Originally posted by LesDMess Maybe you can confirm for me in testing I conducted with my local Noritsu minilab scanner service what options were available. They tended to blow out the highlights and had no control over "levels" to darken the image. The lady working it said she can only turn auto enhance on or off. Turning auto enhance off tended to lessen sharpening, contrast and levels but not by much.
I am not familiar with the exact model scanner your local Noritsu minilab is using, but up against Kodak, Fujifilm, Agfa, Konishiroku, and Copal, Noritsu was the industry leader and I have a hard time believing that in 2016 the operator only has an auto enhance off or on option.
If they are like Costco and many minilabs that I've seen in the last 10 years, management doesn't care about the kind of custom quality you seek. It has been dumbed-down so that either the customer trusts the one-and-done auto enhance for ALL images, or if you've done PP on an image, you don't want their auto enhance to override your work, so then you tell them to turn auto enhance off.
All the while, there is a keyboard and video screen with 4 banks of keys for Cyan-Red, Magenta-Green, Yellow-Blue, and Density (what you're referring to as "levels"). Again, it's usually a management decision to either not adjust any of that or negligence for them to train the operator. All you can do as a consumer is to go from lab to lab until you find the one that cares or is competent.
My last stint as a minilab tech was at a Fox Photo. The parent company, Sears, was more interested in reducing waste and increasing efficiency. So I was discouraged from making image to image color and density corrections, because it is slower than just ripping through everything with auto. But half the time you're sitting around picking your nose, and I'd rather have some pride in my work, so I'd make corrections and turn out great prints for customers. After a couple weeks, people noticed and business picked up, but then other labs in the franchise start getting a bad rep because they refuse to make corrections....so what does corporate do? Stop making corrections!!! At that point, I knew it was a sign for me to move on with my life.
Now my curse is that I can make better corrections than just about any lab. It's not just me, it's thousands of color lab techs that were trained and then were replaced by automation. The same thing has happened in publishing with automated digital presses, but I'm old fashion so next month I'm going to fly 8,000 miles roundtrip to Winnipeg, Manitoba, home of Friesens, where they have real pressmen to work with me to do a real press check for color balance and ink density for black and white images. (I'm also a yearbook advisor now and we print about 2000 9x12" hard bound books 372-pages annually). Love the ManRoland German presses with Italian GardaGloss paper crafted by polite and caring Canadians. But I digress....
So, my goal with labs is that I find one that won't screw up the processing or scratch my film, let them do the low res base scans, and then from those 'proofs' I do it myself with my own film scanner for high res and Photoshop.