Impressed on Tetenal C-41 chems mixed 3.5 months ago

Wow Harry, the color looks great.

Chris Douglas said:

I wish RA-4 lasted like this. A couple of weeks and its a mess...It makes me wonder why C-41 lasts so much longer than RA-4.

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How are you storing it? I store all my chemistry in glass canning jars filled to the top and right now I have both C-41 and RA-4 chemistry mixed in early 2008 and it is still giving results as good as fresh. There has been little change in color. Many use plastic but I don't believe there is anything better than glass. Try it, it works!

RPC

My RA-4 lasts just fine too. I kill the developer through capacity before it goes bad for both C-41 and RA-4. Surprisingly the blix always lasts longer than the developer while I was told it would be the first to go.

+1 to everyone who suggests the chemicals last much longer than stated.
I am on my 27th roll, I have developed mostly 120 col. negatives, a few 35mm and 5 or 6 Xpro fujichrome Velvia. Still very happy with the results.

It's hard to know if what I'm seeing is an accurate color rendition when viewing an image online, but all of those images appear to have a green cast to me, mkillmer. Do your originals have that same greenish cast?

I use a dark bottle for the developer, but just plain (but thick) PET bottles for the blix and stabilizer. I store them in a closed cupboard.

SkipA said:

It's hard to know if what I'm seeing is an accurate color rendition when viewing an image online, but all of those images appear to have a green cast to me, mkillmer. Do your originals have that same greenish cast?

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Hi SkipA,
it's really hard to tell about the colour cast because my scanner does a white balance on the film, so I dont really see the originals. I have an older epson 1660 that changes the colour balance depending on the image every time I select a portion of the film to be scanned.
How can I tell if there is a latent colour cast?
Mark

The three images in post #79 appear weird to me as well. Picture one seems to have a pronounced green cast, the metal structure in the foreground should probably appear grey. The second one is tricky, the concrete on the ground might have taken some green overtone (moss, lichen) and the bronze (?) sphere might receive a green reflection from the concrete floor, but overall I would suspect a green cast. Besides, the magenta look of the sky might be due to the sunset hour, although one normally sees this in the West sky, and if this is sunset, judging from the shadows the sky is more a South sky. The third picture is the weirdest: the sky is skyblue on top, but there is this magenta overcast over the clouds. The lower part appears to be greenish - yellowish but that might be a false impression because there is no clear grey we can judge.

Overall I would say that chemicals last much longer than stated, provided you don't mix them with water

Judging colour shades on the monitor can be done if:

Both monitors are "calibrated" using a device such as those produced by ColorVision, etc. at the very least.
The work-flow is colour-corrected and the image file embeds a colour profile, at best.

Failing that, what I see on my screen will not match, if not by chance, what somebody else sees. The same image which would have a magenta cast on one of my monitor will have a green cast on my laptop.

Calibrating monitors is enough for most uses, monitors have to be of decent quality.

Many stock agencies strip colour profile informations, this makes no sense to me, but it is a demonstration that if both photographer and final client work on calibrated monitors, what you see is pretty close to what the final client sees.

If calibration is not applied and profiles are not used, it might easily be that somebody's monitor has a certain e.g. magenta cast. The photographer prepares a scan for the web (for us) and balances it so that greys are greys and whites are whites on his monitor. When we see his pictures, we on average will see a green cast.

They look green and a bit flat to me too (on my reasonably-close-to-calibrated monitor), but that could be just poor choice of scanning settings. It could also be due to use of the AdobeRGB colour space, which most browsers don't support even if the image is correctly tagged. However, that could easily be down to the scans.

Scans say little to nothing about the quality of the chems - we'd need to know if (for example) the print-filter settings have drifted between the first and last rolls. And in particular, whether a test-chart looked any different. As the colour developer goes bad, I could easily imagine that the couplers started failing at different rates for different layers, and non-linearly, i.e. maybe cause a loss of speed in the highlights of one layer but not another, leading to subtle crossover (different colour balance in the highlights than the shadows). Those sorts of effects would not be immediately obvious in landscape snapshots.

Which leads to an unrelated conclusion: if you do everything hybrid, you can probably correct for exhausted developer in post! (and I say this as someone who intends to start RA-4 printing "soon")

It has been years since I've done any RA-4 printing. I never managed to get good at it, but I'm sure I've forgotten what little I thought I knew at the time. I found it very tedious and frustrating and difficult to get good colors on paper, and I was using fresh paper and fresh chemicals and printing commercially developed film. This time I'll be doing my own C41 developing too, which is why I'm reading threads like this one.

