specifically the roll that these photos are from. I originally got them developed and scanned at Kerrisdale Cameras in Vancouver, and later back in Philadelphia I got them rescanned at Indie Photo Lab along with my roll of B&W film1
in my B-roll post I had mentioned that the colour photos turned out really green and I know that colour correction is something I can do myself2, but I had no idea what kind of colour correction I was supposed to do, and trying to ungreen them myself just made them look too red. I was just curious how a different lab might interpret the colours from that roll, really3
here's what I got back compared to the originals below the cut
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some exposures were missing for some reason. annoying)
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in fact most of the photos I posted have some amount of curves adjustment done in GNU IMP
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although that's not something I'll do again — turns out it's pretty expensive just to get film scanned
in removing what I guess is really the yellow-green it looks a lot cooler and bluer now. if I had gotten the one on the right back in the first place I would've thought nothing of it but now it feels like it's lacking warmth despite having more "natural" colours. then again, looking back at the original, it looks like there was a heavy sepia filter applied.
I thought I'd be able to figure out how to correct the colours just by starting out with one and messing with the colour sliders until I got something that looked like the other, but I haven't quite got it, and I'm not sure that's something I want to do to a set of 36 exposures manually. maybe there's some software I can look into that does this automatically.
I also don't really know what I want? it's possible that if I had only gotten the photo on the left back I would've thought nothing of it and that it's only because the rest of the photos looked unnaturally green that I felt this one was also too green in comparison. but if given these two at the same time I really don't know which one I would've decided to post, and if given either one of them I don't think I would've thought to run it through any sort of colour balancing.
here's a pair, however, where I do prefer the rescans:
with the cooler blues of the water, the sky, and the bridge, the gold of the locks pop a lot more. I only posted this one as part of the B-roll post because it was out of focus, but if I had gotten the rescan in time I probably would've posted it anyway because the contrast in colour makes up for it, whereas the original looked smudged to me.
I've done some brief tinkering with the colours on this one as well and I don't know how to replicate the colours of the rescan either. it almost looks unnaturally blue, especially when I'm moving the sliders and seeing it become bluer and bluer, and I definitely would've thought my own adjustments looked too artificially blue and fake. but seeing the rescan on its own looks fine! and looks more natural in some way!
in the end, I still don't really know how to figure out what kind of colour correction I'd want to do (if at all), and how to do it efficiently (there is probably a simple software solution for this problem). since the weirdly green photos came from that lab in Vancouver and not the usual labs I get my film developed in Philly, I'm just going to hope that the scans I get back in the future don't have weird colours. but maybe in the future I'll want to intentionally unbalance the colours in my photos...