c41 insane contrast and dull pinks

[jm94]

I developed a roll of portra 800 yesterday in C41. I do quite a bit of E6 processing and have no problems, but this... Was not the result I expected. First off, I know the temperature was a little bit too high. I realised it had gone up to 39.5 C when the water I used to heat the bath suddenly went boiling hot as my housemate turned up the wrong dial on our boiler while the tap was running as the temperature had fell to 36.9, and only noticed too late!

After development bleach fix and wash etc I stabilised it,the stabilizer left horrible drying marks, so I rewashed and used the e6 stabilizer, the only final rise apart from water than I know of that actually works and doesn't leave a single mark.

I began to print via RA4 on supra III which was stored at -18 since new, which I bought 3 rolls oflast year, the guy kindy delevered them all for £40 and £5 for fuel. and when I moved to bath, had my parents freeze it and then send me a roll a year down the line which i got yesterday and cut loads of sheets with my rotary cutter darkroom guillotine. Not perfect sizes but I can cut them down afterwards. I bought them I case I got into ra4 printing properly and tested two sheets worth only from 1 roll when I got them, they came out brilliant.

The paper works very well on my 'test' negative, a bike photo.

Many of these photos came out very saturated, skin tones were horrible and very yellowed, and contrast was extremely high. Now I think it MAY have been insufficient bleaching and wonder if that might have caused the problem. Pinks came out very dull, and finding a good filter pack to print well was very, very difficult, a change of 5m /y would change the cast to a much larger degree than I have seen! I used the tetenal 2 bath kit but I prefer separate bleach and fix so that's what I worked with, I didn't mix the blix halves. The spider on one of the photos that has my housemate behind came out perfect, as did the web, but the skin tones were shocking, too much yellow with insane contrast to them! The wooden silver picture frame in one of the photos had a slight yellow tinge and looked very dull.
The borders of the prints are still white as white, ruling out age-fog, plus other stuff prints well on the stuff, but finding the right filter pack takes some experimenting.

Now I think I might have messed up the developing majorly and maybe one or more of the colour layers were not well developed, the cyan? Layer... also cannot rule out bad bleach as it looks somewhat like bleach bypass in some ways as well.

Any ideas? The roll was not too crucial but at the same time I could do with good prints from the roll as they were ones I wanted to keep! E6 I can do well, but c41 I still have some learning to do!

Any advice would be greatly appreciated Seeing as the only good lab around here that can do my negatives well has closed down, I had to start C41 at home! Boots and other mainstream stores scratch them, jessops wanted £5 for NEGATIVES Only! I never got into c41 in my old town as I knew the best lab there well who did them for £1 a roll, very cost effective and perfect negs every time. Was more cost effective than doing them at home for my volume at the time.

I might also try rebleaching And fixing when I get home...

 

[Gerald C Koch]

First off, I know the temperature was a little bit too high. I realised it had gone up to 39.5 C when the water I used to heat the bath suddenly went boiling hot as my housemate turned up the wrong dial on our boiler while the tap was running as the temperature had fell to 36.9, and only noticed too late!

This is a significant temperature increase. I would speculate that it is the cause of your problems.

 

[amac212]

I suspect your temperature change affected the development. The three layers must reach the optimum temps at the same time or you get color casts and crossover.
At lower temperatures, you'll find that by the time the cyan (bottom) layer is properly developed, the yellow (top) layer is overdeveloped. Maintaining temperature for that short window is critical.

 

[wildbill]

hmmm...........First off, I know the temperature was a little bit too high. I realised it had gone up to 39.5 C when the water I used to heat the bath suddenly went boiling hot as my housemate turned up the wrong dial on our boiler while the tap was running as the temperature had fell to 36.9, and only noticed too late!

 

[Rudeofus]

I used the tetenal 2 bath kit but I prefer separate bleach and fix so that's what I worked with, I didn't mix the blix halves. The spider on one of the photos that has my housemate behind came out perfect, as did the web, but the skin tones were shocking, too much yellow with insane contrast to them! The wooden silver picture frame in one of the photos had a slight yellow tinge and looked very dull.

I have seen a report where creating two separate bathes from Tetenal's BLIX components did not work well for E6. Unless you are 100% sure you can do that without repercussions I would strongly recommend against this. There is a high chance you had insufficient bleaching from this as a result.

 

[jm94]

I developed another two rolls of ektar, (well two halves for two seperate shoots) over the past two days, they came out perfect! It must have been the temperature change that affected development as stated, the bleach was okay. I never did find a good filter pack for the botched ones, the reds were totally shot! I was certain the temperature had botched it in some way but it was impossible to recover from!

I printed both new shoots and got perfect results! I will add I require much less filtration for home processed ones, and also impressed my college tutor with sky photos as in my write up for my sketchbook I adjusted the Y filtration more and less to increase/decrease the intensity blue in the sky, with a colour wheel to describe it.

The bleach seems fine I was put off doing colour neg development a year ago due to temps and the cheap good local lab, but it's easy once one has the hang of it, E6 is fun and easy too, but I manly use that for super-8.

I'll let this topic show for anyone who is starting colour, it's easy, but temperature is CRITICAL. I had always read that using the two blix halves was fine, where did you read that?

Jacob

 

[Rudeofus]

(there was a url link here which no longer exists) in which user naugastyle describes his experience with C41 and split BLIX. Yes, it was C41, not E6 as I incorrectly wrote before. The reason why I wouldn't split a BLIX is that a bleach needs a halogenide salt to form silver halogenide which then gets dissolved in the fixer bath, whereas a BLIX forms soluble silver complex right away. Therefore I would expect insufficient bleaching with your split bath. You can use tests for retained silver like selenium toner to test this.

I am very surprised that processing at +2°C causes such a disastrous result, since Tetenal's instructions even provide super fast processing times for yet higher temperatures. The contrast will be higher and the colors will be off, since you don't follow the kit instructions that way, but it's interesting to know that the result from this turns out completely unusable.