Red 25 Filter on Color film, a mistake with some nice results

[DrTebi]

I recently made the mistake and shot almost an entire roll of color negative film with a RED 25 filter, which, as I know now, is really only most useful when shooting black and white film.

However, after discovering all those red images in my scans, I tried out a few things to save the pictures. I eventually found a nice way to convert them to black and white, which worked quite well for a lot of the images.

I used "The GIMP" for Ubuntu Linux, although the same is possible with Photoshop. However I found that GIMP did somehow a better job.

This is what I did:
- Open the image
- Color -> Components -> Decompose... (default settings are OK)

A new image will be created at this point, which is a black and white version, but doesn't look that great yet. But the following steps turned out to work wonders:
- Duplicate the red layer
- Drag the duplicated layer to the bottom of all layers
- Change the "Mode" of the top red layer to "Overlay"

This usually already looks really good. If not, tweaking the opacity of the red/green/blue layers a bit can improve the image further.

I thought this was a neat way to save those mistakingly made red images, and thought I would share it here.

Here the original of the Madrid image:

Here the results, click on an image to see a larger version. All were shot with my Yashica Electro 35 GSN on Kodak Ektar 100 film, scanned by Dwayne's (Noritsu scanner):

 

[jamesdfloyd]

I like the results...

 

[sevo]

Yep, works pretty much like a chromogenic b+w film with red filter - you can also separate each colour layer in scanning, for quite a similar effect as red, green or blue filters. Overall better than the generally rather flat results from a three-colour to black and white conversion.

 

[c.poulton]

Hehe, maybe this is a new way to shoot B+W? Great results. I think that I would have given up and binned the film!