Remjet should be removed before development. If done after development, small particles of carbon can be embedded in the gelatin, causing white spots in prints.
I find prints from ECN films to be objectionably low in contrast, but beautiful slides can be made from them using ECP.
PE
I realize now that you have been saying this since the beginning of dawn PE, sorry to make you say it yet another time
(I finally found a few threads here, trough google, while searching for ECN and c-41, in the same search-parameters, and can see that you have been trying to educate us on this for a very long time already
).
I did buy a roll of Cinestill 50D this weekend (pretty expensive, £37 for 1 roll of 50D and 1 800 ISO ) and went around on a marked-day on Saturday, shooting.
I used my Jupiter-3 on my Leica M6 (that's quite the provocation right there).
They are developed in a regular Tetenal C-41 home-processing kit.
I can see what you mean with lower contrast and muted colors. And I would believe that actually trying to print these negatives could be hard work.
However;
I do hybrid processing when it comes to color (I don't print the negatives, just scan), so any saturation issues and / or contrast problems can be very easily dealt with (takes 1 minute in LR for the whole roll).
Here are two processed (in c-41) shots where I altered a few things after straight scanning.
(In fear of going off-topic; Basically, I set black and white points, gave it a touch of an 'S' curve and increased the saturation a good notch. )
- It is indeed very natural looking and very very close to what I did see with my own eye.
This does NOT mean that I believe that this is an accurate representation of what the film is
actually supposed to look, I get that. As far as color-films go though, it's pretty damn good to use as-is. (imo).
Gives a different look from both Ektar and Portra and it tend, since it's daylight balanced, to yield very accurate colors. (strangely)
What I did not like,as you can also see on these, was the halo-effect in the highlights from the missing remjet coating on these Cinestill-films. The 50D is a daylight balanced negative film, so I would normally use that on sunny days, so it defeats the purpose if it "haloing-out" like this.
A few more examples, these have not been altered a whole lot regarding saturation, but they have been set a accurate black and white point (IE, initial scan was much lower in contrast):
The final photo explains why I want to get hold of the same film, only with the remjet intact.
The last shot shows how horrible the halo-effect really is (here in Norway, the sun is sharp as a razor until it dips below the horizon, all year, every year.....the few days it's sunny out
).
- Nope, it's not the lens, Jupiters are prone to flare, not halo-effects.
I would think that the halo-issue becomes much improved with the remjet-coating intact (this may even help the contrast somewhat as well, perhaps). Shooting it with my CZ 50mm planar would probably also give the shots a better definition over-all, compared to the old-coated Jupiter-3, at the very least, it will be slightly less provocative than putting a commie lens on a Leica, haha!
I could probably have altered these final shots even more the way I would have wanted (more sat and contrast), but I kept them like this, to show how they look, with a quick "fix" after scanning (Nikon Coolscan V ).
I have absolutely no idea what this films is supposed to look like, but (IMO) there is absolutely nothing wrong with the bike-shots (apart from the halo) and when I can get this film for around $0.5 per roll, I can live with the fact that I need to fix them slightly in post. ( I have to do that with every color film I've ever shot and scanned anyway
).
I am not disagreeing with anyone either:
If there were such a thing as a home ECN-processing kit, I would definitely use that, but discarding potential for miles of cheap, high-quality film for pictorial use, because it looks a little funny in C-41 seems strange to me. I can understand that people who actually wet-print color photos, would be prevented from using it though.
Sorry if this is a little off-topic, but since I use a process not involving printing, for color, it's kind of hard not to mention the elephant (my Nikon Coolscan V ) in the room