Just another note to add that I've further refined my development workflow with the ADOX C41 kit by controlling temperature even earlier, at the pre-soak stage.
I'm now doing a longer pre-soak, using 1L of water kept in the sous vide bath running at 39 Celsius. Sampling the temperature of the pre-soak water within the Paterson tank, I stop pre-soaking once the water has reached 38 Celsius. In my room this takes 12 minutes at the moment. I do this by inserting a thin, long analogue thermometer all the way down the central shaft of the Paterson tank.
So to summarise:
With the above, fully temperature and time-controlled workflow, I'm getting what I would call 'professional grade' negatives that invert extremely easily using any of the methods I'm familiar with, and most importantly need minimal or no post processing to get my positive where I want it to be (essentially just setting the black point and little more). I'm pretty confident that these negatives will represent an excellent starting point for when I decide to try RA4 printing, in the future, too.
Advice for those people out there scanning their C41 negatives and are going crazy about colour casts that are difficult to fix in Photoshop and are giving you many headaches:
I'm now doing a longer pre-soak, using 1L of water kept in the sous vide bath running at 39 Celsius. Sampling the temperature of the pre-soak water within the Paterson tank, I stop pre-soaking once the water has reached 38 Celsius. In my room this takes 12 minutes at the moment. I do this by inserting a thin, long analogue thermometer all the way down the central shaft of the Paterson tank.
So to summarise:
- Reel, film and tank are at exactly 38C even before pouring in the developer;
- The developer is sitting in the sous vide controlled bath at 39C, is then poured in the tank, becomes slightly cooler as I pour it in, which means it ends up staying at 38C during the 3'15'' of development;
- No water rinse, once development ends I pour the developer out and pour the blix in, once again at exactly 38 degrees.
- Dev starts being poured out at the 3'00'' mark, blix starts going in at the 3'15''mark
With the above, fully temperature and time-controlled workflow, I'm getting what I would call 'professional grade' negatives that invert extremely easily using any of the methods I'm familiar with, and most importantly need minimal or no post processing to get my positive where I want it to be (essentially just setting the black point and little more). I'm pretty confident that these negatives will represent an excellent starting point for when I decide to try RA4 printing, in the future, too.
Advice for those people out there scanning their C41 negatives and are going crazy about colour casts that are difficult to fix in Photoshop and are giving you many headaches:
- Don't discount development inaccuracies as a likely source of the heavy complex colour casts you're seeing in your scans
- Go back to your workflow if you develop at home, and make sure you're really - really - accurate with times and temperatures.
- If you outsource development to a lab and are seeing heavy crossovers, change lab!
- Immediately dismiss any advice to 'wing it' and stuff like 'your negs are fine, you images are meant to be post-processed and colour graded, anyway'. Run like hell if someone gives you that 'advice', or ask them to show some of their samples before you run: they will inevitably look like poorly developed, heavily post-processed images
- You should't have to post-process away heavy colour casts, unless you enjoy that process, and unless random colour shifts are of creative interest, of course.