Color Shifts on Black and White Images
ByIt’s 1998, we are shooting film, and we are putting specially designed black and white paper through the color processing machines. It is cool looking, fast, and cheaper to do this than hand processing large black and white prints in the darkroom. The look was as nice as most black and white images.
Now it’s 2011 and these pseudo black and white images are now coming back to haunt us with visible color shifting in certain tones of the print. Little did we know thirteen years ago that there was going to be a stability issue with this process.
I had my first (and hopefully only) client call to ask about her strange looking portrait. I was so worried because I had no idea what was going on. I thought I had goofed in some way – until I saw the image. I found out that this was not really uncommon with images printed with that process and a few other photographers were having the same experience. My images had been printed in a professional, high end color lab too!
In case this happens to you, don’t panic. Just find your negative, get it scanned on a high quality film scanner, and have a new print remade for your customer. I was very pleased to see the new image was actually nicer than the original and my customer was happy with the customer service I was able to provide. (It was a good thing that I keep files for a long time.)
And by the way, I would advise doing this as a service and not charging your customer. If you can work something out with your printer to defer the cost to you, even better.
The color shifting showed up best on a close up I took of the print that was returned. I hope that you can see the orange looking cast in this section of the image. It will help you identify this problem if you come across it.
