#C 41 developing tv#

Stand development, I can load the tank, pour in the chemicals, and then go watch TV for 20 minutes. Beforehand with normal C-41 processing, I had way too many negatives that did have color casts, under development, washed out colors, and artifacts (stripes etc, though this may have been from cinestill processing). Only now (thanks to a sous vide machine) do I have a good setup for fairly precise temperature control. This is easy to correct while scanning though. I've not noticed any cross-over color, though I would assume the exact development and resulting curves is probably a bit different. So, I don't do optical prints, but the only film I have trouble color correcting (I do DSLR scanning, and correct the color in Photoshop using curves) is when it's vastly under exposed, vastly over exposed, or when using ECN-2 film (Cinestill). OR, they are using scans, then push and pull until they get the image where they want it. In my experience, when people recommend way out-of-spec methods, they generally have not made stringent comparisons. I can't imagine this would happen with stand processing.Īnyway, bottom line to me is that it's kind of nutty to vary from the spec C-41 process conditions if one's goal is to get high quality color prints. This can be a fairly subtle effect - most people could probably not explain what looks wrong with such an image, but if they have two images side by side, they can often recognize that something is not quite right with the color-crossed image.Īs a note, from actual experience, with properly processed and printed Portra 160 film, a 'normal' vs 3 or 4 stops overexposed negative will be virtually identical, colorwise. If you try to correct one of these, the other goes in the opposite direction - they are essentially not correctable with standard methods. The contrast issue is not correctable in 'normal' optical printing (scanned images are a completely different situation) giving a result we call a 'color cross.' If you have a color cross in photos of people, you would find, for example, that lighter flesh tones would have a slightly different color than the darker tones. So I presume that NO agitation (aka stand development) carries this effect even further. I DO know that when agitation is reduced in a machine process, a reduced amount of development, both overall density and contrast, can be seen in the bottom layer of the film. The bottom (color) layer of the film is largely affected by the extent of development in the upper layers, and it seems that not agitating the developer (to sweep away byproducts and bring fresh developer to the surface of the film) would aggravate the differencs. Now, having seen that there is little room for improvement of consistency (based on densitometer readings to 0.01 density units) I can't imagine that 'stand development' could be more consistent.Īgain, I've never tried stand development, but in principle it seems that two films, with different exposures, would vary in the extent of development. Part of this is to test consistency of processing by periodically running special test strips with rigidly-controlled exposures these are then 'read' with an instrument (densitometer) to evaluate the degree of development.

#C 41 developing professional#

The obvious counter argument to this is to, when using the standard method, is to stop making mistakes, right? Then you should have consistent processing with the added benefit of saving ~40 minutes of your time during each processing run.Īs a note, I've spent a large part of my life being involved with professional processing and printing of color negative films, with particular involvement in what they call (statistical) process control. Hi, I usually avoid making opinions on methods that I have not actually tried, but.Īre you actually saying that it is more consistent because you don't make mistakes, whereas you DO make mistakes when using the standard procedure?

I've gotten more processing mistakes with the normal and fast development method than stand development. Is anyone else out there using C-41 stand development regularly? I use it for nearly all C-41 film I develop because it's easier and more consistent.