a Negative printing experience

I normally don't get my negatives printed until I've scanned them. This is because quite simply the places who print your film are incompetent (I really can't think of what else to say). Today because the shop didn't listen (more evidence to support my hypothesis) I ended up getting prints with my 24 exposures.

I glanced at them quickly and thought FFS

Item of Evidence 1

Now looking at the timber of the desk it looks like I see it here ... so my scan of the negative.

The blue light on the snow is classic up here, and as the sun is going down the sky was lit with low cloud and lovely reds. That's why I took the picture.

If I was a person learning about photography and all I saw was the print I'd be so disappointed with the my camera or me or something. But the issue is firmly at the shop. For if I take my file there (in sRGB colourspace) and print it, then it will look like my scan.

Item 2

shit, the ends of my glasses have more colour than this print.

My scan:

now I want to emphasize that I did fuck all to these scans aside from my usual process:

1. scan as positive and set levels conservatively to not loose data
2. invert in photoshop
3. trim up levels
4. apply some gamma to each channel

So its no wonder that people think prints from negatives don't look as good as digital prints. The real irony here is that negative was designed with printing in mind, not scanning.

I don't mind paying 5 bucks for the negative developing but the extra for the prints of this quality is just insulting. Sometimes you just don't get what you pay for.