Sunday, September 28, 2014

Does Parodinal (or Rodinal) develop color?

The C-41 film developed as B&W with Parodinal but scanned as color makes one think it might be possible to get real colors. I started experimenting on this and now I am quite sure it will be possible to develop C-41 films with Parodinal. This is my first picture where it is clear that Parodinal is giving true colors and not a kind of random colorized picture like I've got in the first results. I am still working on this subject in order to present the full procedure that may be reproduced by everyone.


In this picture I can see that the gras is green, the roofs are red and the sky is blue. It was developed with homebrewed parodinal, a special recipe I use, made of Paracetamol, Potassium Metabisulfite and Sodium Hydroxide, nothing else. I am using Povidone Iodine as bleach and common rapid fixer for B&W.

Sunday, September 21, 2014

Using C-41 films as B&W

I have been very busy, so I had no time to post. But today I discovered something I would like to share with you:

It is known that C-41 may be developed in B&W chemistry giving black and white pictures. But, because the bleach step is bypassed, the negatives are very dense because the filter masks (correct me if it is not that) are still there and they are washed out by the bleach bath.
So I thought following procedure and somebody else may already have discovered it first:
1- Develop in B&W chemicals
2 - Rinse
3- Fix
4- Wash
5- Bleach
6- Wash
7- Redevelop in B&W developer
8- final wash

Final fixing may be not necessary.

This way the bleach step can clear the film and you will get a nice negative, almost like Ilford XP2 or Kodak BW400CN.

Sorry, now I have to go outside and take some pictures with a C-41 film and develop it like B&W.

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I developed the C-41 film I used yesterday like I said above. I used a disposable Kodak camera with a 800 ISO film and I developed it as follows:

1 - Develop in homebrewed parodinal 1:100 for 1 hour in stand dev. at 23ºC
2 - Rinse 3 times
3 - Fix for 5 minutes in comon rapid fixer
4 - Wash for 10 min.
5 - Bleach in Povidone-Iodine (PVP-I) for 1 hour or until the images disappear.
6 - Wash
7 - Redevelop in homebrewed parodinal 1:10 (yes, strong like for paper) for 2 hours
8 - Final wash for 15min.

Here are some of the pictures I took, scanned as color and automatic settings for scanner and brigtness level in Photoscape. 







I think the pictures are not coloured, these tonalities are a result of several things that may be discussed further but not interesting by now.

These negatives will produce B&W pictures like these:





Follow next developments of this subject at the blog, soon! I came to the conclusion that it is possible to produce better B&W negatives using C-41 films. This will be unveilled in the next post.