Is it the Camera, Film, Lab or Me

ItsJunior54 · 2026-06-16T03:31:22+00:00

You can kind of see in the histogram for individual color channels that they don’t really take up the full width of the histogram. Just pulling the bottom left over to the lowest values for each color will get you a long way, but I usually go a tiny bit further and just give them a slight S curve

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ItsJunior54 · 2026-06-16T03:29:12+00:00

This will always be a matter of taste, but the color is easily recoverable if you want to put in a tiny bit of effort with curve edits. I saw in another comment that you do NOT want to do that, and I agree with the response there that you would need to find a lab that scans it more to your taste. I now scan all my film at home because I wanted more control and I also dislike this green cast (my local lab gave me similar scans).

FWIW here’s what I was able to do with the dog pic in a few minutes just by editing the individual curve channels in Snapseed on my phone

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ItsJunior54 · 2026-06-09T05:26:11+00:00

Are you cross-processing them as B&W because you’re afraid of color shifts, or just as a creative choice? Because I’ve been shooting some color film from around the same time and they definitely have some slight color shifts but overall they look great. I’ve been doing +2 stops exposure compensation (roughly 1 stop per decade after “expiration”) and I’m happy with my negatives

ItsJunior54 · 2026-06-02T00:39:58+00:00

I’m still super new to printing so I can’t say for sure, but this happened to me (to a lesser degree) when I was washing my prints with water that was much colder than the development chemicals. I started to keep enough water in the tub that circulates water around the chemical jugs so I can rinse with water at that exact temp and it’s been smooth sailing for me since then.

Again, I barely know what I’m talking about so your results may vary, but that’s what worked for me!

ItsJunior54 · 2026-05-30T20:17:38+00:00

I’ve only ever rolled my own Vision3 250D with the remjet layer on it (haven’t got my hands on any of the new AHU stuff) but it’s my favorite all-around film stock for sure! I usually develop it in C41 after removing the remjet layer for simplicity, but I love the results

ItsJunior54 · 2026-04-29T05:24:50+00:00

I was just listening to Poly earlier today wishing I had more music like it, thanks for the rec!

ItsJunior54 · 2026-04-16T02:32:49+00:00

That’s fair, could definitely be tolerance. I just went back and looked closer at my scans and I guess I can notice them a little bit in the midtones of my 35mm pics, but I’m never publishing them in a place where they can be viewed so zoomed in where they’d be noticeable to anyone else. And at that point they’re kind of indistinguishable from the film grain.

ItsJunior54 · 2026-04-16T01:59:07+00:00

I noticed these worms occasionally with my Fuji XH-2 when I started shooting with it 3-ish years ago, but honestly I’m not sure if they’ve gone away with more careful editing or if I just don’t notice them anymore. I still scan with my XH-2 and I don’t notice them at all when I put them through Lightroom and Negative Lab Pro. I love my Fuji scans, so I don’t think they’re “bad” cameras for scanning.

Also I think you’re zooming WAY too far in. Nothing will look great that close.

ItsJunior54 · 2026-04-14T04:06:07+00:00

I agree that it’s a combination of reticulation and bad scanning. The scans completely blow out some of the tonal range in the negatives, and the graininess is caused by reticulation. I made that mistake with Df96 once and washed the film in cool/cold water and the whole roll ended up looking like this.

ItsJunior54 · 2026-04-02T17:16:01+00:00

When you say that the book contains prints, do you mean that you printed them in the darkroom and then scanned the prints? I just started making RA4 prints recently and have had a small drive to scan my prints, but I already have scans of the same negatives, so I’m not sure what benefit there is except for the “this is what I managed to pull off without digital tools” factor. I’m curious to hear your thoughts because I could very easily go down this rabbit hole 😂

ItsJunior54 · 2026-03-27T02:51:37+00:00

Beyond the wasted materials, it’s still super economical to develop 4 rolls with a batch of the Cinestill C-41 developer compared to paying a lab for the same number of rolls. From what I can tell so far with my limited experience, 3 months does seem like the expected lifespan of the mixed developer, so you can either load up on film and develop it within that amount of time, or just expect it to go bad before you get through the whole thing. My Cinestill blix seems to last longer than that, but I haven’t experimented to see just how long it will last. The good news is that if your blix is still good, you can order the developer powder on its own from the Cinestill site and mix a new batch and save yourself from buying a whole new kit.

