B/W negative from colour film

[giellaleafapmu]

Dear Folks,

due to my lack of time I have not posted at all for ages; I have been lurking from time to time but I prefer to use my time to actually take pictures...

Well, I come to the question. I remember it once existed a Kodak technical publication about developing a color film to obtain a B/W negative (I think they proposed that as a way to rescue a color film if it was accidentally soacked into B/W developper), however I could no longer find that publication in the web. Does any of you have the file?

I remember that the process was somehow similar to the usual one but at some point one had to wash out the dye, I can no longer remember using what, I also think that if one wanted to try there was some exposure adjustment to be made...

I have "inherited" a lot of very out of date 4x5" film which produces very strange color casts and I would like to try that as B/W film in my pihole cameras.

Thanks in advance,

GLF

PS
Does anyone know whether one can do something similar also to slide film?

 

[keithwms]

I don't recall the publication you mention but I'll offer some nutty thoughts because I played around with this a bit and didn't want to try cross processing or dye washing etc. 😉

I have had some success printing colour slide film to b&w, just by making an internegative. In the easiest/least expensive approach I simply made a paper internegative, which of course shouldn't be a good idea because of the lack of red sensitivity of the paper, but... it worked surprisingly well for some of my chromes. Better would be to make an internegative using a b&w film with full red sensitivity. There are also ra4 papers that have red sensitivity but they only come in rolls so that probably isn't a solution for you. Anyway if you enlarge 4x5 to 8x10 to make an interneg then you can do 8x10 contacts... very nice and you won't see any ill effect from such a small enlargement....

Of course you could also scan colour slides or negs and then make a digital neg, that is quite easy and allows you to curve in a very flexible way. It really works well and you still get tonable, traditional output.

Another nutty thing you can do is print to polaroid, that can yield very interesting results especially for emulsions lifts or transfers. You can of course print to b&w polaroid and that can be very nice and unique even if your capture film is way outdated.

Sorry, I probably didn't address your question, just thought I'd share some of my own tinkering ....

 

[oftheherd]

Actually, I think Keithwms did sort of address your problem. I have never tried it, but the cross processing he mentioned should yield lots of results with a search either on these forums, or on the i'net.

Good luck. Show us some results.