Experiment: Shooting ECP film and developing in RA-4

[FilmCurlCom]

Hi!

Few days ago I cut 1.6m off a 20m ECP roll I have at home and loaded that into a 135 cartridge.
With it I shot a few pictures directly, with the rest of the roll I photographed inverted images off my screen (kind of like a film-out), inverted ones shall show up as positives on the ECP, additionally I played with various filters on my lens.

I developed the resulting film with a RA-4 developer and C-41 Blix and Stab (what I sometimes do for ECN-2 films, as an approximation of ECN-2 chemistry, but now I tried the same for ECP). Yes, I know the chemistry is even more off than between ECN-2 and RA-4, but I wanted to see what happens.

See attached a comparison of the original positive image (that was still inverted before photographing it) and the resulting image exactly how it looks on the ECP film. I did not expect that all of my images would turn the same kind of yellow, almost like black&yellow, as shown here. When I play with the results on my PC, I can get some hints of colors besides the yellow, but not many. Would be interesting to find out from some of you experts here, why it turns out exactly like this!

Bernhard

 

[Photo Engineer]

ECP is tungsten balanced and has a further offset in balance for the orange mask in ECN. Did you take this into account?

PE

 

[FilmCurlCom]

Yes, I thought about that and shot both with and without a 85 filter on the lens, had also some images artifically processed on the PC to be very blue, very orange or look like they had some negative masked overlayed. And finally, one of them even actually was a scan of a Kodak Intermediate film.
But still all of the resulting images are yellow as seen above, that really surpised me, that none of them was "closer" to "real" colors.

Bernhard

 

[Photo Engineer]

Well then, all I can say is that the RA4 developer was not designed for ECP film.

You might try a development time series increasing the development time.

PE

 

[Mogsby]

I have also tried this!
I got the same results! all yellow.
You were on a thread about contact printing onto 2383 I think!. JoJo on here was very helpful in explaining the colour layers of the film and what filtering is needed for contact printing. With his guidance I finaly managed to get close to a good contact print using 80Y + 40M on the enlarger.
So, from what i learned from contact printing the pos film, maybe when shooting it for stills you need to use lots of yellow filter on the lens to start with and a long exposure. Or maybe its just not possible to do!. I'm getting low on 2383 (trying to find more) else I would do some more experimants myself.
I do know that the RA4 chem's are no good for ECP film, I already tried that ages ago. ECN2 is the best I found so far.

 

[FilmCurlCom]

I will get a small amount of ECN-2 (2 liters) today. Will use it first to develop some Kodak EXR and some Fuji Eterna I shot recently, but afterwards I can try some ECP again. I think I have a few meters left still. I got it from a lab half a year ago or so, quite cheap. Just ask some labs near you, I got 20 meters on a core, much cheaper than any negative film.
Bernhard