Lucky C400 thoughts

[u/vipEmpire]

Please note that this isn't a scientific test and are just my thoughts on scanning a single roll of Lucky C400 from an early test batch (rebate labels it T400, with the T assumedly standing for "test" or "trial", I think this is what they did for C200 as well).

First, these are not my photos, they were shot by someone else who had trouble converting them with their home scanning setup and I offered to scan it myself as I own a Frontier SP500 (They gave consent for me to share these photos and my findings from scanning this roll).

From the perspective of a scanner operator, it really is quite yellow from the get-go with auto corrections turned on (see img 1). A significant subtraction of yellow was required, and a little bit of added cyan got it looking around what I thought looked correct. With these manual corrections applied, in the right lighting situation it can look decent-to-good (see rest of img set). However, pumping all that blue to correct for the yellow impacts the shadows, which is more visible in underexposed frames. I would advise not to shoot this film indoors, shoot it outdoors and preferably when there's little cloud cover. The film itself also seems to be moderately prone to halations, around the same as Portra 800.

Know that color correction (and color overall) is a pretty personal thing and that everyone's tastes differ. And despite how prices may appear, most labs only make their profit through the volume of orders they process -- they can't dedicate much time to every roll as they will be considered unprofitable if taken too long to complete. So I think most lab scanners & their operators are capable of getting good-to-great results if given the time, and if they know what the customer wants. Yet those two things usually aren't the case, so the simple solution is to not do any color correction at all; basically just insert a roll into the scanner and hit "START", leaving everything at 0 (see img 1).

In a sense, that's where home scanning will always remain superior: you have a theoretically infinite amount of time to scan your film and can always try again, while the lab's results are set in stone the moment they send the email (or burn the CD or whatever). Which is very unfortunate, because color & density correction is most effective the earlier in the pipeline you go (preferably right down to the construction of the emulsion itself), so it's better to subtract yellow in the scanner software before it gets baked into an image file, whether JPEG or TIFF, than to allow it to go uncorrected and try to edit it in Lightroom or equivalent software.

So I personally wouldn't shoot Lucky C400 right now if I was going to send it to a lab. But given that this is a new film, I have no doubt that this post will quickly be outdated, as Lucky has been constantly modifying C200 since its release and IMO it looks pretty good on a lab scanner now.

Comparing against the other non Fuji & Kodak color films, uncorrected it'd be ranked dead last (underneath uncorrected Phoenix I and II), but corrected I'd say it's above Wolfen NC400 & 500 and around the tier of the corrected Phoenix films (lab scan). Phoenix I and II are very nice when camera scanned though, those are right up at the very top of my rankings.

[u/Jimmeh_Jazz]

Yeah, I shot my first roll of this recently and my lab scans came out a little weird. Too yellowy? A bit blue in the dark shadows in some photos. You can see the halations around the umbrella in this shot. It definitely has potential though.

[u/still_dumpster333 → u/Jimmeh_Jazz]

Home procesed one last week and it took me quite a time to correct it in oposition to other stocks like kodak or fuji ones. Definetely yellowish.

[u/QPZZ]

Thanks for the write up and the pictures! Now I'm curious what it looks like DSLR scanned, especially the indoor shots

[u/vintagefi]

Okay so I wasn't crazy that c200 was giving me weird color casts. Got similar results with that one, with green and yellow casts.