Film processing companies

REOS

REOS

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Name
Robin
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Hello Everyone,

I‘m returning to film photography after 20 years with my newly serviced Nikkormat and would welcome any recommendations for reliable companies to do the negative processing and scanning, having no plans to return to the darkroom just yet. I’d like to be able to make adjustments in Lightroom and to produce prints of at least A4 size. My first roll of film has been a disappointment as the promised 18mb files are opening as 4mb in Lightroom. I sent the link to the computer expert at my local camera club who said: “The files in the zip file are not compressed. They save to my computer as jpgs around 4mb in size. That is the size they are when I open them in Lightroom. But when I open them in Photoshop they are about 18mb in size. However the number of pixels is still the same, there is no improvement in quality.” I’ve sent this response to the company who did the scans, but they seem reluctant to help me out. Any advice from members would be greatly appreciated.
 
Hi Robin, I use Spectrum Photolabs in Plymouth ( http://www.spectrumphotolabs.co.uk/ ) although they don't advertise scanning to TIFF they always scan mine (on request) to huge TIFFs so I get max flexibility in LR. From memory the files are about 50 mb (these are 120 films). Unfortunately they have recently downsized and no longer process my favoured Fuji Provia 100F and I am struggling to find a lab I am happy with for my slides.
 
I have used AG Labs and Filmdev in the past, and am currently trying Analogue Wonderland - two films with them at present. However I have never asked for them to be scanned at max resolution, simply on the basis that I don't expect more than (at best) a few frames to be worth it. If any were particularly good, I could send those specific ones for re-scanning, or (now I've bought the kit) re-scan myself.
 
REOS said:
Hello Everyone,

I‘m returning to film photography after 20 years with my newly serviced Nikkormat and would welcome any recommendations for reliable companies to do the negative processing and scanning, having no plans to return to the darkroom just yet. I’d like to be able to make adjustments in Lightroom and to produce prints of at least A4 size. My first roll of film has been a disappointment as the promised 18mb files are opening as 4mb in Lightroom. I sent the link to the computer expert at my local camera club who said: “The files in the zip file are not compressed. They save to my computer as jpgs around 4mb in size. That is the size they are when I open them in Lightroom. But when I open them in Photoshop they are about 18mb in size. However the number of pixels is still the same, there is no improvement in quality.” I’ve sent this response to the company who did the scans, but they seem reluctant to help me out. Any advice from members would be greatly appreciated.
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What part of the country are you in? Probably a good idea to keep it local if you can.
 
I’ve used both FilmDev & AG Photolab recently (and the much lamented but now no more Peak Imaging) and been happy with the service from each of them.
 
Thank you for all these comments. Apart from finding a reliable supplier, I'm really trying to establish the sort of quality one can expect from scans and the scope for minor adjustments in Lightroom. I suspect I also need reminding about what makes film images special, having now rediscovered the joy of analog cameras. Unfortunately there are no local film labs near me in Berwick, so I shall certainly be following up on your recommendations.
 
IMHO @REOS there's PLENTY of scope for adjustments, dunno about LR, but I used Aperture and now Capture One Pro.

Filmdev used to offer TIFF scans rather than JPEGs, at no extra cost, but I've a feeling this might have disappeared when they moved to WeTransfer. I've asked them and will report back.

If you find a lab you like for Dev/Scan, it's worth asking them.

OTOH I did a test of some Filmdev scans where I got JPEGs as well as (8-bit) TIFFs. I loaded each image, made a minor adjustment, then saved it, reloaded that image and made the opposite minor adjustment, 10 times in all. Couldn't see any significant difference! So I stopped getting TIFFs at that point. YMMV, and no doubt 16-bit TIFFs would show a difference. But IMHO there's plenty you can do with JPEG scans, as long as you show a certain amount of restraint!
 
REOS said:
Thank you for all these comments. Apart from finding a reliable supplier, I'm really trying to establish the sort of quality one can expect from scans and the scope for minor adjustments in Lightroom. I suspect I also need reminding about what makes film images special, having now rediscovered the joy of analog cameras. Unfortunately there are no local film labs near me in Berwick, so I shall certainly be following up on your recommendations.
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Well I take my hat off to you if you are proficient at using lightroom, I tried it but gave up as being too complicated and a steep learning curve.
 
