Scratches on Negatives

Hi

Last week I needed a some portraits quickly and bought NPS 160 and had

it processed in a Fuji 1 hour shop. The machine they have is brand

new. When I got home, I scanned the negatives at high resolution, to

do some photoshop work on some of the shots.

I was surprised to see that the negatives looked as if they had been

kept in a draw, full of scratches and complete drop outs in colour (no

dye). This was at less than an hour old.

I could remove these in photoshop.

Can anyone suggest to me the likely source of the scratches?

Is this the nature of 1 hour processing machines? or is this more

likely to be the operator wiping down the negatives with a cloth or

something?

Many thanks

Andrew

Dirty cutting and sleeving machine? I gave up on one lab where the scratches were only on the last two frames of each strip, making the source rather obvious.

 

Plus, if you're a slob, it doesn't take long to contaminate a roller transport film processor with dirt and grit.

I've come to the conclusion that unless you do your own processing, or use a dip and dunk processor you are always at risk of scratches. The better labs keep their machines clean, however there is till a small risk. Most of the budget processor I've tried have scratched the film to some degree. If you a film scanner with ICE it will nearly always bail you out with scratched. However if I shooting XP2 to print in the darkroom scracthed film is just a nightmare.

Just watch how the employees handle the film between processor / scanner and sleeving. I get what little C-41 I shoot processed at a Sam's where the lab manager has seen my work at exhititions. He never scratched my film. But the "you want fries with that? kids" frequently did. I watched how the kids handle film and saw how they scratched it. Of course it never showed on their prints but did on my high rez scans.

 

I pointed it out the lab manager who coached the employees. Now I get almost no scratches. And I bet the rest of the customers don't either.

 

It's not rocket science, but then most of the lab workers are not rocket scientists either.