Developing Film / Minilab

AnCatDubh

I've been wondering about this.

So you leave a roll of film in with the mini lab people and one hour later you arrive back to find your negatives being sliced and diced but not before it gets scanned and your prints all lined up for you.

So far so good.

To get those prints, does the mini lab machinery actually work some magic with the negative through a normal developing process with all those lovely chemicals or does it take the scan of the negative thus now in a digital format such as JPG/TIFF and print like it would a print from a digital camera.

Anyone been there done that?

DaireQuinlan

AnCatDubh wrote: »

To get those prints, does the mini lab machinery actually work some magic with the negative through a normal developing process with all those lovely chemicals or does it take the scan of the negative thus now in a digital format such as JPG/TIFF and print like it would a print from a digital camera.

Nah, all the magic is gone nowadays. after the film is developed it's scanned and then the scans are used to produce the print. The wierd thing is that the print afaik is actually produced (on the fuji frontier machines at least) by exposing real photosensitive paper to lasers, and then wet-developing it. So they skip out on the projection step and digitise your lovely analogue negative before wet printing it at 300 DPI. And this is supposed to be progress ...

melekalikimaka

i never actually considered this... makes sense i suppose

AnCatDubh

hmnnnnnn....... i had my suspicions when comparing some of my current mistakes efforts to some really beautiful vintage photography.

The dynamic range doesn't appear to be there in what i'm presently getting from the mini labs - so I reckoned it was either that everyone was wrong and that I had discovered that film actually didn't have better dynamic range than digital :rolleyes: or there was some bit of sculdougery going on in that black white box of a mini lab thing.

Think i'll have to go and buy a developing tank and be real old school and wreak of fixer / ebay here i come.

Now the other point is should I have actually noticed this ????? or am I just convincing myself that my eyesight is way better than it actually is?

DaireQuinlan

AnCatDubh wrote: »

hmnnnnnn....... i had my suspicions when comparing some of my current mistakes efforts to some really beautiful vintage photography.

The dynamic range doesn't appear to be there in what i'm presently getting from the mini labs - so I reckoned it was either that everyone was wrong and that I had discovered that film actually didn't have better dynamic range than digital :rolleyes: or there was some bit of sculdougery going on in that black white box of a mini lab thing.

Think i'll have to go and buy a developing tank and be real old school and wreak of fixer / ebay here i come.

Now the other point is should I have actually noticed this ????? or am I just convincing myself that my eyesight is way better than it actually is?

Well, another thing to consider is that they commonly bump up the contrast and saturation in minilabs, often do a mushy grain removal, and occasionally sharpen it to bits aswell. On the rare occasions when I actually get a roll developed in a chemist or minilab nowadays I just use the prints as sort of proofs so I know which ones to scan myself. Then I normally bin the prints. I can do a vastly better job myself.

Captain Flaps

I work in a Fuji minilab so I'll try answer as best I can!

Once we have your developed negs, we feed them through the film scanner on the frontier. As far as I'm aware the frontier scans the negs into a 300dpi digital file, I could be wrong about the resolution. From there, the files can be sent to the lab computer to be burned to disk, sent to the printer, or a combination of the two. For printing, the digital files are projected onto the light sensitive paper which is wet developed.

So yeah, ideally they should be just exposing straight from the negs, but in order to preview the negs and make adjustments before printing, the whole process needs to be digitized.

Oh, and Daire, I know we don't do anything in terms of contrast or saturation, but the Frontier basically does a full auto scan of your negs and tries to give the best average exposure on a frame by frame basis. This is ALWAYS going to be inferior to someone with a decent scanner who knows what they're doing.