The Simple Film Lab film processing order form has been updated to include C-41 color negative film processing.
Please download it and start sending in your color C-41 film to be processed.
Enjoy!
The Simple Film Lab film processing order form has been updated to include C-41 color negative film processing.
Please download it and start sending in your color C-41 film to be processed.
Enjoy!
Kodak Ektar 100
Yes, it’s about to be here. Simple Film Lab will start accepting C-41 color negative film for processing and scanning in the month of June, 2018.
Color is a lot harder to do than Black and White, and it took a while for me to figure out how to do C-41 color negative film in a way that would be repeatable and have fairly accurate colors, but still allow the character of each film to come through once scanned in.
I’ve been able to process C-41 film for a long time and even had my own Adobe Photoshop based color workflow, but it really only worked for one film: Kodak Ektar 100, and it wasn’t really viable to do on a large scale or for other people. If this is to be a service I want to offer to others, then I need a way to provide an equivalent to what you get with RA-4 analog color prints, but digitally in Adobe Lightroom which is a fully color managed environment.
So, lots of research, lots of testing, lots of studying the DNG spec, lots of code tweaks to Simple Image Tools (the film scanning toolset developed by me for Simple Film Lab), and a lot later than I would have preferred, it’s done. And it works.
So, what do you get? Basically, the same as my Black and White film processing service, except the output is in full on, glorious, 32 bit floating point, linear light color, as an Adobe Digital Negative file. It is the color film vision that I’ve had for a while, and in my humble opinion, is the best hybrid workflow for color negative film. Bar None.
What you get from other labs is inferior if it is not at least correctly color conformed Adobe DNG files. Jpegs and tiff files have their uses, but frankly, if that’s what the lab you’re using is offering as the output of scanning your film after processing it, then they are not doing you or anybody else a favor. Like it or not, anybody who takes any serious amount of pictures uses Adobe Lightroom and should demand to get Lightroom native DNG files of their film scans. Anything else can be an option, but should not be the default. Period. End of Discussion. If you are a film lab and you are reading this, consider this post as a notice. The film scanning gold standard is correctly color conformed 32 bit floating point DNG files that behave the same way as a DNG file from a digital camera. If you don’t know how to do that, then please go figure it out and start doing it before your customers figure out that what you are giving them could be so much better and become my customers.
Film scans from Simple Image Tools does things like make Lightroom’s color temperature and white balancing actually accurate. A daylight film shot during the day has whites that look white. Did you shoot your daylight film indoors under fluorescent lights? No problem, just select that type of lighting under the Lightroom WB drop-down, or use the eye dropper to change it. Did you shoot your Tungsten balanced film outside during the day? Also, no problem. Just select “Daylight” in the WB dropdown tool. It actually works the way it’s supposed to work.
The same goes for the exposure. In fact, all of Adobe’s Lightroom Develop Module tools work the way you would expect them to work as if you shot the picture digitally, but in reality, it was shot on film.
So what is this going to cost? Well, I’m still crunching the numbers. C-41 chemistry is quite a bit more expensive than black and white chemistry and I’m still working out what the real cost per roll is, however, expect me to have it worked out and have an order form available for download within the next few days. I’m looking to follow the same model as I do for Black and White film processing, just to keep things simple.
With that all being said, yes, C-41 color negative film processing is about to happen at Simple Film Lab.
Kodak Ektar 100? Yes.
Kodak Portra 400? Yes.
Kodak Portra 160? Yes.
Fuji PRO 400H? Yes.
Pretty much any C-41 film? Pretty much Yes.
The above image is super cheap Kodak ColorPlus 200.
Color checker charts are one thing. What about real pictures? I’m glad you asked. I’ve been uploading sample images to my Flickr account and plan to create tech sheets with full DNG sample files to download for all the Color negative emulsions currently on the market today.
