I gather from your text that you have never seen prints of these shots,
they went straight from develop only to flatbed scanning? Given the
evidence at hand, 2 things seem certain:
1. The scanning is clearly wildly deficient. There are a few flat-bed
scanners that can make quite good scans of 35mm film, quite a few that
can do a workmanlike job for low quality uses and a whole lot that are
really crappy. Either the operator and/or the scanner simply produced
junk scans. My suspicion is that the negs are likely ok, but one can't
really tell. Loading the sample into PS, the histogram shows no data at
levels from 0-25 and none from 145 to 255 except a few white dust spots
up at the top. Thus, the image uses only about half of the dynamic range
available, almost all from the midpoint down, so of course, it is flat
and dark looking. Setting the black, white and neutral points properly
results in a sort of normal looking picture, although spreading the very
narrow range out still has much less luminance detail than would be
achieved from a proper scan.
2. The JPEG, at 25kb for a fairly complex 578x878 pixel image, is way
overcompressed, with all kinds of nasty artifacts. This also makes the
luminance problem worse. One can see spikiness in the individual color
channel histograms where nearby tones have been compressed into one.
You can find out if the film is ok by having prints made or having it
scanned properly. My suspicion is that the camera and flash equipment
performed properly.
Moose
Daniel Tan wrote:
Hi all.
This is my first post to the list with pictures of mine, so feel free to
have a good laugh at them :-P
Anyhow, can somebody give me a few hints here. I recently attended a
computer gaming LAN and managed to get myself branded as official
photographer. Unfortunately, all of the photos I took with my OM ended
up like this................
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