Major lab screw-up!!!! E-6 as C-41

[wfooshee]

So if Fuji, the people that make Velvia, can't process it correctly, wtf are we supposed to do???!?!?!

Sent a roll off through a local store, I've used them for slides before. Envelope was clearly marked "E-6 slides" and of course the film cartridge is rather clear about the film it contains.

Package came back with an uncut strip of bluish "negatives," a B&W 4x6 for each frame, and a letter from the Fuji lab in South Carolina saying, sorry, your film got damaged.

MY FILM DIDN'T GET DAMAGED, YOU MORONS, YOU RAN IT THROUGH THE WRONG CHEMICALS!!!!! MAN UP AND SAY WHAT YOU DID!!!!!

Ooh! Ooh! After destroying my 36-exposure roll of Velvia 50, they sent me a single-use camera loaded with 27 exposures of 800-speed print film. What the heck am I going to do with that??!??!?!

THEY COULDN'T EVEN REPLACE THE FILM LIKE FOR LIKE???!??!?!

Nasty-gram on the way to Fuji! Business-like, but nasty. And of course, I wanted everybody I know to hear about it!

[Photo-John]

That seriously sucks. And they definitely could have handled it better. I worked in photo labs for years and I will say, mistakes happen. To expect otherwise is to be unrealistic. However, you can handle them well and you can handle them poorly. If I were the manager of the lab that did that, I would have given you a replacement roll of film and offered free processing for your next roll. That can't replace your lost images, but at least it's certainly more reasonable compensation than a non-comparable roll of film in a throwaway camera.

[Axle]

Oh man, that seriously sucks! I mean I've purposefully cross-processed my e-6 film in c-41 (mostly expired slide film) and get a really neat look. But for a lab to pull that crap, and then send a disposable as a 'we're sorry' is uncalled for.

Some Xpro stuff.

Toronto - September 2011 by .:Axle:., on Flickr
(Lomo Xpro 100 (Agfa CT100))


Curves by .:Axle:., on Flickr
(Kodak Elitechrome 400)


Give these two labs a try, the first is Old School Photo Lab - Film Processing, It's what we do! they're in NH, fantastic service (in fact the one time they did screw up a roll of mine (bad chemistry, the negs looked horrible, but scanned as B&W and some curve adjustment in Ps and actually got good results), they gave me 50% off my entire film order a 60$ order cost me only 30$ and that's five rolls of slide film processed), the other is thedarkroom.com they're in CA also good and their processing includes scans!


Niagara-On-The-Lake - December 2012 by .:Axle:., on Flickr
(From the messed up roll)

But yes, ream out the Fuji Lab!

[wfooshee]

For grins and giggles, I've played with one of the frames a bit on my film scanner. My scanner can output DNG files, so I was able to do RAW processing on them in Photoshop's loader. Here's the frame scanned as a slide. I set white balance on the space between frames.


Once in Photoshop, I inverted it and did some serious jiggling of color balance, levels, and brightness/contrast, getting this out of it. Quite frankly, I find this completely amazing.


If I told the scanner that it was a negative, the resulting positive was this. I never got anything useful from this.


When I scanned as a negative and attempted a white balance correction at scan time, I got this, which is better, but.....


And if you're asking, "Well, yeah, but what did it really look like?" here's a digital shot taken at the same time by switching the lens and flash to my D7000.

[Axle]

Hey! Those look actually really good!

[samanada]

gggggggggggggggggggggg

[Sammy388]

why didn't I think of that??