C 41 processing at home11/22/2023 Here's a shot from my very first C41 roll:Īfter I exhausted the Cinestill kit, I have switched to Kodak's Flexicolor chemistry. It's dead-simple, reproducible and it worked really well. Start the development using their instructions (I agitated by inversion, every 30 seconds, keeping the tank partially submerged in the water bath in-between).They will cool down a bit but it doesn't matter. Get the blix and rinse out and put aside.The reason it's 103F and not the 100F is because you'll inevitably lose some temperature when pouring the developer into a tank. Keep the bottles with chemicals in the bath, they should reach 103F as well.Heat up the water bath to 103F using their sous vide tool.I started by buying the Cinestill C41 Kit (liquid), their temperature control tool and just followed the instructions. If I had a little warming cabinet (opposite of a dorm fridge) to keep my chemical bottles in, I could process a tank of C-41 in about a half hour, from turning off the light to load the film to hanging it to I was in your shoes just a few months ago and my C41 negatives came out great, even better than some labs I had been using. C-41 is always 38C/100F (usually done as a drift-through starting at 39C/102F) for 3:15, always same bleach time, always same fix time, no matter what C-41 film you're processing. No looking up a Massive Dev Chart, deciding what dilution to use, wondering if the other dev chart having a significantly different time means that one is right, or this one is, doing a power calculation to correct for the fact your darkroom won't get down to 20C for another two months (and then it'll be 13C most of the winter). In some ways, C-41 is simpler than black and white - because everything gets the exact same process. If I had a little warming cabinet (opposite of a dorm fridge) to keep my chemical bottles in, I could process a tank of C-41 in about a half hour, from turning off the light to load the film to hanging it to dry. To paraphrase a juggler I saw once, this is not more difficult, it just has more steps. For C-41, it's not even necessarily more steps, since most kits combine the bleach and fixer to make "blix" - developer, optional stop bath or water rinse, blix, wash just like B&W (only in warmer water) and final rinse which does the same job as PhotoFlo, but isn't as optional (it preserves the film as well as preventing water spots).įor E-6, there's an additional "first developer," stop bath (highly recommended, since this needs to be a precise level of development), water wash to remove the acid, fogging bath and color developer (often combined in kits), bleach, fix (same as C-41, often combined into "blix"), wash, and final rinse. From there, it's barely different from black and white - just more steps. My method is to load the film (same as B&W), fill the deep dishpan and start the sous vide, put the bottles in the water, and go do something else for an hour or so to let the bottles warm up. And after you recover from fainting at the price of a Jobo Processor, look on eBay for a "sous vide" cooker - these will maintain a water bath within 1 degree F for hours at a time that keeps your chemicals the right temperature.
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