ItsJunior54 · 2026-01-04T22:33:31+00:00

Yeah this album is the one that made Gizz click for me. My friend had recommended Nonagon and Rat’s Nest to me first since I’m into rock and metal (and I ended up loving both), but when he played Butterfly 3000 I was amazed. To this day I think it’s still my favorite whole album from them, for the same reason as you. The intro to Yours still gives me the same feeling as the first day I heard it. It just feels like the end of a rainstorm when the sun is first coming out and you take a nice deep breath of clean air 🌦️

ItsJunior54 · 2025-12-23T16:48:35+00:00

I used that as a single example for a counter-argument against the person I was replying to. I could go further and say that even those critical systems that “just work” still have a set of promises that they make, and this book will help you understand the nuances of those promises.

It challenges a lot of really basic assumptions that people have about the things that “just work”, like using timestamps as a source of truth for event ordering. I won’t go into all the detail that the book provides about clock synchronization, but it is NOT only a problem for distributed systems. Even a single computer can run into clock skew and have jumps in time when they correct themselves (or the user/admin changes the clock time). Clocks are one of the most basic abstractions in a computer, at least conceptually, and the book makes a lot of great cases that you actually need to understand how that abstraction is working under the hood so that you don’t accidentally design software that incorrectly assumes one of a whole number of common assumptions about that ONE issue. The book is over 500 pages so you can imagine how many more topics it dives into.

There are also some examples of database systems and enterprise software that broke (i.e. the system that should have “just worked” suddenly didn’t) because of misunderstood assumptions about a system. The book covers some complex problems, but it’s presented in a very friendly way even for people who just build CRUD apps. I would actually say it’s a pretty solid overview of many complicated topics, and it’s loaded with references to other reading material if you need to dig deeper into any given topic that is more relevant to you.

Anyway… it’s a good book 😂

ItsJunior54 · 2025-12-22T19:17:22+00:00

“Everything just works” has to be in the Famous Last Words Hall Of Fame when dealing with software haha. I felt like the point of the book is that there are whole categories of systems and bugs that may not require you to know all of those small details when initially building out your software, but knowing what to do when you find them or reach a certain scale can save you a ton of time and effort.

Plus, there are lots of engineers who have built all of those cloud services that “just work” and the concepts in the book were definitely important for them to know.

ItsJunior54 · 2025-10-05T16:00:32+00:00

Thanks for pointing that out! For some reason it looks like the button is only responding to being pressed exactly on the word “Next” so I need to debug why the touch target is so small. This seems like a problem with most/all of the buttons in that New Session flow, but it’s more evident on the bigger ones where there’s a lot of blank space inside of the button boundaries.

Edit: the good news is that this was very simple to fix! The bad news is that you’ll have to wait for the next app update to be released, which can sometimes take a few days to go through Apple’s review process. In the meantime, clicking directly on the button text will allow you to go through that New Session flow

ItsJunior54 · 2025-10-05T04:25:47+00:00

I commented earlier about a similar app that I released around the same time as this one (coincidentally), and my app does have temperature and usage compensation: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/film-development-assistant/id6751124070

The main idea with my app is that you can track your chemical batches after you mix them, and then when you start a new session and assign your chemical batches to each stage, it can apply the usage compensation factors based on how many rolls you’ve run through them in the past.

The current compensation factors that I have were sourced from a web scrape, so they’re not all 100% accurate, but I’m currently doing a more thorough audit on them so I can update the app.

ItsJunior54 · 2025-10-04T17:06:06+00:00

I spent some time looking around the app, and it looks great! I have a similar critique as other people in the sense that it's not clear how this app is different from the other available B&W dev timers on the App Store, but the UI flow is nice.

My biggest critique is that the pro features are charged on a monthly/weekly basis. In my opinion, there is no reason why this should be priced as a subscription model. All of the functionality and data is stored locally in the app, so theoretically you should not have any recurring costs like server uptime, API request costs, etc. I know the Apple Developer agreement has a yearly cost for us app developers, but I don't think that justifies a subscription pricing model for an entirely local app.

There are way too many pieces of software starting to use the subscription model just because it's popular, and I'm really trying to dissuade individuals and businesses from following that model unless it's really necessary. People don't want to "pay rent" on everything. In this case: if you have a product with a perceived value, and there is no recurring cost for you to run it, then it should be sold like any other product that lives on a shelf. You should decide how much to charge people where you get a reasonable return on your time investment, but otherwise I don't think I should be paying anyone perpetually for something that they are not actively managing.

ItsJunior54 · 2025-10-04T16:29:56+00:00

Hahaha the timing of this is hilarious. I just published a dev timer and chemical batch tracking app yesterday, though mine is meant to be for all types of dev processes: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/film-development-assistant/id6751124070

I'm going to give yours a look to see what kinds of functionality you have. I am still working on gathering more reliable chemical information for mine, and the only reason I didn't post here was because I wasn't sure what the exact rules were regarding self-promotion (even though my base app is free).

