Carmencita Film Lab Brand Guidelines: A 2012 Ruzafa Lab, Lisbon, Madrid & Paris

Two film shooters and a broken scanner.

Carmencita Film Lab is a film-developing and scanning laboratory in Valencia, Spain. The company says it was “born during 2012”, and a profile in Condé Nast Traveler Spain, published on 17 October 2022, tells the story in more detail: the lab began to take shape in 2012, the same year Kodak went into bankruptcy, after two film shooters met online. They were Miguel Varona, a photographer based in Valencia, and Albert Roig, a telecommunications engineer who had specialised in image and sound. According to the magazine, the two began talking in a Facebook group for people who used the same film scanners, when a scanner of Varona’s needed fixing; Roig was in the United States at the time, and after returning to Barcelona he travelled south to Valencia to meet Varona in person.

The name came from a neighbourhood the founders never moved into. Traveler says they had wanted to open in El Carmen, Valencia’s old quarter, which gave the lab its name, but settled instead on a street in Ruzafa, about five minutes’ walk from the Ruzafa market. Four people led the project at the start: Varona, two of his friends and Roig. All of them were photographers, Roig told the magazine, but he and Varona were the only two working on it full time, and from 2020 Roig took charge of the whole project. The company’s own team page lists him as founder and manager.

Growth was steady rather than sudden. By the time of the 2022 profile Carmencita had close to 30 people across the business and was processing about 60,000 rolls a year, an average of 280 rolls a day across its labs, with the Valencia headquarters handling about 65 per cent of the volume, according to Traveler. Its customers then included photographers in Europe, the United States, Australia and South Korea, and Roig described most of them as young people who had not grown up with film. One archive project he described to the magazine was the digitising of more than 3,000 glass plates, dating from the 1920s to the 1940s, from the archive of a town in the province of Alicante.

Developed, scanned, then printed three ways.

The Traveler profile follows a roll through the Valencia lab. Each order is unpacked and checked, logged in an internal database, then developed in the process it needs: colour negative, black and white, slide or motion-picture film. Once dry, a roll is assigned to one of two scanner families, Fuji Frontier or Noritsu, according to the photographer’s preference. The magazine reports that the lab built its own software to track every roll in the building, that a team of editors adjusts each set of scans the following day, and that a roll passes through the hands of five people in about an hour and 47 minutes of working time. In 2022 only about one order in ten asked for prints, it reported, usually at a small standard size.

The company’s website now sets out the range in its own words. It offers developing and scanning, with every negative scanned and corrected “frame by frame”; a tool that, it says, connects photographers directly with the person scanning their film, so that they can describe the look they want; and three kinds of print. Basic prints serve as proofs; fine art prints are made on an Epson SureColor P8000 on papers from Canson and Ilford; and darkroom prints are, the company says, made directly from the negative to the paper with no digital step at all. The lab also sells fresh film and second-hand film cameras, and it has offered a camera-repair service, which its website currently describes as closed for technical reasons.

The Lisbon and Barcelona pages list the same core services. Colour negative and black-and-white film are developed on site, while slide and motion-picture film (the E-6 and ECN-2 processes) are handled remotely; customers can choose between Frontier SP-3000 and HS-1800 scans; and proof prints go up to 20 by 30 centimetres. Film from Kodak, Fujifilm, Ilford and other makers is sold in store, the company says.

Labs, prints and process.

Professional photo labs and film-processing labs sit between the photographer and the finished object. Most present themselves chiefly through the print: the paper it is made on, the process that made it and the size it comes in. Lab websites typically sort their catalogues by paper surface — glossy, lustre, matt, pearl or metallic — and separate photographic prints exposed on light-sensitive paper from inkjet or giclée prints made for fine-art work.

Around the print sit albums, photo books, cards and wall pieces. Labs name these ranges plainly, usually by material and construction: lay-flat books, hard and soft covers, mounted prints, framed prints, acrylic, metal and wood. Film labs add a second vocabulary of development and scanning, listing film formats, scan resolutions and turnaround times so that a photographer can compare one service with another before sending a roll.

Ordering is part of the brand. Many labs describe their software in practical terms: a web editor for families, a mobile app for quick prints, and downloadable ordering programs or proofing tools for professionals who send large batches. Service promises — remakes, colour correction, shipping deadlines and guarantees — are usually written as short named policies rather than long explanations.

Corporate pages tend to carry the history. Labs that began as a single printer or a small darkroom often tell that story in their About pages, alongside the names of their owners, the towns where their production sits and any group they now belong to. For a design reader, the category is a study in restraint: the identity frames the customer’s pictures and names the materials, and it rarely competes with the images it prints.

From Ruzafa to Lisbon, Barcelona, Madrid and Paris.

Carmencita has grown from one lab into a small network. Traveler dated its move into Lisbon to 2019 and into Barcelona to 2021. The company’s Lisbon page says it has been in the city “since the beginning of 2020”, at LX Factory and now also in Arroios, and its Barcelona page places that lab in the Gothic Quarter from the beginning of 2021. In 2022 the magazine reported that Madrid was next on the list; the company’s Madrid page now says it has been in the Spanish capital since 2023, and its Paris page says a lab opened there in February 2026. Beyond its own labs, the company lists drop points at partner shops in Helsinki and Tampere, Dubai and Tokyo, and says it ships worldwide.

The brand’s voice is informal and built around one idea. The website’s main line is “Because life is not made of 1’s and 0’s”, and Roig used the same phrase to Traveler when explaining why young people shoot film. The company calls itself “a lab made by photographers for photographers”, introduces its staff by their favourite camera and film pairing, and publishes a monthly selection of pictures sent in by customers; Traveler said that archive went back to 2016. It also runs the Carmencita Grant, an open call for film-based photography projects run in partnership with Kodak Professional Europe, which the company says contributes the fresh film that selected projects need.

For a design guide, Carmencita Film Lab shows how a service brand can be built from a neighbourhood name, a single slogan and its customers’ own pictures. Compare Kodak, the film partner behind the Carmencita Grant, and Ilford, whose papers the lab uses for its fine art prints. For this guide we use terracotta, amber and a warm cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Carmencita Film Lab’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.