Developed the same roll two ways and the lab scan killed my home setup

I shot a roll of Tri-X 400 last month at my sister's wedding in Nashville and split it in half after cutting the film. Developed the first half in Rodinal 1:50 for 13 minutes at 20C, like I always do at home. Sent the second half to a local lab in town that uses Ilfotec DD-X and let them scan it on their Noritsu. The lab scans came back with way more shadow detail and way less grain than my home scans on my old Epson V500. I thought I was doing fine with my setup but the difference was pretty obvious when I put them side by side on my monitor. Has anyone else had a similar wake up call comparing their home developing or scanning to a pro lab's work?

2 comments

2 Comments

ivan52218d ago

Damn, that side by side is brutal when it happens. I had the same rude awakening with a lab scan and it turned out my whole home workflow was the weak link, not the film itself.

alice99119d ago

Man, I feel this one hard! I used to think my V500 was fine too until I got a roll back from a shop that uses a mirrorless setup for their scans. The big fix for me was ditching the Epson software and using SilverFast with proper multi-pass scanning, plus learning to set my black point where the histogram actually starts instead of letting the auto settings do it. Also, Rodinal is great for punchy negatives but it adds visible grain, so I switched to Xtol for my 35mm stuff and that closed the gap a lot. Your negatives are probably fine, it's just the scanner and software doing the heavy lifting for the lab.