Major lab screw-up!!!!

[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???!??!?! It's FUJI!!!! They make the stuff!!!!!

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

 

[Slash]

Isn't Fuji the cheap stuff? You get what you pay for...

 

[nobuffalo]

Isn't Fuji the cheap stuff? You get what you pay for...

No, not Fuji and especially not slide film. Look it up, it's around $15 a roll. Don't be a jerk, if you've got nothing worth saying then don't. Seriously, what an idiotic comment.

Sorry to hear this, wfooshee. You should definitely follow up on this with them, damaging your film is one thing but to then send you a crap disposable camera and one with less exposures at that is unacceptable.

 

[Mikeybc]

double post

 

[Mikeybc]

It almost seems like a slap in the face to be sent a cheap disposable loaded with ISO 800, I'd be offended for sure ! It's the equivalent of buying a BMW and having the dealer replace it with a Kia Rio after they dropped the BMW off the hoist

I always wanted to try Fuji Velvia 50 but could never find it locally, I didn't use slide film enough to justify a 2 hour drive to get it.

 

[Sprite]

Sorry to hear what they did. I haven't paid for developing film for a long while but when I used to it wasn't cheap, I can only imagine the cost now. Hopefully your letter will get to them and they will see what they did and correct it by way of a better gesture than a crummy disposable.

 

[F1GTR]

Have you scanned the slides in yet? The colour cast you get from what I assume was cross processing (rather than a manufacturing defect) can be somewhat mitigated in post. Also find another lab where you can inspect the slides in person.

 

[wfooshee]

I have tried to scan them. The slides ARE negative, but bluish instead of the reddish-brown you see in color negs. Dark objects are white, sky is dark, etc. Telling Vuescan they were negatives helped, but the best I've been able to get is very yellow overall, and the film isn't laying flat in the scanner, even with the strip holder, so focus is not good. The film sits high in the center, like a bubble. Got to try to flatten it out before I can try anything else.

Mikeybc, I buy the film online, usually from B&H photo, packages of 5 rolls. It's about 40 bucks (American) for a box of five 36es.

Oh, I neglected to point out that they didn't charge me for the processing..... Hey, thanks for that, Fuji!

 

[F1GTR]

You need to tell Vuescan to lock the film base colour, first do a preview, then find a clear area on the strip that's in between the frames, select that area in the preview window, hit the preview button again, check the 'lock exposure' box, hit preview again and finally tick the 'lock film base colour' box. That calibrates Vuescan for the particular colour of that roll.

 

[wfooshee]

OK, thanks for that. I knew about trying to set white balance with a right-click on a white object, but not much white in my pics.

 

[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. (I found "lock exposure," but not "lock film base color," so I just set the frame off enough to see the inter-frame space, right-clicked there to make it white, then positioned correctly and scanned.)

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 from the F4 to the D7000.

I don't know how much of the scratch marks are theirs or mine. I haven't been handling this very carefully, what with the rage still burning and all...