ChrisR said:
IMHO @REOS there's PLENTY of scope for adjustments, dunno about LR, but I used Aperture and now Capture One Pro.

Filmdev used to offer TIFF scans rather than JPEGs, at no extra cost, but I've a feeling this might have disappeared when they moved to WeTransfer. I've asked them and will report back.

If you find a lab you like for Dev/Scan, it's worth asking them.

OTOH I did a test of some Filmdev scans where I got JPEGs as well as (8-bit) TIFFs. I loaded each image, made a minor adjustment, then saved it, reloaded that image and made the opposite minor adjustment, 10 times in all. Couldn't see any significant difference! So I stopped getting TIFFs at that point. YMMV, and no doubt 16-bit TIFFs would show a difference. But IMHO there's plenty you can do with JPEG scans, as long as you show a certain amount of restraint!
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Thanks Chris. My sense is that getting it right in-camera on the day and keeping post processing to a minimum is the way to go. Most of the labs seem to deal in MBs when it comes to choosing the quality of scan, so forgive my ignorance but is 8-bit equivalent to 8MB?
 
Ruffmeister said:
I use FilmDev. They develop and scan and are reasonably priced too. If you want an idea of their scans, check out my gallery here and click 'Film' https://danielianphotography.com/gallery/
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Chris, what a beautiful gallery. Does the subject matter influence your choice of film or digital, or is it just about how you feel on the day? Looking through your photographs I got the feeling that you were less concerned about depth of field when shooting film, but maybe I'm imagining that.
 
excalibur2 said:
Well I take my hat off to you if you are proficient at using lightroom, I tried it but gave up as being too complicated and a steep learning curve.
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Thanks! It didn't come naturally to me, but I can now do most of the things that I want to do reasonably proficiently, with the exception of filing. I dread the day when my aging and unsupported version of the software gives up the ghost.
 
The number of bits determines how many different tones or levels can be can be recorded in a single pixel. Typically, you'll have red, green and blue channels. If each channel is records in 8 bits, that gives a maximum number of different values of 256. That's 256 different values of R G and B to make up a colour. If you have 16 bits, that number 256 increases to over 65,000. Hence a greater possibility of subtle and gradual colour changes.

Edit to make this clearer. I mean 256 different values of R G and B for each pixel, giving 256x256x256 values. Still less than 65,536 x 64,536x65,536 though.

8MB or whatever value indicates the file size. This is ambiguous... Data can be compressed, and the file size on disk may be smaller than the actual uncompressed size which is what you'd be working with in an image processing program. Uncompressed, it's the number of pixels on the long side multiplied by the number of pixels on the short side, and then converted to megapixels by dividing whether by 1000 (the usual rounding to give a bigger result) or 1024 (the "real" value as used in computers, but which doesn't sound as good).

Most jpgs are 8 bit, and jpgs are compressed in a "lossy" format, meaning that you don't recover all the original detail when uncompressed. Tiffs are usually 16 bit and uncompressed.

8 bit jpgs will progressively lose detail as they are edited and resaved, as the resaving compresses them again in a lossy way. Different people have different views on when the loss becomes noticeable. I tested this about 20 years ago, and found 6 saves to be where the change became noticeable.
 
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REOS said:
Chris, what a beautiful gallery. Does the subject matter influence your choice of film or digital, or is it just about how you feel on the day? Looking through your photographs I got the feeling that you were less concerned about depth of field when shooting film, but maybe I'm imagining that.
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Thank you. I mostly stick to Portra 160 or 400, though there is some Gold 200 and 400H in there. I find Portra tends to suit my style.
I’d say there is more emphasis to depth of field on my film photography. Not intentionally, but I don’t look to have everything super sharp on film. Most of the time I shoot wide open (2.8).

I do seem to capture things differently with film for whatever reason. Kinda like a different eye.
 