I’ve already shot Ektar 100, Portra 160, Portra 400, PRO 400H, Gold 200, Ultramax 400, and ColorPlus 200. I have Portra 800, Fujicolor 200, Fujicolor 400, Fujicolor 800, Lomography CN100, CN400, and CN800 in my possession and queued up have sample images shot, developed, and scanned and plan to search out and acquire as many other C-41 emulsions as I can to generate sample images for.
If you have a preferred C-41 emulsion that’s not on this list that you’d like to see, then let me know via the contact form and I’ll see what I can do about it. That being said, C-41 is very standardized, and once you get one emulsion working with Adobe Lightroom, the same thing pretty much works for every emulsion. There are differences between the emulsions (just like there are differences between digital cameras), but once you understand what those differences are and how to deal with them in a standardized way, it stops mattering and just works.
So, keep an eye out for an updated order form, and I look forward to processing your C-41 color film really soon.
Just a quick heads up: I’ve published the tech sheet for Japan Camera Hunter StreetPan 400 film in the Film Review/Tech Sheets section.
You can find it here.
If you send your StreetPan film in to Simple Film Lab, please refer to the tech sheet so you’ll know what to expect. It includes sample images along with downloadable DNG files to look at.
Enjoy!
Our Order Form has been updated.
There have been a couple of refinements and some additions, detailed below:
You can now pay via credit card, or you can pay via PayPal. Just put your PayPal address in the same spot as the credit card number, and send payment when you drop your film in the mail. I’ll correlate the payment with the email address. You can alternatively just wait for me to receive your film and send you a PayPal payment request.
This option has been refined to reflect a change in time (which affects film speed and contrast) in 60 second increments. If you want finer grained control over that, then you can still specify a custom time in the custom film development section.
The default option here has been changed to develop only. If you want scans, you will have to select something. This is to reduce the amount of confusion about what type of scan you’ll be receiving. Please refer to the scan types available to see what you get with each one.
You can now request that your film be developed with a number of Ilford’s line of developers, namely, DD-X, Ilfosol S, Microphen, and Perceptol. We may add HC/LC29 in the future, but for now, this is a pretty significant increase in choice.
This section is for us to communicate to you! When we send your film back to you, we also send your order form back to you. What you can expect to see here is the twin check(s) of the film you sent in, and detailed notes of your development session for future reference. This way, as you send more film in, you have a frame of reference and can request changes or tweaks from there.
Enjoy!
I’ve updated the Ilford HP5+ film review and moved it to its own tech page along with all the other films I’ve generated tech pages for.
Just as a reminder, if you want to use Simple Film Lab to get your film processed and scanned, please consult the published tech sheets so that you’ll know what to expect for results.
Next Up: JCH Streetpan 400
Just a quick note, I’ve completed and published the tech sheet for Ilford FP4+ Film.
If you send your film in to Simple Film Lab, you can now see what you’ll get if you shoot Ilford FP4+ film and send it in to us to process and scan in. Check the review out here. I’ve included a characteristic curve, a slideshow of sample images, and downloadable sample Adobe Digital Negatives of what you could get if your film was handled by us.
Enjoy!
Just a quick update:
Kodak T-MAX 100, T-MAX 400, and TRI-X tech sheets have been updated to reflect development with replenished Kodak XTOL developer with Rotary agitation at 24 degrees C and scanning at 0.56 Contrast Index.
The tech sheets are located at:
I’ll be uploading new sample images and making sample DNG files available over the next few days. Any film sent in to Simple Film Lab will be developed as described in the tech sheet unless requested otherwise on the development order form.
If there’s any specific films anybody would like to see tech sheets generated for, please let me know and I’ll bump it up in the queue of films to do.
Enjoy!
I’ve revised and updated the 2018 film processing order form. You can download it here, or from the Simple Film Lab page.
2018 is going to be a great year!
We’ve updated or are in the process of updating the pages for Simple Film Lab and the new updated order form should be online and available within the next couple of days.
