Why are my outdoor shots blue on Kodak UltraMax 400, while indoor shots look normal?
Asked 3/22/2018
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I shot a test roll of Kodak UltraMax 400 in an Olympus 35RC and had it developed/printed by a lab. The outdoor photos came back very blue, but the two indoor frames look normal. The negatives appear normal to me.
Could this be caused by the camera, the film, overexposure, or the lab/printing process? What is the most likely explanation for blue outdoor prints when the indoor ones look fine?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
8y ago
2 Answers
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It looks like the laboratory messed things up: the film you used is a daylight color negative film. Which means that basically, without (extra*) correction, the daylight images should have been ok, and the indoors way too orange.
But as it is a negative film, the lab can apply an extra correction for white balance (probably the reason there is no tungsten-balanced negative film).
Was the first image on the series perhaps taken indoors? In that case, the lab technician may have been lazy and applied the same correction to all images on the film, which would have made the outdoors images much too blue... I'd show this to the lab, and see what they are willing to do.
It's most certainly not the camera (film cameras simply don't do white balance correction) and the film would have shown strange colours in all prints (but see the additions below).
Note that for colour slide film such corrections are not possible, if you use a daylight film indoors, you'll have to use a correction filter.
(*: extra correction, as most color negative films have an orange filter layer that has to be corrected for as well for printing).
Edit after seeing the contact sheet: You might also have a problem with the camera shutter, the exposition looks very irregular on a lot of the images, with a visible band at the leftmost quarter. This could also explain some of the colour problems.
Originally by user72870. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user72870
8y ago
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Most likely this is a lab printing/scanning issue, not the camera. Olympus 35RC is a film camera, so it does not apply white balance. Kodak UltraMax 400 is a daylight-balanced color negative film, so outdoor daylight shots should normally look correct; if anything, indoor shots under tungsten light would tend to look warm/orange unless corrected.
That points to the photofinisher applying an incorrect color correction during scanning/printing, possibly using one frame or one general setting for the whole roll. That could make daylight frames turn strongly blue while indoor frames look acceptable.
A second possibility, if mainly the brightest sunny frames are affected, is overexposure. Color negative film is forgiving, but badly overexposed highlights can print with strange color shifts, especially if the lab balances for the midtones.
So the most likely cause is the lab’s scan/print settings, with overexposure as a lesser possibility for the brightest scenes. It is very unlikely to be the camera itself, and less likely to be a bad film stock if only some frames are affected. Ask the lab to rescan/reprint the negatives, or have another lab scan them.
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