Developing film. Now in color!

I'd like to know more about the sous vide heater arrangement, and the C41 kit you used.

Timothy Kepple

I have a 15 year old Epson negative flat-bed. The software needs to know the film type to do the best inversion of color film. Whatever you used did a magnificent job, IMHO.

Mike Bird

I used to use an aquarium heater to hold the water temperature. Also used metal canisters which I think adjust to temperature changes faster (could be good or bad), but tbh I never actually tested that. I just always preferred the metal canisters and reels after some bad experiences with the plastic reels.

Sean Harding

You don't necessarily need it at all - there are many ways to accomplish inverting the negative, and most any scanner will have some ability to do it natively. Both my Epson and Nikon scanners can, simply by saying your source is a color negative, produce positive scans on their own. Trouble is they're never that good (at least from the Epson. I don't exactly know what the Nikon is capable of on its own because it's a 15 year old scanner and I'm not using its native software). What Nate has created in Negative Lab Pro is a ridiculously powerful tool for doing that conversion process outside the scanner and its native software, and NLP allows for much greater control. He's also been working to duplicate the various aspects of lab scanners in that software (that's what the Frontier setting was, if you saw that), and I've found it to have made leaps and bounds improvements over whatever EpsonScan was pumping out. A big reason I stopped caring about color film was that I just couldn't get nice colors out of my scans, but with NLP it's just... boom. They're nearly perfect. The 120 rolls I scanned with my Epson scanner turned out to have some of my favorite images I've ever taken, and I very much doubt using the EpsonScan software would produce such good results. I suppose I could try for giggles but I've rarely ever been truly happy with its color output in the past. I think it's just too hard to try and get a scanner's built-in software to produce decent inversions when it has to have a one-size-fits-all approach. Scanning as RAW files allows NLP to account for the film base's color, and also pull much more detail out of them. I sound like I'm shilling for Nate's program, here, but honestly it has singlehandedly brought me back into wanting to shoot film.

Technology Connections

Why do you need special software to convert the scanned negative to a positive? What happens if you just use something like Photoshop's invert colors? I'm guessing it has something to do with response curves and logarithms?

Mister Author

Years ago, when I tried C41 (before cheap sous vide was available) we were taught to leave the tank in the water bath since the temp couldn't vary by more than +/- .25 degrees Farenheit. We kept the water the same temp by having the water constantly running at the adjustment to keep the temp the same.

Mike Bird

Glacial acetic acid is 100%. So, just 20 times stronger than vinegar.

The cloudiness that appeared for a while is just because the chemicals have different optical refractive indexes, so it's like mixing two different but fluid lenses. mixing two different temperature volumes of water does that too as the density is different. We had a lot of silver contamination when processing x-ray film. It is possible to use electrolysis to plate the silver onto electrode rods although we sent our fixer to specialist silver recovery firms. Most photography supplies companies should know who does that.

Jim Hewlett

Wearing gloves (and not changing them when they get wet) and goggles, but no lab coat... 🤔 (says the biologist here 🤪) In the lab at work we use water-absorbing paper backed with a plastic layer so the tables stay clean and spilling is not such a problem, maybe that is an idea? I guess just using an old newspaper (if you still got those 😛) is also a good option. We never did color back in the day, my father thought it to be too complicated. But it sure looks doable, the pictures in the end look good! They really have that "film" character that digital pictures are missing.

MrHammond

Sealed bottles in a heated water bath doesn't seem right. Pressure vessel + heat source = bad times?

Dave Curran

The photo lab I worked at had a silver recovery unit that would be replaced occasionally. The rest of the chemicals went down the drain - with a permit, of course. I'm not sure if the silver was recovered due to cost or some environmental reason, but I'm guessing it's not so great for the environment.

Quinton Wilson

Glacial acetic acid has no water in it and it looks like ice crystals.

Jimmy Dorff

If you want to see examples of images shot on CineStill film, one of my favorite YouTube photographers--Nick Carver--has a video showing some photos shot on that film and how it compares to the film he normally uses: Kodak Portra https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99dJgCjeHgs&t=284s

Mark Hesse

Since I had no issues with the development here I think I'll just stick with the tanks I have. I was only worried that the agitation rod would produce weird results but apparently it's fine, so inversion for agitation isn't something I'm going to insist on.

Technology Connections

That looked like a lot of effort November :) Don’t worry about the temperature of the tank, and also get a new tank that doesn’t leak, it’s not supposed to that. My wife (who’s done this before) says Jobo is a good brand.

Thomas Fuchs

Back in the day I did a lot of c-41 processing at home. I used to make color prints with an enlarger as well. The many joys of color balance! The only hassle with color is that the temperature range needs to be really precise, particularly for printing, or the color goes to hell. They do mean it about the week, what will happen is, you start to get crazy color shifts as the chemicals go bad.

Mark Lewus

The c41 process is easy with a sous vide heater!

Sina Farhat

it's so interesting watching you develop the film & go over the history!

Erik Granlund

Instructions littered around, messy desk, excellent t-shirt, xacto knife in hand and big grin? That's the look of someone who just discovered a fun new hobby

Gord Allott

Oh hell yeah! C41 is a blast, though I will say that so far I've managed not to poison myself doing it all in a little crummy bathroom so you should be fine. Though man the ammonia smell from some blix is not a fun one. And you should be totally fine extending past the 8 rolls, I'm pretty sure they only give that as the maximum number that clear whatever standard for development they have. With unicolor kits I've had decent luck extending the life for a ridiculous amount of time, I think my record was something like 20 rolls for a standard US liter kit. Now you just gotta try e6 haha 😄 I will admit it is probably the most magical process, nothing beats seeing those real actual images come straight out of the tank. Though I will say to avoid cinestill's e6 kit, I've had okay luck but the developer is super weak and leads to obnoxiously dense positives that are hard to scan, even at correct timing and temperature. It's always great to see the mechanical/chemical side of film photography too, it's such a fun medium that is just absolutely bonkers it works as well as it does!

Dylan Packard