Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Refining Colordinal

The latest news on my multipurpose developer Colordinal, whose final formula is still not established what I hope will be soon. By now, B&W development follows Rodinal rules in what times, temperatures and agitation is concerned, I don't recommend stand development, it gives uneven development, the bottom will be overdeveloped. For color C-41 films it works but could be better and I am considering some changes in the formula but first I have to see what the formula of the last batch is capable, adjusting temperatures and times. At the first C-41 roll I developed in Colordinal I used room temperature and the same dilution 1:100 and time as for B&W. Low color saturation but development was complete. At the second roll I rose the temperature to 40 (or above) and used higher concentration, 1:25 and some 15min time. Very dense but more color saturation. At the third and last roll I used the same concentrated solution, less temperature, 30ºC, and less developing time, only 10min. Yes, it was the best result I had until now, but not the last word. The temperature is OK and the developing time can be still shorter than 10 minutes, maybe just 5 minutes and this will be the next experiment. Or perhaps time and temperature could be the same as for normal C-41 process, 3:15 minutes at 38,5ºC or something closer to that.

And here some of the latest Colordinal pictures, took with Kodacolor 200 at 1 f stop overexposed.







Green and Blue are well represented but Red is missing to balance the pictures. And, on the other hand all pictures had to be adjusted at scanning to give better colors that, without any adjustments seem dull and violet like the first picture below. The second was obtained with automatic level correction of the first one in Photoscape.



One may think that it is still a long way to produce better color results but the picture without color correction given above is already a big progress when compared to the pictures of the first roll.

5 comments:

André said...

Dear Henrique, this Colordinal process for C-41 is just like a standard b/w film developing + final bleaching and washing? Or is it more like standard C-41 process (developing, bleaching, fixing, etc...)? Thanks for your attention :-)

Henrique Sousa said...

Yes, that's it! Sorry for the delay in answering. Didn't come here for a while!

André said...
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André said...

That is what? B/w or C-41 process? Don't worry about delaying ;)

André said...
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