Lab vs Home Development & Scan

Trying to make up my mind whether to continue home developing and scanning, or go back to using a lab. Thought I'd use this as a sounding board for my thoughts and for the sake of discussion.

So I've home developed for maybe five years now with mixed results. Mostly black and white, tried c41 but the chemical disposal is tricky where I am, and I don't shoot enough of it to keep fresh chemicals. I quite enjoy the development process actually, mad scientist in his bathroom laboratory and all that.

The scanning gets me though. Went from cheap flatbed to scanning with my Fuji XT4 and that helped. Getting a smoking deal on Fuji's native 80mm macro helped a lot more, but despite my efforts there's still a struggle with flat negatives, dust, water spots, and the digital workflow of cropping, inverting, colour balancing, dust cloning is sorta tedious. I shoot film partly to get away from screens but the edits take me way longer than my digital workflow. Often leaves me wondering if this is worth it? I started home developing so I could shoot more film, but for the amount of time and tedium it takes me, with mixed results, I've found myself shooting even less.

On the other side, I have a great lab semi local to me. They're a pro lab that works with you and caters specifically to your style with the scans so minimal edits. They scan on a Fuji Frontier at some pretty ridiculous resolutions and it always comes back way more sharp yet natural than my home efforts. The downside is pretty obvious though, they charge $30CAD per roll. Add the cost of film, shipping to send in a few at a time, it works out to about $1.50 per frame, which leaves me asking if this is worth it!

It's not entirely about the money though, as expensive as it is I could just sit down and do my job for the same time it takes me to develop and edit a roll and probably come out ahead.

Could argue just doing both, but I feel like I'd have a banger of a shoot that I didn't do justice with my own workflow, then get a bunch of impeccably processed and scanned lab images of an uninspired boring roll. Plus even more expired chemicals from doing less rolls in house.

Not a question of abandoning film entirely. Too much enjoyment from the using the gear, too much sentimental value using gear from friends and family who've passed.

I'm leaning towards going back to the lab, for a while at least, and see how I get on. Yeah it'll run $500-$1000 a year, but it's cheaper than drugs at least so there's that. Plus I could flip the Fuji macro and cover a year's worth of lab fees right there.

So that's my bit of a ramble, mostly just thinking out loud. Anyone ever go through a similar dilemma? Regret ditching the home kit and losing control of the entire process? Regret hours spent sloshing tanks around instead of out shooting?