Simple Tips for Developing Color Film At Home
A number of film shooters know that the best way to develop black and white film is to do it yourself at home. You save so much money, you’re in full control of your development, and you (hopefully) have a bit more fun than you would otherwise. I’ve developed tons of rolls of my own film and I still get a bit giddy whenever I’m pulling the reel out of the tank and getting my first glimpse at the negatives. Honestly, why would you ever want to let someone at a lab develop your film for you?
Color film is quite different. The processes are all standardized, so it doesn’t matter where you take it, and labs offer color film development very inexpensively. While black and white film development costs mere pennies at home, sometimes the cost and longevity of C-41 and E-6 kits can leave you wondering whether you’d be better off sending the film out. After all, a place like Sharp Photo and Portrait will charge you less than two dollars to develop a roll of film, and if you want, you can even pay them to scan the roll, which can save you time and effort at home.
But in the end, you can end up saving money (especially on E-6) if you’re willing to get the color chemistry yourself and change your methods of developing slightly. You’ll also have mastered a new aspect of your craft, and you might even enjoy the process. Rather than walk you through every step to get you started, though, I will offer some simple tips to keep in mind when developing either C-41 or E-6 film so you’ll be less likely to screw up, and ultimately more likely to stick with it if you make a mistake.
1. Save that chemistry!
You might be used to dealing with as little as one storage bottle for your black and white fixer. If you use the Unicolor C-41 kit or the Arista E-6 kit, then be prepared to store three different chemicals for each chemical process. Opaque plastic bottles work well, but you don’t need to invest in the fancy accordion-style bottles. The 1-liter kits, for example, fit quite well in Delta Datatainer quart-size bottles, which you can squeeze lightly on the sides to get all the air out. All the chemicals in these processes are able to be reused for quite a few rolls—maybe 20 or even more—to the point where the investment in the kit will have paid for itself.
And since you’ll be keeping the chemicals for quite some time, go ahead and pay the extra 89 cents to get some distilled water for mixing. You don’t want any tap water impurities to end up ruining your chemicals prematurely.
2. Get ready to warm things up.
As you may know, C-41 and E-6 take place at elevated temperatures. My C-41 kit needs a developer temperature of 102ºF, and E-6 needs 105ºF (That’s about 39 and 40.5 on the Celsius scale, respectively.) The temperatures don’t have to be spot on but drift more than a few degrees in either direction during the development stages, and you might get color shifts.
So, I would recommend that you get a soda cooler that will hold up to all three chemical storage bottles. As long as you have access to tap water that’s hotter than the temperature you’ll need, you can use it to warm up the chemicals. The soda cooler (such as a Coleman) will keep the hot water insulated and make sure most of the heat transfers to your chemicals and not the air in the room.
On that note, you’ll ideally want two thermometers: one for the hot water bath, and one for the first developer bottle. Make sure that the hot water stays above the target temperature. If it doesn’t dump the water and replace it with warmer water. Once the developer thermometer reads the target temperature, you’re ready to start developing.
Personally, I try to get the water coming from my sink faucet to right around the target developer, then I fill my sink with a water bath. When I’m not agitating my tank, I’ll put it in this warm water bath to ensure that heat isn’t lost too quickly. And I’ll use my plastic tanks, not my steel ones, because plastics are a bit better at keeping the developer insulated.
As you can see, though, you don’t need a high-tech setup with a bunch of heating elements and super-tight control of your temperature. A simple, cost-effective approach will work just fine.
Developed in Unicolor C-41 Kit
3. Read the instructions.
Sounds elementary, but the instructions that come with these kits are really helpful when it comes to developing. Once you read through the process, you may want to write down the whole process on a “cheat sheet” that you keep handy while developing. Maybe even laminate it to protect it against water damage. Nothing is worse than forgetting, for example, that you were supposed to wash the film in between the two developer steps of the E-6 process, or that the Blix is the second chemical step in C-41, not the third.
While we’re on that note, I would suggest labelling your chemical bottles thoroughly. For example, don’t just put “Developer” on the first bottle of your C-41 kit. Also label it “C-41 #1.” Put the appropriate time the chemical will be in the tank, and what temperature it’s supposed to be. Sometimes the individual steps can be over before you know it, so take as many steps as you can to prevent thoughtless errors. My first batch of chemistry was ruined, for example, after I started pouring stabilizer into the blix bottle.
If all this sounds too complicated, remember…
4. Don’t be intimidated.
Apart from having to warm up the chemicals beforehand, there’s nothing more difficult about C-41 development, or even E-6. The basic skills of pouring chemicals and agitating the tank are all the same. Many people are needlessly intimidated for a variety of reasons. Maybe they think the temperatures have to be accurate within a single degree, or that the times have to be accurate to within two seconds. In fact, in my experiences, color developing is pretty forgiving if you treat everything with the same careful deliberation that you give your black and white development.
For whatever reason, E-6 seems to have more of a stigma of intimidation than C-41, despite being just as easy to do. Maybe it’s because the cost of the film stock and chemistry are slightly higher, or that you have to gradually add additional time to your first developer. But either one should be easy enough to do. If you feel the need for a confidence-builder, some cheap drugstore film makes for a nice way to get used to C-41 development.
