Well, the wait is over. I’ve developed, edited and now posted my first roll of C41 color film. I bought a few expired Fuji Superia 400 rolls a while back and stuck them in my freezer until I was ready. The first spring flowering seemed like a great time to get started with C41.
I bought the developer kit a while ago. C41 color developing has to be done at 102ºF. I originally going to do a hot bath with water out of the tap in a cooler, but I wanted to make sure the temperature was consistent and precise, so I got a temperature control system form CineStill. It’s just an electroboiler attached to a water circulator, but it does make developing easier and more consistent.
The colors are vibrant and the contrast is really good as well. I’m using a different scanner for the color negatives. It’s an Epson Perfection Photo V600. I did some scans using the older scanner I used for the black and white photos, but the unwanted artifacts in the negative were not easy to edit out. Also the color balance was off significantly. The new scanner takes care of it like a champ and I had much less editing to do.
Some came out of the scanner better than others. This one was from the old scanner with color balance manually adjusted. It was underexposed and a bit more tricky to adjust. The rest of the pictures are with the new scanner.
I really like some of these macro shots. I used a 28mm to 85mm zoom lens that has a macro mode built in.
I couldn’t ask for better results for my first roll. I definitely want to experiment more with this and hopefully we’ll get some interesting pictures and results.
As a side note, the original C41 developing process required a stabilizer bath to fix the dyes to the film. This last part included formaldehyde and some other hazardous chemicals. Starting in the 80s, producers of C41 film started to include stabilizers in the film. This made it so smaller photo labs could process the film without handling with hazardous chemicals. Now all you have to do is develop, bleach, fix and rinse the film. The C41 kit from CineStill combines bleach and fix (blix), so its very similar to the black and white 2 bath process… just at 102ºF.
Development Details
- Film: Fuji Superia 400
- Camera ISO setting: 400
- Developer: CineStill C41 Developer at 102ºF
- Development Time: 3.5 Minutes
- Development Agitation: Kodak Style (5x inversions every 30 seconds)