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REOS said:
Thanks! It didn't come naturally to me, but I can now do most of the things that I want to do reasonably proficiently, with the exception of filing. I dread the day when my aging and unsupported version of the software gives up the ghost.
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It's Catalog and library that annoys me and then altering an individual jpg and have no idea if it's saved to my hard drive, with Photoshop I just open a jpg then alter it and save it in the folder where it came from.
 
excalibur2 said:
It's Catalog and library that annoys me and then altering an individual jpg and have no idea if it's saved to my hard drive, with Photoshop I just open a jpg then alter it and save it in the folder where it came from.
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Lightroom keeps them in the same location too. When you import the pictures into the Lightroom catalogue the original image stays where it was originally stored and is not altered in any way - non-destructive editing. You can make as many changes to a photo as you want in Lightroom and the original image is preserved - the catalogue stores the edit information and so forth. Photoshop is destructive in that, unless you make a copy of your image, your changes overwrite the original file.
 
FishyFish said:
Lightroom keeps them in the same location too. When you import the pictures into the Lightroom catalogue the original image stays where it was originally stored and is not altered in any way - non-destructive editing. You can make as many changes to a photo as you want in Lightroom and the original image is preserved - the catalogue stores the edit information and so forth. Photoshop is destructive in that, unless you make a copy of your image, your changes overwrite the original file.
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Well Lightroom must be a great program but IMO if anyone can get an old copy of Photoshop it's much easier to use..why? e.g. in Photoshop just select "open" for any folder with jpgs, then select one or all and they are all shown, alter the ones that you want and either save to overwrite or a slightly different name ???????-2.jpg...easy peasy of course for all the other advanced feature in PS I've still got to learn those ;)
 
This business of quoting scan sizes in megabytes is a pain in the posterior! What really counts (to me) is the number of pixels produced (preferably expressed as width x height).

I THINK, to a first approximation, you can assume they are dealing in 8-bit images. So the "18 MByte" image (when open, ie before any compression) requires 3 bytes of revery pixel, so becomes 6 Mpixel. For a 135 image that is likely 3,000 x 2,000 pixels. In practice, this isn't a terrible resolution, corresponding to about 2,000 samples per inch when scanned. I usually scan my everyday images at 2,400 spi. Despite the advertising claims of scanner makers (when there were any), most scanners have an effective resolution around that level. See the "Resolution" section of the Big Scanner Thread for more info: https://www.talkphotography.co.uk/threads/a-big-film-scanner-thread.709453/post-8676692 . You might find other parts of that thread interesting too, start at the front for a ToC.
 
ChrisR said:
This business of quoting scan sizes in megabytes is a pain in the posterior! What really counts (to me) is the number of pixels produced (preferably expressed as width x height).

I THINK, to a first approximation, you can assume they are dealing in 8-bit images. So the "18 MByte" image (when open, ie before any compression) requires 3 bytes of revery pixel, so becomes 6 Mpixel. For a 135 image that is likely 3,000 x 2,000 pixels. In practice, this isn't a terrible resolution, corresponding to about 2,000 samples per inch when scanned. I usually scan my everyday images at 2,400 spi. Despite the advertising claims of scanner makers (when there were any), most scanners have an effective resolution around that level. See the "Resolution" section of the Big Scanner Thread for more info: https://www.talkphotography.co.uk/threads/a-big-film-scanner-thread.709453/post-8676692 . You might find other parts of that thread interesting too, start at the front for a ToC.
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In that thread you gave a link to the Epson V550, well the reviewer quite liked it which got me thinking that if you are never going to print much above A4 or do heavy crops....then a cheap S/H V550 or V600 is good enough for the average film photographer. For MF negs, I proved to myself a £3 Epson 4180 (from the bootie) was reasonably good on a massive crop comparison, after scanning 6X7...compared to a scan from V750 and was IIRC about 6ft across my computer screen. My A3 printer had stopped working and it would have been interesting to see the difference in print.
 
Based on all the helpful comments, I've decided to go with Filmdev for now. They look like very good value and, unusually, classify the scan sizes by pixel count rather than MB, which I now understand to be the more logical approach. They have included examples of photos at each size on their website, but frankly I can't tell the difference.
 
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