Don't get me wrong, I love my Jobo stuff. But there's many ways, the easiest and neatest are these sous vide things. When I was in 8th grade, I bought E2 in half gallon size and developed my first Ektachrome. I used 1/2 gallon glass Mason canning jars. The 2 liter soda bottle was still at least 15 years into the future. I wrote to Rochester, there were no instructions, some tech service guy copied probably 100 pages and sent it to me in a huge envelope.And after you recover from fainting at the price of a Jobo Processor, look on eBay for a "sous vide" cooker -- these will maintain a water bath within 1 degree F for hours at a time; that keeps your chemicals the right temperature.
My method is to load the film (same as B&W), fill the deep dishpan and start the sous vide, put the bottles in the water, and go do something else for an hour or so to let the bottles warm up. From there, it's barely different from black and white -- just more steps. For C-41, it's not even necessarily more steps, since most kits combine the bleach and fixer to make "blix" -- developer, optional stop bath or water rinse, blix, wash just like B&W (only in warmer water) and final rinse which does the same job as PhotoFlo, but isn't as optional (it preserves the film as well as preventing water spots).
For E-6, there's an additional "first developer," stop bath (highly recommended, since this needs to be a precise level of development), water wash to remove the acid, fogging bath and color developer (often combined in kits), bleach, fix (same as C-41, often combined into "blix"), wash, and final rinse.
To paraphrase a juggler I saw once, this is not more difficult, it just has more steps.
In some ways, C-41 is simpler than black and white -- because everything gets the exact same process. No looking up a Massive Dev Chart, deciding what dilution to use, wondering if the other dev chart having a significantly different time means that one is right, or this one is, doing a power calculation to correct for the fact your darkroom won't get down to 20C for another two months (and then it'll be 13C most of the winter)... C-41 is always 38C/100F (usually done as a drift-through starting at 39C/102F) for 3:15, always same bleach time, always same fix time, no matter what C-41 film you're processing. If I had a little warming cabinet (opposite of a dorm fridge) to keep my chemical bottles in, I could process a tank of C-41 in about a half hour, from turning off the light to load the film to hanging it to dry.
Avoid the temptation to add to all the stuff. I buy Flexicolor chemistry from Unique photo in NJ. Not sure if you are using the Flexicolor C-41RA Bleach and fixer. This is for minilab fast process. Bleach 1 minute Fixer 1.5 minutes.,wash 3 minutes then Flexicolor final rinse@W_Taylor76 I was in your shoes just a few months ago and my C41 negatives came out great, even better than some labs I had been using. I started by buying the Cinestill C41 Kit (liquid), their temperature control tool and just followed the instructions. Here's my routine:
This was my "routine #1". It's dead-simple, reproducible and it worked really well.
- Heat up the water bath to 103F using their sous vide tool.
- Keep the bottles with chemicals in the bath, they should reach 103F as well. The reason it's 103F and not the 100F is because you'll inevitably lose some temperature when pouring the developer into a tank.
- Get the blix and rinse out and put aside. They will cool down a bit but it doesn't matter.
- Start the development using their instructions (I agitated by inversion, every 30 seconds, keeping the tank partially submerged in the water bath in-between)
Here's a shot from my very first C41 roll:
View attachment 257419
After I exhausted the Cinestill kit, I have switched to Kodak's Flexicolor chemistry. The process is a bit more complicated as you have one more step (bleach & fix are separate) and buying and mixing Flexicolor is super annoying, but it's much, much cheaper per roll and some people report improvements in image quality, although TBH I haven't noticed vs the Cinestill Kit, maybe because I didn't abuse it and developed only 6 rolls in it.
I looked into buying a JOBO, but decided to curb my consumerism. The consistency you get with a sous vide is pretty good, but you have to work a bit harder (juggling chems in/out of the water bath, agitating every 30 seconds, etc). In my mind JOBO makes sense if you're doing more than 2 tanks per session, which is not my case.
Doing your own C-41 can save you a lot of money. Step one is to ignore the manufacturer's estimate of the number of rolls you can process. I use the dry-powder kits from Unicolor or FPP (they seem to be the same) and mix up a liter of chemistry at a time. I immediately divide this into to sets of 500mL brown glass bottles. 500 mL is enough to immerse one roll of film up to 120 size. I can soup ten rolls with each set of bottles, for a total of 20 from the whole kit. (I've gotten more than 30 in the past, but I like to err on the side of caution.) Shelf life can be anywhere from 4 months to 6, although some people I know have stored it longer. I define a roll as anything from a roll of 35mm to 127, 120 or two sheets of 5x7 in a Unicolor drum. How much does your lab charge?
... not to mention turning a moderately tough eye-of-round into some of the best deli-style roast beef you've ever had. Takes about 20 hours, though.
Care to share the procedure?
a little too tender for sandwiches,
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