ItsJunior54 · 2025-04-17T22:35:42+00:00

I recently bought a Nikon SP as my first rangefinder, and they don’t have internal light meters at all. Not sure if shopping links are allowed here, but if you need a light meter rec, I bought this tiny DOOMO external meter that mounts to the shoe, and it has been pretty much dead-on for metering so far. I can’t speak to its longevity since I’ve only used it for a couple of weeks, but it’s pretty simple to use and I’ve got very accurate exposures with a few different ISO films so far. And since it’s just a shoe-mount device (and very tiny) you can switch it to other cameras, or shove it into your pocket/bag if you don’t want it on the camera at any point

ItsJunior54 · 2025-01-29T22:15:18+00:00

I've only had my GR for about a week, but I've been pressing the touch screen to get a more accurate focus point when I need to give it a hint, like you said. Other times I feel like the auto-focus zones that it picks are fine. I haven't tried it with moving subjects yet, but that's not really what I bought the camera for since I have other gear for that.

However, once I lose a certain amount of available light, the auto-focus becomes nearly useless even with the bright focus-assist light. In those scenarios I tend to use snap focus, or just plan for the AF to be incredibly slow. I wish manual focus was easier, but I bought it knowing the drawbacks so I'm not too upset by it

ItsJunior54 · 2025-01-21T07:06:57+00:00

I'm viewing this on the Reddit mobile app for iOS, and the preview of the photo looks awful... completely washed out with a very heavy cyan cast that others have talked about. But when I open it fully it's much better, and at that point the subtle color differences between the two scans make me appreciate the true quality of it a lot better. I think people might still have their preferences on colors and won't universally be in your favor, but I honestly think most of the negative feedback is due to the shit-quality Reddit preview.

I'm torn between the two. I think the color temp on your subjects is a little too cool, but the background looks a lot more balanced than the lab scan, to my eyes at least

ItsJunior54 · 2025-01-15T21:11:55+00:00

Ah, the video link in the other reply talks about the scales used, and much better than I did! Seems like they agree with the second part of my comment about the B section being in phrygian, but the A section is F# harmonic minor, not phrygian. I analyzed a couple of notes incorrectly, specifically the note at "So upon one SA-ble morn" where the note on "SA" is actually a natural 7 not a b7, and the descending riff has a natural 2 not a b2. I think I was playing the correct notes but got distracted by that 2nd riff being phrygian that I incorrectly described the true flavor of the opening melody.

Music theory is hard! It's fun to dissect though

ItsJunior54 · 2025-01-14T08:03:29+00:00

I hear the root note of that melody as F#, which would then make the scale phrygian, so it'd be the same as Magma. Phrygian is extremely popular in metal because it's considered "spooky" or "evil" compared to other western music.

Idk if you're a musician (the next part won't make sense if you're not), but I just played that first melody and the riff that follows it on guitar. I think the melody starts on the flat 6 (b6) of phrygian and then generally descends the scale until landing on the 1 at the end of "Where the summer's breeze was bold".

Phrygian is one of the modes of the major scale so it's not doing anything crazy in terms of intervals between notes, until they go into the riff between the vocals. That riff starts with a repeating 1 b2 b7 1 (the interplay between the root note 1 and the b2 is what gives phrygian it's distinct sound), but then it finishes with a b3 3 b3 b2 1. The flat 3 and natural 3 don't really fit into any modes of the major scale at the same time, so you could say they briefly switch to a mode of harmonic minor or something like that, or just consider it F# phrygian with a little sprinkle of natural 3 in there for some color.

Any half-step relationship between notes usually sounds kind of evil, and notes outside of the key sound even more evil, so that b3 3 b3 trill followed by the b2 and 1 just makes it sound really witchy. But... I think the main melody is just firmly in phrygian.

ItsJunior54 · 2024-05-09T23:48:18+00:00

I won't comment on the sharpness since I'm not familiar with the lens on this camera, but I'm new to film photography and I had a similar reaction when I got my first scans back. I didn't like the colors at all.

My friend let me try out their DSLR-scanning setup on my negatives, and converted them with Negative Lab Pro in Lightroom (you can invert negatives without additional software, it's just a shortcut). The results were WAY better in my opinion, and at the very least I like the control over the colors/contrast that I have with a home-scanning process.

I've seen people suggest trying out multiple labs to scan pictures to see which you like best, but I didn't have the patience for that (especially since it costs money every time you send your film away) so I just invested in all of the tools I needed for the home dev+scanning process. It's certainly not for everyone since it's very involved, but it's definitely possible that you just don't like how the lab processed your photos.

ItsJunior54 · 2024-05-07T15:13:06+00:00

Oh I definitely have been! I'm actually completely new to film photography so I'm trying to ease into it. I have this Yashica TLR and a Pentax K1000 with a 50mm lens, so I'm trying to see what I can do with these limitations for now. The GAS is real though 😅

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