I have a Jobo Tetenal C41 Press Kit that must be 6 or 8 years old. It's unopened, so hopefully it'll still be usable. I doubt I'll push it much beyond its published capacity, even though several people in this thread report that it is just keeps going like the Energizer bunny. I know I'm going to have a hard enough time printing without having to deal with unusual color shifts.

Diapositivo said:

Overall I would say that chemicals last much longer than stated, provided you don't mix them with water

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Interesting... why do you say not to dilute them? I had to dilute my developer because it ran out and wouldnt cover the 120 film!!
As for the colour cast... well - it may be just my eye as I do often reset the white balance (maybe I have green eyes - who knows).

I think the comment about hybrid fixing most issues is true. The biggest problem i seem to have is gettting the correct exposure with my old cameras - they only have one setting (1/30 s) so I can be busy in lightroom sometimes.

I forgot when I bought my E-6 kit, that must have been around January 2010. The kit was sealed but had a quite old manufacturing date, I asked Ornano if this was right, and they told me there was no problem, batches of those kits were made infrequently so the date would be old. The first developer has the date Jun 26th, 2008 and the other chemicals have more or less the same dates on them.
I opened the kit on October 2010, IIRC, when I begun developing film.
I always prepare my baths for one-shot use, so I mix them with water only before processing, and only the required quantity (140ml if using 1 reel, 240ml if using 2 reels). I insert a rinse between bleach and fixer and re-use the same chemicals within 24 hours for a second batch, after which I discard the chemicals.
I always top the flasks with Tetenal Protectan and keep them in a place of the house where they don't suffer excessive heat, or cold, or temperature variations (inside a small cupboard in an inner room).
We are now, as we know, in June 2011, three years from manufacturing date. Not just the films come out beautifully, but when I throw away the chemicals they are beautifully coloured and clear. From this I deduce that expiration is yet quite far away, I don't see the faintest trace of opacization, and I talk about used chemistry.
I think that even if I had to take more than another year to consume the chemicals, they would arrive to that date without any problem.

I am actually beginning to consider that my beginner's strategy of throwing away all the chemicals is probably a waste. Some of the baths should have a greater capacity than others and I should organize things so that I consume the baths at different speeds and reorder only the finished ones.

The person at Ornano told me that conservation of the chemicals was best if the chemicals were left undiluted.

Fabrizio

So where does one buy these Ornano chemicals? I've never seen them for sale.

Until some time ago you could buy them directly at Ornano, www.ornano.it.

I bought my kit at an internet / eBay shop because I was also buying other items at that shop (I saved on shipping).

I phoned Ornano a few days ago to buy their C-41 kit (kit FLC to make 5 litres), but they recently stopped production of kits (both C-41 and six-bath E-6, kit KI 90, which is the E-6 kit I am using at the moment) for lack of sufficient demand. I didn't request details, so I don't know if it is still possible to buy in larger quantities and if they still produce the three-bath E-6 kit (kit DIA 3), because I am not interested in "big" quantities or 3-bath E-6 treatment. All those kits are still present in their on-line catalogue (Italian version, Listini prezzi), which is not updated regularly one might infer.

So I bought a Rollei / Compard Digibase C-41 5 litres kit at macodirect.de, which was the fastest solution as my "preferred" internet shop sincerely told me that their next shipping would have arrived to them in the second half of July, and I didn't want to wait. I preferred to order at macodirect notwithstanding the mess they did with an order which was referred here on this forum, as the next immediate alternative was Freestyle in the UK, which has very expensive shipping to Italy. Another Roman shop had the kit in catalogue but not immediately available.

If you can read Italian, the series of technical papers Ornano consiglia is full of interesting information, you find them on the Italian ornano site. Some instalments have been also translated into English (Ornano suggests) and into French (Ornano vous conseille) you find them on the English site under "Technical info".

If you speak Italian and you have any kind of problem with photographic chemistry, Ornano now give free support for photographic chemistry of any producer, that's to support traditional photography.

Dead Link Removed clicca qui - Home

I'm sorry that Ornano doesn't produce any more the kits that I would be buying (KI90 and FLC).

Fabrizio