5. Know what you will get in the end.
Be aware that when color film comes out of the tank, it won’t look quite right. When color negative film is hung to dry, it may look a little “milky,” like black and white film that has been improperly fixed. Similarly, color transparency film that I’ve developed has appeared milky blue on one side and milky yellow on the other side. Let the film dry overnight (or at least a few hours) before passing judgement on the success of your development session.
Developed in Arista E-6 Kit
In closing, let me know via comments if you found this encouraging, or if you have more questions about developing your color film at home. I could end up editing this post if need be.
From Hasselblad…
First in a two-parter. I recently sent my faulty Hasselblad film magazine to David Odess for repair. Very not-cheap, but I sold a friend my Canon AE-1 to help pay for it. Why would I sell my AE-1 you ask? Well, when I bought it I had definitely NOT done my research and thought it was a mechanical camera. Turns out it needs a battery to function, and I’ve had a beef with it ever since I bought it. And I was sick of it sitting there asking me why I didn’t love it properly with it’s accusing eyes. Anyway.
The problem I was having was the occasional overlapping frame on whatever roll of film I’d put through the Hasselblad. I noticed that this happened once or twice, so I stopped using the camera until I had the cash (more than a hundred, but not quite two hundred) to get the magazine fixed. Fortunately, a call to David confirmed that the film back was all that I needed to send in – the problem is apparently never with the camera body.
Well, I got the magazine back on a Friday and shot a roll of film in it that night. It was a poker night in Stormstown, and I hadn’t had the pleasure of a poker night in a long time. Much to my dismay, however, the frames were still closely spaced. Not overlapping, but closely spaced. I even took the time to measure them, the average being 3.7 mm, translating to a 1.85-mm border for a roughly 60x60mm image. In my opinion, that’s too close for comfort. My latest camera, a Yashica Mat-124G, produces a much more comfortable frame spacing.
So I e-mailed David and he explained that he replaced some parts that ensured the frames wouldn’t overlap. But unlike the old Kiev camera I performed surgery on, there’s no adjustment for spacing the frames farther apart. You have to start replacing parts at that point, and it can get very expensive. Since the original frame overlap problem was fixed, I’m going to just consider the matter settled, even though I thought the frames were going to have a bit more of a buffer between them.
Of course, I’m going to keep my eye on the film that comes out of this camera, and hopefully there won’t be any problems.
Shots from the first test roll, for which I finally used my Unicolor C-41 kit:
Redscale!
There’s a fairly popular cult movement in film photography known as Redscale. I listen to the Film Photography Podcast religiously, and redscale film was discussed very early on – in episode one, actually – more than a year ago. (See John Milleker’s photo that sparked the discussion.) I originally thought the photos I saw were far too red, and wondered why anyone would want to shoot it. So I put it on my personal “back burner” of photography projects.
So what am I talking about? Basically, color negative film is loaded into the canister backwards – though to be fair, I suppose it could be done with 120 or sheet film too. This means that rather than sensitizing the light-sensitive emulsion directly, light must pass through the orange mask of the acetate base to reach the emuslion. This essentially gives you a severe red/orange filter for free. Theoretically, you could have a 100′ reel of color negative film that you purposefully wind backwards, but I’ve never seen any long spools for sale. Instead, there are a number of internet tutorials on how to redscale your film by transferring the film from one 35mm canister to another.
See the step-by-step tutorials I found here and here. Personally, I followed the steps in the first tutorial. Since I originally heard about the technique, I also learned that Lomography now produces pre-redscaled film for sale. But I didn’t like the idea of paying Lomography prices and not knowing what was going into the rolls.
So why did I finally visit redscale? Because as I saw more and more redscale photos, I saw some shades of green and blue. They were actually colorful! The tutorials above both recommend exposing the film one stop more than you the film’s original rating to compensate for the light lost to the acetate layer. But because negative film has such a mammoth exposure latitude, you can still get plenty of detail when you overexpose. Overexposure on correctly-loaded C-41 film is a common practice for wedding or portrait photographers to smooth skin tones. It’s difficult to do this with slide film and impossible to do with digital. I noticed that most images that I disliked had very rich blacks and fairly dense highlights. So, I thought that maybe a good solution would be to overexpose.
Then, I saw this comparison of exposure settings for redscale film. It is a test of redscaled Fuji Superia 400 rated at 100. Right off the bat, the film is given two stops of exposure compensation rather than the one stop as recommended in the tutorials above. In addition, it seemed like the more muted tonality I was going for is a result of further overexposure by a stop or two. So, I followed the tutorial with some Fuji Superia X-Tra 400 that I picked up at Wal-mart. The original film was rated at ISO 400, and I rated it at ISO 50 – a full three stops of compensation.
I shot two of my three rolls of film at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in Washington, DC this past weekend. When I came back, I took the film to CVS for a quick development ($4.35 total, I think it was). When I got my negatives back, though, I noticed that some of the felt must have come off and dirtied the film. So, my scans have a bit of white spots. Still, they look pretty awesome, I think. Note: these are straight scans from the EPSONscan software with just a little bit of color temperature adjustment in Adobe Lightroom.
