I took some pictures at a recent martial arts event I attended last week and was going to send the film in for developing tomorrow.
I just found out however, that I had left the film in a pair of jeans that got washed!!! :eek: 
Do you guys think there is any hope for the pictures?
The jeans were in hot water, soap, and then went through a drier cycle. The film was in the back pocket. :dubious:
You won’t be able to take it to the corner pharmacy for 1 hour service-that’s for sure. The only chance of salvaging the images is for someone with a darkroom who can run the b&w or color process required by the type of film used. I’d be opening the film can in the dark and soaking the whole roll in process temperature water for a few hours to try to unstick the emulsion from the next turn of base material such that I could (if really lucky) let the strip hang and become firm enough to hand load onto a developing reel, after which you run the original development cycle.
It probably is, but I’d get them developed and tell the person working that you want ALL the prints back. Some places throw out pictures of your fingers and stuff like that.
What’s the worst that could happen? You don’t get any pictures. There could be some really cool effects, though.
This is almost the same question, but what if undeveloped film were just dropped in water by accident? Any problems from simply getting wet? It happened in a dream (what an exciting dream), and now I’m wondering about it.
I’ve done this before once to a roll of slides. You will be able to salvage images from it, but the resulting photos will be splotchy (at least in my case.)
To sort-of salvage the pictures, I went into the darkroom (well, my bathroom will all light sources blocked out) and opened the roll of film with a can opener. I then rinsed it several times in cool water until it felt free of soap. Satisfied the soap had been cleaned off, I dried it in the dark with a hair dryer (be careful your heating element in the dryer doesn’t glow and expose your film), and re-rolled it into a spare canister I had lying around.
This whole process took an hour or so.
When I went to develop it, I told the developer what kind of film it was (as the spare film canisters were blank), and told him to throw it in as his very last batch, just to be sure my film didn’t contaminate the chemicals and ruin anyone else’s pictures.
When the film came back from the processor, there were definitely images there. A bit spoltchy and unevenly developed (perhaps I didn’t wash all the soap off as I thought I had, or perhaps the damage had already been done.) They were certainly not publishable, but they were salvageable. If they were absolutely critical photographs, I think one would be able to fix them with a lot of work in Photoshop. The main problem was blobs of uneven development.
I’d be worried about screwing up someone else’s photos. I don’t know if the residual soap will contaminate a batch of developer, but I wouldn’t take that risk.
Commercial labs, big and small, don’t use batches of chemicals. They use a system of continual replenishment whereby a proportion of the existing chemical is drawn off and replaced with fresh. This can go on for a considerable period and they do not like having to replace the entire lot very often.
It could stilll be developed, but the colour might be a little off. Once wet, don’t dry it – just develop it wet. Here are a couple of shots of me that were in the drink for half a day and only developed the next day: Kipawa River Photographs
That’s exactly the type of splotching I experienced.
And it’s definitely fixable with Photoshop.