ECN-2 Troubleshooting

[Koen Van Crombrugghe]

I recently developed my first batch of film with the Bellini ECN-2 1l kit and the resulting negatives all have a very strong color cast as you can see in these samples:



It's not possible to correct the white balance to obtain normal skin tones.

In total I developed 11 rolls of different film stocks (Vision3 50D; Vision3 250D) and shot on different camera's with both manual and automatic exposure and all have the same color cast.
8 rolls were developed in a large tank with continuous agitation (manual drum process) and 3 rolls were developed in a small tank with intermittent agitation. All rolls were developed on the same day, immediately after mixing the solutions.

I assume the development process or chemicals are to blame. All temperatures and times are as instructed by Bellini, however the temperature control on the developer may have been +/-0.5 degrees in stead of the instructed +/-0.2 degrees as I cannot control the temperature quite as tight. I would not expect these extreme color shifts from a small temperature deviation.

The Bellini ECN-2 kit was bought about one year ago so it has been sitting idle (unmixed) for nearly a year now. It's possible that the storage temperature has been around 30°C for several days.
Can the ageing of the chemicals cause this issue?

Any ideas what might have gone wrong?

I would like to repeat the process with fresh chemicals but I have to shoot some film first and I don't want to waste the next batch

 

[eatfrog]

Please show some pictures of the negatives. And how were these images scanned?

 

[eatfrog]

After tweaking the color balance I think they look pretty good.

 

[Koen Van Crombrugghe]

Please show some pictures of the negatives. And how were these images scanned?

These are some of the negatives:


I scanned them with my Nikon Coolscan 4000, I never had these issues with C41.

 

[Koen Van Crombrugghe]

After tweaking the color balance I think they look pretty good.
View attachment 278089 View attachment 278090

I can make them look better in Lightroom but skin tones are never truly pink and vegetation is never really green.
I'm not saying I don't like the result but I believe Kodak Vision 3 should be able to render a neutral picture, and this effect should be by choice

 

[eatfrog]

These are some of the negatives:
View attachment 278091

I scanned them with my Nikon Coolscan 4000, I never had these issues with C41.

I don't see anything obviously out of order here.

It might be that the scanner is a little confused by the ecn2 negs, since they are a bit flatter and can have a different colored orange mask. In my experience ecn2 negs are lower contrast and need more tweaking to produce good images than C41. But that is also how they were intended to be used.

I have no experience with the bellini kit, but I have noticed that mixed ECN2 developer goes bad very quickly. I usually use it within a week and then ditch it. However, concentrates seem to last a very long time.

 

[halfaman]

These are some of the negatives:
View attachment 278091

I scanned them with my Nikon Coolscan 4000, I never had these issues with C41.

What about cyan dye? I can barely see any cyan in your negatives but could be just a wrong impression of your photo. Compare with good C41 negatives and if you can't see cyan dye or just a very low density where it should be (red colored things) then someting wrong happened with the chemistry, incomplete bleach being one of them.

 

[koraks]

scanned them with my Nikon Coolscan 4000, I never had these issues with C41.

ECN2 negatives are not equivalent to C41 negatives. The gamma is different and so is the color balance. Hence, crossover issues can occur if you process ECN2 negatives as if they were C41. Basically, all bets are off. Sometimes you get something fairly natural, sometimes you don't.

 

[Koen Van Crombrugghe]

What about cyan dye? I can barely see any cyan in your negatives but could be just a wrong impression of your photo. Compare with good C41 negatives and if you can't see cyan dye or just a very low density where it should be (red colored things) then someting wrong happened with the chemistry, incomplete bleach being one of them.

Actually what I'm noticing is that there's hardly any magenta in the negatives.
Which would be logical as the biggest issue is with the rendering of green.

For comparison here's the first scene shot with a DSLR:


Here a comparison between a C41 (top) and ECN-2 negative:


The lack of magenta is clear and the negative seems generally underdeveloped compared to the C41

So does this mean that the issue occurred during the development or something was wrong with the chemicals?
I'm pretty sure the development time and developer temperatures were within acceptable limits.

 

[halfaman]

I agree that negatives seem underdeveloped, at least for C41 standards, but it is strange that you have no magenta dye. Green/Magenta layer is between the other two. You have some cyan dye, which is in the deepest layer, but no magenta dye which is in the layer just above cyan and more available to the developer.