

 

Therefore to subtract a cyan cast in the final print you either a) add cyan filtration in small steps or b) add both magenta and yellow filtration in small steps. When magenta and yellow are added equally its essentially the same as increasing the cyan filtration.

 

Whenever you add filtration, you may have to open the aperture of the enlarger lens by a half stop or more.

<p>Doh! MEA CULPA! The info I just posted is TOTALLY wrong for printing color negatives. In fact, it's completely bass ackwards.</p>

 

<p>To <u>remove</u> a color cast you <u>subtract</u> <u>filtration</u>.</p>

 

<p>To subtract cyan, you would preferably <u>decrease</u> the magenta and yellow filter densities equally in .05 steps until the cyan cast is removed.</p>

 

<p>Equal parts of magenta and yellow are the compliments of cyan. I'm assuming that the cyan filtration was set to zero for the origninal print.</p>

 

<p>Disregard my first post, which would have worked for Cibachrome, but not much else.</p>

Actually I for got to mention that I had it done at a one-hour lab. So are you saying

they screwed up?

It wouldn't be the first time a 1 hour photo lab missed the mark. The operator doesn't have time to set the filtration to all 24 or 36 frames. If the filtration is off in a particular frame, the effect can usually be clearly seen in the shaded or neutral colored areas of the frame.

I don't know what you mean by "green levels"... also, by "dark areas" I assume you mean shadows. Did you scan the film or the print? Have you looked at your negatives? How is the overall contrast of the image... does it looked "washed out"? Areas in shadow are getting light from the blue sky so tend to have a blue cast... if the subject is green you would get cyan from the blue and green. If you used a film scanner, it may not be correcting the "orange mask" right for the film. If images look "washed out" then the lens might not have been shaded well from out of frame light (like the sun) I would look at the negatives and try to tell if they are too dense (dark) or too thin (light)... choose the best ones and have the lab print a few at different density settings, but no color adjustments. Sometimes you can see a color cast in the negatives (they will be inverted... reversed), but cyan would look too similar to the orange mask so it's hard to tell. What were the conditions: clear day, overcast, shade?

Here a link to the picture cd the lab made, it follows the same pattern as the prints.

 

http://www.photo.net/photo/1554379&size=lg

Wow, that's awful. If I were you I would throw away the RG 200

and buy something better, e.g. Portra 400UC.