Processing and Scanning Colour Negative Film

Since Ken Rockwell can get good results developing and scanning his film at a mini-lab, I thought I could too. First I looked at the prices for developing film at the place where I get my digital prints, Japan Camera. Developing and printing a roll of 24 exposures costs $6.99. That does not include a scan of the negatives on CD. To get that with your prints you pay $16.99. Ten dollars seemed a bit steep for a bit of computer work.

My next options were the grocery store and the drug store. Zehrs' Photolab and Shopper's Drug Mart's Easypix had the same price for developing, printing and scanning 24 exposures, $6.99. That seemed like a much more reasonable price. I had a bad experience at Zehrs before when printing digital so I decided to try Easypix. I don't know if there would really be that much difference since when you visit their websites you can see they are both "Powered By PhotoChannel In Partnership with Fujifilm."

I stopped by Shopper's on my lunch break to drop off the film. I thought I'd have to get 5-day service since I didn't expect them to have the equipment to develop film on-site. But to my surprise they said they could have them ready in a few hours, so I picked them up at the end of my work day.

I quickly looked through the prints at the store and wasn't too impressed. I saw the same issues I saw when I used to get my digital prints from Bent's Camera. The darks were too dark and there wasn't much detail in the smooth gradient of my 3-year-old boy's face. I also saw a purple line across the middle of about half the prints. I hoped these problems didn't appear in the scans on CD.

When I put the CD in my computer I had another disappointment. The same problems as on the prints appeared (harsh contrast, purple streaks), plus more. The scans are 1544x1024, which is only 1.5 megapixels. The images have noise like you see in a compact camera. And worst of all, there was dust, hair and other fuzzles on the prints. That was totally unacceptable. I don't know how they get away creating such crappy scans. My last hope was that they didn't mess up the negatives too.

To see what the negatives were like, I had to borrow my Dad's scanner, an Epson Perfection 4490 Photo. Scanning the negatives I got images that had almost none of the problems of the scans from the lab. I did see some of the purple streaks on some images but it was much reduced. There was no dust, the contrast was much smoother and the colours were better (once I enabled colour correction in the scanning software). And I could get much higher resolution images. I decided to keep them to 8 megapixels.

Here are some samples for the same exposure, which happens to be my favourite from this roll. You'll have to click through to the full size to see all the problems with these images. First we'll look at the scan of the print I made at home:


Here you can see all the problems that I mentioned about the prints. There is some dirt in the lower half (in the tree), but that was on the scanner's glass, which I later cleaned. But here you can see something else: the hair that you see on the scan from the lab is in the print too! Look just behind the top of the boy's head.

Now lets look at the scan that the lab gave me:


Oh the humanity!

Let's see what I got when I scanned the negative myself:


Much better, but there's still a green streak across the top. I guess that's on the negative. You can see detail in the dark cabinet and in the dark parts of the tree.

One more. Here's what it looks like after some correction in iPhoto:


Very nice.

I don't want to scan all my negatives myself, so for my next roll of film I'll see what that $16.99 gets me from Japan Camera.