Timing Card

When you originate in color negative and edit in color positive workprint, Colorlab will supply a timing report along with your workprint. The timing report shows the amount and color balance of the light (the amounts of Red, Green, and Blue light) used to print each section of your workprint.

The cue points (numbers under "FCC") are read as the distance, in feet plus frames, from the zero start mark printed at the head of the workprint (see example at right). Thus Scene 2, Take 1 in the example card above begins at 46 feet +18 frames, and runs until 94 feet +34 frames (the beginning of the next take).

The printer light levels for each take are indicated by the numbers under "R G B". These levels are known as "printer points" or "C-lights," and they range from 0 (off, or no light) to 50 (maximum light) for each color of light. "Lab Normal" printing light is 20-20-20.

Using the timing report to critique your exposure

When you order best-light workprints, our timer times your film for the best possible print, no matter how you have exposed your film. So just because your print looks pretty good doesn't mean your exposure was right on the money. To better judge how well exposed your negative was, it's useful to refer to the timing card.

In general, properly exposed color and b/w negative should look good when printed at close to the 20-20-20 "lab normal." The farther your numbers are from 20, the farther your exposure was off.

7 printer points equals one f-stop. Higher numbers mean overexposure, and lower ones mean underexposure.

To figure out how far your exposure was off, average the three RGB numbers, subtract 20 from the result, and divide by seven.

Example: on the card above, scene 2, take 1 was overexposed and printed at 38-44-39:

38 + 44 + 39 = 121; 121/3 = about 40; 40 - 20 = 20; 20/7 = 2.86.

So the scene was overexposed by about 3 stops.

Remember that although bad exposure can often be corrected in your workprint, it will never produce the same results as good exposure will produce. A timed (exposure-corrected) print from a badly exposed negative will be off in other ways. It may gain graininess and gain or lose contrast. In addition, bad exposure wastes the limited "headroom" of correctability in the film, headroom which you may want to use later when correcting or adding color effects to your answer print.

The chart (below) should help illustrate how printer points correspond to the quality of your negative.

As you look at the chart, remember that printing is a process of "pushing" light through the negative onto the print stock. To make a normal-looking print, you want about the same amount of light to get through to the print stock, no matter how hard it is to push it through the negative. Higher point values push harder to get the light through a dark (overexposed) negative; lower ones let it trickle through a very light (underexposed) negative.

The last box is a simplified example of what happens when your exposure contains too much of a particular color. Fluorescent lights are one common way your film can get too much green light; if a scene took a particularly high green value to correct, it may well have been shot under or near some fluorescent lights.

Remember, if your film contains INTENTIONAL color or exposure effects, LET US KNOW what's on it, so we don't "correct away" the effect you were going for!