>>2981579I fought with this issue for a year and eventually found out that the problem was lab developing, but there's a few things to think about first as you could try another lab. Is this medium format film or 35mm? If it's just 35mm then your lab is doing a very substandard job and you should switch, for larger formats I've found there can be a problem with low contrast images on c41 no matter which lab you use. So empty skies, salt flats, things with hardly any contrast don't get developed evenly enough and the subtleties get ruined.
The problem came down to the methods that labs use for developing. My understanding is that most of them use large dip-and-dunk machines which can hold about 50 sheets of film or dozens of rolls at once. The film just sits in one spot in the machine and agitation is done with nitrogen bubbles. This probably worked just fine decades ago but now the labs are not changing out the gallons of chemicals as often because they don't have the flow of film coming in the door like they used to. The only way I could correct this issue was with home-developing or by using slides for low contrast scenes and negatives for those images where the skies are full of clouds and lots of contrast. Don't worry, home developing c41 is easy and the $20 powder c41 kit works just fine. As a note, I still had some minor developing uneven-ness with plastic reels and 120 film, steel reels seems to work better for me. Then I acquired a jobo processor and that's been the best.