Here are the highlights:
We’ve introduced a new standardized film development regime based on XTOL and standardized our scanning protocol so that film you send in to us can easily be either printed onto photo sensitive paper in a darkroom, or can be scanned in using standard contrast indexes that correlate to black and white paper grades. This makes things much simpler and leads to other things listed below.
We can now develop and scan in all commonly available black and white negative films in 135, 120, and 4×5 sheet formats, so send them in and get them processed! This is huge for us and we couldn’t have been able to realistically do it without standardizing our development environment.
Yep, we do that too. In addition to XTOL, you can request that your film be developed with D76, HC110, and Rodinal with custom dilutions, development temperatures, development agitation scheme, and development times. You can pretty much go nuts, though be aware that doing so can lead to unpredictable results.
Want your film scanned in with the equivalent of a grade 3 paper instead of the standard grade 2? No problem. We have a range of available contrast indexes that you can have your film scanned in at. It’s the digital equivalent of printing on said paper in the darkroom except you get a Digital Negative file instead. Combined with custom film development and you can get really creative if you want to.
Don’t like Digital Negatives? No Problem. You can now request other formats without actually going the custom scan route.
There’s more than this, so check the Lab pages as we’ll be getting those pages updated with whats going on for 2018!
“I shot it at 1600 and pushed it 2 stops! It looks great!”
I’m sure we’ve all heard this. It’s largely a myth. All films are within a third of a stop of the manufacturer’s published ISO rating in most developers.
This is extremely true of C-41 color films because the processing is standardized and the films are manufactured to conform to that processing environment. Given that, we’re not going to talk about color films. If it’s rated for ISO 100, shoot it at 100. If it’s a 400 speed film, shoot it at 400. Any lab that is worth anything can give you a wonderful scan of that film.
For black and white films, this is also largely true based on how the ISO standard prescribes determining the speed of the film which is explained very simply:
Film speeds are based on the exposure required to give a log density of 0.10 above film base plus fog (fb+f).
Terminology aside, we can say the speed of the film is determined by the amount of exposure needed to get a certain fixed amount of density above film base plus fog. For the ISO standard, that fixed density is 0.10 log density above film base plus fog. You can use a different fixed density level and you can use a different density scale and that’s totally valid except that it’s not to the ISO standard.
Where the confusion comes in is film density in the shadows or minimum density areas of the emulsion develops at different rates depending on the film developer used. The developer used along with developer temperature and time spent developing affects how much density is developed.
Not so fast. You see, depending on the size of the silver grains in the emulsion, you do in fact need a minimum amount of light to hit each grain so that it will develop anything at all. Believe it or not, that minimum amount of light is amazingly close to the ISO rating of the film.
Simply put, push processing develops more density for the silver crystals that did get enough light to develop anything. What this does is make the density difference large enough that you can see it and gives the impression that the film is more sensitive than it actually is. In Adobe Lightroom speak, it’s the equivalent of going into the Develop Module and pulling the shadows up without changing the black level.
It does not make the film more sensitive. Once you go below that minimum exposure level, no amount of processing is going to bring more density into the emulsion. All you’ll do is develop more film fog.
That’s because normally exposed and developed film typically has its film base plus fog at 6 stops below middle grey. That makes for some awesome blacks. If you switched over to the Exposure Index method of exposing, and under exposed the film by a stop, the film base plus fog effectively moves up by one stop to 5 stops below middle grey. This still results in totally acceptable blacks for most exposures. If you under expose by 2 stops (exposing a 400 speed film at EI 1600) the film base plus fog moves up to 4 stops below middle grey. This results in your blacks starting to look dark grey and a little muddy. This is where the push processing come in. More development time adds more density to what shadows you do have which makes the shadow areas have more contrast which to a degree counteracts the raised film base plus fog. There is a point of diminishing returns because once again, there is a minimum amount of light you need in order to develop anything above film base plus fog.
So that’s it in a nutshell. Pushing film is a myth. If you switch to a different exposure standard (like Exposure Index), then you can get a little more performance out of your film, but at the end of the day, the worst thing you can do is under expose your film.
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