Portra negatives coming out of development too dark

[1kgcoffee]

Recently shot a bunch of portra (400) and developed it in the argentix c41 kit (similar to unicolor I think.) First time doing c41.

Now, I don't know if the bleach is bad, but the negatives are coming out too dark or too dense. They were developed for the proper time and proper temp. I overexposed them intentionally one, two or three stops to get more saturated colours, but not six+ stops which I have seen examples of online come out perfectly in scans.

Well, after reblixing for a half hour there isn't much difference. Very difficult to get a scan out of them. I'm wondering if the blix is exhausted, despite being brand new batch of chemicals, or if there is some other problem. The negatives I thought were slightly underexposed came out damn near perfect. I metered everything before shooting.

Can I use regular bleach. If so for how long?

 

[chassis]

How do they look now? C41 negatives look dense and/or cloudy straight out of the chemicals. Can you scan a negative? What was your development time and temperature? How did you meter the exposure? Properly exposed and developed, should be a nice looking negative.

 

[klownshed]

Sounds like you overexposed the roll.

If the 'underexposed' shots came out ok, there's your clue.

There's either a camera fault/error in the exposure (wrong ISO? Slow shutter?) or over development.

my guess, as the 'underexposed' negs came out well is that it's an issue with the exposure. That's assuming that when you say the negatives are too dark, you mean the negatives themselves are dense.

 

[geirtbr]

If the problem is overexposure, you might get better result from using an enlarger and doing ra4 as the enlarger lamp is much more powerful and more able to get details from dense negatives than a conventional scanner.

I didnt use blix in c41, but i believe these solutions are a bit unstable. If it doesnt work at all the dark anti-halation layer on the back of the film will be present, and make things much more difficult for you.

 

[Berri]

overexposure produces dense negatives, that's how it is.

 

[1kgcoffee]

Thanks for the responses. The negatives looked normal, just really overdeveloped/overexposed (not very transparent)

One interesting thing to note is that I didn't use a stop bath after developer, just straight to blix as per instruction. The developing tank had to be burped as it was filling up with gas. After the ruined roll, I used a stop bath of water and got this effect only after the initial agitation. Also, the temperature may have been a bit high.

Who knows why that roll turned out so poorly, but every roll since has turned out perfectly

 

[Sirius Glass]

The negatives were over exposed. Why are you surprised that they are dense? Hint: Use box speed. The manufacturer knows more about their product than you ever will. They tested their products more scientifically and accurately than you can ever hope to do.