c41 noob, fresh chems, having issues...

[NukePity]

after wasting roll after roll i'm trying to really dial in my c41 development. can someone please tell me what's going on here?

these shots are from a superia 200 test roll fresh off the scanner (vuescan) with no processing or color adjustments...

http://imgur.com/a/VAxhB

the indoor shots are ok i suppose, but the one of the cigar box looks unsaturated with bad colors.

the flower shots are very screwy for some reason. the presence of flowers seems to be the catalyst.

the other outdoor shots are better but with what-appears-to-me-as unsaturated colors.

after this roll i developed an ektar 120 roll at a full degree lower temp, but the colors came out worse and more unsaturated with negs that were red or magenta. so maybe i should go warmer?

my temperature control is probably good at this point. i'm using a cheap digital thermometer (Taylor 9842), lunch cooler in my kitchen sink for reservoir holding my 1L bottles. The reservoir temperature seems a full degree higher than the bottled solutions, maybe even slightly more (does this make sense?). I typically add some hot water from a shot glass every minute or so to keep the reservoir .2 degrees within 103f which should keep the solutions close to 102f.

 

[splitimageview]

they look ok to me except for the third, this may not be a development issue but a scan issue

 

[NukePity]

they look ok to me except for the third, this may not be a development issue but a scan issue

i should've pointed out that the 2nd shot was in full midday sun. it behaves the least, and seems impervious to any attempt at fixing up in photoshop, at least the flowers won't look right no matter what. maybe superia isn't the right type of film for those shots, and the strange cast is from vuescan's color correction.

 

[michaelwj]

The development looks fine. I wouldn't mess with the temperature or times.
If I were you I'd spend some time in Vuescan and post-scan. 1st thing, in Vuescan you can change the film type/brand, sometimes that works. Also what colour space are you scanning in? This will have an influence. Next is to adjust the white balance in LR/PS to get it looking right - it might take some practice, but you should be able to get it sorted.
Don't forget film is colour balanced to a particular light colour temperature. I assume you're not using filters to compensate for this? If so than make sure you're using the right one, if not you'll need to adjust the white balance.

I find I need to adjust the white balance on all my colour shots, developed at home or the lab.

Edit: Only the second and third ones look bad. They weren't in midday sun - I can't see a hard shadow anywhere. They look to be in overcast/shade, and don't forget that shadows are blue, not neutral.

 

[dmr]

I'm a C41 n00b too, so I'm paying careful attention to threads like this.

In the example photos, the only ones that look kinda wonky to me are those of the window box, and please keep in mind that the monitor here at home is far from being accurately calibrated. The reds look blown out to me, maybe overexposed or clipped in scanning? The one of the window boxes with the pipes below looks to me like it's lit by skylight and thus the blueish cast. The third from the bottom seems to be saturated or clipped on the red as well, but not as bad.

That's my opinion anyway. 🙂

 

[David Murphy]

The photos look pretty good to me. The one in the deep shade may have a color temperature problem when shot - normal for color film with out correction filters of artificial light supplements, but it can be corrected to a fair degree by "warming" it in post-processing. Keep at it - you are doing pretty good!

 

[brbo]

And you have no issues like that when you scan film that was developed elsewhere?

 

[FujiLove]

These look fine to me except the third one which has an obvious colour cast. This is almost certainly a scanning issue, as a development issue would affect all the images.

Having said that, things to improve your development:

1. keep the temperature as close to 38C / 100.4F as possible. Don't screw around with that.

2. throw out the chemicals if you suspect they are exhausted or when you have processed the manufacturers recommended volume of film.

3. Pre-warm the empty (but loaded) tank for 5 minutes before starting the dev stage.

4. Don't pre-warm the film and tank with water. I found this can lead to streaked images.

5. Include draining time in your 3:15 development time. Takes me about 8 seconds to drain my Jobo tanks.

6. If you're using blix, use a 2% acetic acid stop bath after the dev stage, then 2 x washes of warm water before starting the blix. I don't use a stop when I run separate bleach and fix. Don't know where I read not to bother, but it seems to work for me.

7. Blix, bleach and fix stages are not as critical as the dev stage, and they need to run to completion. Longer times within reason don't do any harm, so you should run them a bit longer than the recommended times. I usually add 90 seconds, or more if the chemicals are being re-used.

8. Don't agitate the stabiliser or it will foam like crazy. I run that stage in an open tray by moving the film back and forth through it for a couple of minutes.

I think scanning is a bit like plumbing: best left to the professionals. Sure, you can learn to do it, but it's very time consuming, a huge pain in the arse, and you often end up with stuff that looks amateurish. If you can process film, you can wet print no problem. It's much more fun than scanning 🙂

 

[ForestCap]

Most of them look good to me, I would say you did not mess up with the developing. The ones with red flowers are too blue.

Which scanning software do you use? I use VueScan and keep the Auto Level on, it gives nice results 90% of the time. Occasionally I too get "too blue" images. I simply -10 Brightness for blue in Color Balance in whatever editing software.

Don't get obsessed with getting the "correct colour" with colour negatives. Even the "correct colour" is achieved by colour shifting, massively 🙂 . As long as the colour fits your eyes, your mother-in-law's eyes, or whoever you want to please, then it's fine.

Shot on Kodak Ektar 100, developed in Tetenal C41 kit. Scanned by PlusTek 7200 with VueScan. I want to buy a 8200i....


Scan-160917-0012-2 by X. Yang, 於 Flickr

 

[FujiLove]

Don't get obsessed with getting the "correct colour" with colour negatives. Even the "correct colour" is achieved by colour shifting, massively 🙂 . As long as the colour fits your eyes, your mother-in-law's eyes, or whoever you want to please, then it's fine.

This is an important point. All final images from colour negatives are interpreted from the negative. The negative is only an intermediate step. You have to decide what you want the final image to look like, whether you are trying to match what you remember seeing when you took the photograph, or something completely different, it's up to you.

If you want the colours to be final, use positive film. And even then the colours you see depend upon the light you use to illuminate the slides.