B&W photography with color C-41

In Portugal, where I live, the lovers of black and white photography must pay a higher price for the B&W films, what may be overcome using C-41 or E-6 films that will be "printed" as B&W. Some brands offer a chromogenic black and white film, like Ilford XP-2, that should be developed in C-41 process too, but the price is higher than B&W ones. Still you may find color C-41 for a better price, like this one.

But the beautiful in B&W is that the developing process is very simple, at normal temperature and all you need essencialy is developer and fixer. Many people is using color C-41 films cross-processed in B&W chemicals, but you need a very good scanner to scan at transparency because the negatives are very dense and they are not good scannable reflexive.

In my experiences with a new hair dye, that does not develop color films, I putted Parodinal in 1:100 proportion in a soup containing hair dye, sodium carbonate and sodium sulfite and with this I developed a color film, bleach bypassed. The result was a very good B&W image on a white background, suitable to be scanned reflexive, and almost opaque, so not suitable for transparency scan.

Inverted reflexive scan of the color C-41 film

Example of one picture

I only used a small piece of film for test, but I will try this again with a complete film exposed outside. I think we may have better quality adjusting times and scanner parameters. But this is what film manufacturers should offer, a film that you may develop and scan with a normal scanner, using normal chemicals and not specially prepared ones like I did. There is another possibility of getting a picture on film that may be scanned with a normal scanner, I will explain that in another post!