developing c41 in black and white chemistry

[msbarnes]

This is just for fun. I do not plan on doing this normally unless the results are surprisingly "better" than my current black and white films.

How would I go about doing this? I have the following developers: rodinal, d76, hc-110.

Anyone have experience doing this? Suggested developers and times?

It's just that I have a few mystery rolls from some old cameras that I do not care to pay to get developed or going out of my way too much to do so (e.g. buying other devleopers/chemicals), so I thought that I'd soup them up with my current chemicals just for fun.

 

[Ed Weatherly]

I just tried this experiment last week. I used D76 and my normal development process; 9.75 minutes with agitation every minute. My negatives came out pretty dark. I printed several of themand needed about 45 seconds at f8. The tonality I got was really good and I think it is definitely worth pursuing more. My film was just generic C41 from the dollar store.

Give it a try and let us know how you do and how you like the results.

Best of luck!

 

[MirekE]

You will most likely get very dark negative (the base won't be transparent). Color negative films include layers that form the orange-brown mask and you won't be able to remove that with B&W processing.

Concentrated developers might work better than diluted. If the resulting coloration looks like it was formed with silver, Farmer's reducer might reduce it and make printing easier.

 

[Ed Weatherly]

I definitely noticed a dark base that was semi opaque. It took very long exposure to get the negs to print well- about 45 seconds. But the tonality was excellent. The time in developer, stop, and fix baths was identical to the trip negs I printed at the same time.