Finally some color again!

The long term task of this blog is to publish a recipe for developing C41 films without CD4. Meanwhile I compromised and putted small portions of CD4 in my soups with coffee and yes, you may use coffee not as developer because it will only develop silver but seems to act as stabilizer, like Hydroxlamine Sulfate. The recipe I gave first, Caffcol I works and works satisfactory, it is a only different from normal c-41 developer because it has coffee instead of Hydroxilamine Sulfate. The paper of this stuff is to keep dye grains small, what maybe coffee does too.

In a thread at Flickr, I discovered this picture of Marschal A. Fazio (Pothman), that he made using Rodinal and hair dye in a reversal (?) process. He says:

"I used about 3-4ml of rodinal and 10ml of liquid hair dye from Loreal (it was a bottle of liquid color i got at the beauty supply store, it was a shade of black) that was mixed in 500ml of water. developed for 20 minutes at room temp. The bleach was left over from a C-41 kit (Rollei digibase). I used the same mix of hair dye from previous developing for the redevelop."

Since yesterday I am trying to reproduce the experiment, I have nothing really exciting yet to show you, but maybe some of theses days, who knows.

Report of what I have tryied until now:

I prepared the developer like suggested, 3-4 ml not of Rodinal but self prepared Parodinal for 500ml water and about 10ml hair dye, but not the same brand of Loreal. I was so convinced of the success that I went out and exposed a 36 Agfa 100 and developed with this developer. After the first development I filled the tank with a bleach bath of a Tetenal kit for some 4 minutes and oppened the tank to expose the film to light. I expected a blank film but no, it was developed in black and white, looked very nice as black and white pictures. I submitted then the roll to a stronger bleach, Potassium Dichriomate + Sulfuric acid and the result was to bleach out almost all, leaving the roll damaged. No, this way it doesn't go. I need another bleach bath...

I exposed then short pieces of film at home and tried again, the same developer but as bleach I used this time Betadyne which takes hours to act but goes safer. I bleached for some 3 hours and then exposed to light and redeveloped. I have got color pictures but very weak. This was yesterday!

Today I restarted exposing small pieces of film at home and develop them using Parodinal and hair dye. I read somewhere that Parodinal or Rodinal alone is a very weak color developer too. So, this time I took as first developer only a 1:50 solution of Parodinal for 10 minutes only, stiring constantly. Then I submited the film to 45 minutes Betadyne and the result was a almost B&W developed film, without the orange mask, the Betadyne removed the orange mask but leaving the silver untouched. I divide the experience in two parts, cutting a portion of the film to be fixed and washed like it was and the other portion I left in Betadyne for one hour more, controling the process until I see that the silver was bleached leaving a little a weak image of dye. Then I redeveloped in the same Parodinal with two spoons of the first prepared developer of hair dye. The image got more density althought the color restitution is not that good.

Example of the first part, bleach during 45 minutes with Betadyne

The same image warmed with software

Direct scan of the 2 hours bleach + redevelopment with Parodinal and a little hair dye only

From the same second part but enhanced with software

I wonder what could have happened if I used a little more hair dye in the second developer.