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I've very recently gotten into developing film at home. For the longest time I'd take my film into a store and get them to do it for me leaving results like this.

enter image description here

However after developing at home I'm finding that I can never get the colour to look anywhere this good. For example here's a few photos from the most recent roll I developed.

(view of hills) https://i.stack.imgur.com/AqZbe.jpg (Street) https://i.stack.imgur.com/J2Nsy.jpg (Friends) https://i.stack.imgur.com/DMGqi.jpg

(all of these shots are from the same roll)

I have made sure the water is exactly at 38 degrees while doing the developing along with making the chemicals that temp.

Does anybody have any ideas what the problem could be and or if you have a solution to it.

Thank you.

Edit

I scanned them at home using a cheap scanner. And these are the raw images out of the scanner.

Original ScanOriginal scan enter image description here

Using new scanner

Using my new scannerUsing old scanner

Hamish
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    Are you now also scanning the film yourself, unlike before? – timvrhn Jul 26 '21 at 13:38
  • Are these the raw images from the scanner? Because there is some weirdness in the histogram of the red channel. – xenoid Jul 26 '21 at 16:41
  • I am scanning them myself at home. Before they did everything from development to scanning. – Hamish Jul 26 '21 at 23:37
  • These are the raw images from the scanner – Hamish Jul 26 '21 at 23:38
  • What does the "good" photo look like when you scan the negative on your scanner? – xiota Jul 27 '21 at 00:50
  • I've added two more photos.. the first is from the scan at the photo lab. The second is the raw file of the same negative on my scanner. The original negative was not developed by me. – Hamish Jul 27 '21 at 01:35
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    So this looks like a scanning, not development, problem. You'll need to tweak settings or get another scanner. What scanner and settings are you using? – xiota Jul 27 '21 at 01:54
  • Qpix PS-970. I'm thinking of purchasing a v600 as this scanner doesn't seem to cut it. It's quite average. – Hamish Jul 27 '21 at 02:13
  • I'll let you know if the new scanner fixes it – Hamish Jul 27 '21 at 02:25
  • I'm not familiar with Qpix, but the reviews for your scanner are mostly negative. A lot of photographers use Epson V-series scanners with good results. – xiota Jul 27 '21 at 04:24
  • This indeed seems like a scanning problem to me. Bear in mind that there's a lot of variability in scanning, and unless you are scanning slide film, there is going to be tweaking involved. Rarely do the scanner auto settings produce results as you want them. – timvrhn Jul 27 '21 at 10:03
  • I've done another scan on an old negative that I didn't develop as a point of reference. See above. – Hamish Jul 27 '21 at 10:51
  • I used a different scanner which fixed the issue. See results above if you like. – Hamish Aug 03 '21 at 11:22

1 Answers1

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Your blueish tinted image looks like a case of "direct color inversion of scan". Most color negative films have an orange mask (see this question for more detail) to them, which when you invert the colors would yield a blueish tint like yours. Because of this mask, you need to to adjust the "white balance" (although it's more complicated than a simple white balance) of the scanned negative. One common way to deal with the orange mask is to adjust the color curves of the negative image, such that the piece of the film outside the exposed frame renders white. (The unexposed part only have the negative of black, which should be white).

For more information, see for instance this this page or this (which also shows an example of a direct inversion). Because of the somewhat complex nature of correctly "removing" the orange mask, it's generally recommended to get a dedicated software for negative inversion (often included with scanners made for scanning negatives). Negative lab pro is a popular Lightroom plugin, but comes at a cost of ~$100. For the Linux users out there, negative2positive is an open-source alternative for converting negative scans to positive.

Andréas Sundström
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