Fujifilm 400H

[RattyMouse]

Well, I finally got back my rolls of Fujifilm 400H from the lab. Sort of surprised by the results. Almost all the images are very saturated and with high contrast. I was expecting the opposite. I'm not sure what to make of this. Did the lab process the film wrong? The following images should give you some idea on the saturation and contrast levels.

[Mustafa Umut Sarac]

400 H is the best film I have ever seen from Fuji. May be all the artificial colors and bright lights and better exposure made the difference. Its a learning curve for each camera.

And no flare, no blue cast weather changes everything. I think your nighttime compositions are better than the daylight.

Best wishes,
Umut

[wildbill]

who did the printing, u or the lab?

[RattyMouse]

who did the printing, u or the lab?

The lab did the developing and the scanning. No prints were made.

[polyglot]

Scanning, you see. The lab will auto-correct the contrast and colour to what they (or the automated scanner) think looks right, which may or may not have anything whatsoever to do with the native appearance of that film.

To know what it actually looks like, you need to print it optically to RA4.

[RattyMouse]

Scanning, you see. The lab will auto-correct the contrast and colour to what they (or the automated scanner) think looks right, which may or may not have anything whatsoever to do with the native appearance of that film.

To know what it actually looks like, you need to print it optically to RA4.

Thanks for your reply. I assume I can ask for uncorrected scans?

The other scans I get from this lab, Reala and Acros, do not show any dramatic differences from what one would expect them to be. I'm not so sure why 400H would be so different.

[Rudeofus]

A negative can record a lot more tonal range than you monitor or any photographic paper can display. When most scanners scan negative film, they try to squeeze all the tones into the result, which yields ugly results if you have strong highlights and high contrast in your scene. This is why straight RA4 printing normally works much better for these kinds of negs. The only chance you have with scanning is if you get a high end scan with 16 bit color depth per channel, then you can manually adjust the tonal range to your liking.

[RattyMouse]

I understand that scanning can change the properties of negative film. However, are these changes consistent with what I am showing in the images above? Would so much color be added to a low saturation negative? The amount of color I'm seeing in my images is really much higher than I was expecting.

To put it simply, do these images look like they are from 400H film?

[Rudeofus]

I understand that scanning can change the properties of negative film. However, are these changes consistent with what I am showing in the images above? Would so much color be added to a low saturation negative? The amount of color I'm seeing in my images is really much higher than I was expecting.

If you underexpose film, colors are said to be more saturated. Since you have highlights in your scene, depending on your metering method chances are high that you underexposed these shots.

[Roger Cole]

I understand that scanning can change the properties of negative film. However, are these changes consistent with what I am showing in the images above? Would so much color be added to a low saturation negative? The amount of color I'm seeing in my images is really much higher than I was expecting.

To put it simply, do these images look like they are from 400H film?

They don't look like 400H photos that I'm used to seeing.