My prints are coming out with a tinge of blue/cyan no matter what I set the CMY to. Why is this happening?
Blue/cyan cast to RA4 color prints
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Is the white of your borders also cyan/blue?
What kind of paper do you use, and how old is it?
A few possible causes come to mind, but it's a bit of a stab in the dark:
* Fogged paper due to age. Especially Kodak Endura tends to fog greenish/cyan. Fuji tends to fog yellowish.
* Fogging due to light, particularly in the orange-red end of the spectrum. Usual suspects are indicator LEDs on devices in the darkroom, including smoke detectors.
* Developer contaminated with blix. This tends to give pronounced green/cyan fog, the severity of which varies with the degree of contamination. Suspects are backflow and/or splashing in rack-style development devices (e.g. RT) or insufficient cleaning of development tubes or tanks if these are used.
Things to try:
* If the cyan issue extends to the white borders of your prints, try this: take a sheet/strip of paper right out of the box and develop & blix. Don't expose and handle it as briefly humanly as possible to reduce exposure to any extraneous light sources.
* If you're using drums or a RT machine: mix a (small) batch of fresh developer (with starter if your chemistry requires it) and blix and develop a test strip/sheet in trays, at room temperature (development time of 2 minutes is usually good).
A picture is as usual worth a thousand words. See if you can get up an example; this usually helps narrowing down the possible problems.
A detailed description of your equipment, materials and working methods also helps.
What kind of paper do you use, and how old is it?
A few possible causes come to mind, but it's a bit of a stab in the dark:
* Fogged paper due to age. Especially Kodak Endura tends to fog greenish/cyan. Fuji tends to fog yellowish.
* Fogging due to light, particularly in the orange-red end of the spectrum. Usual suspects are indicator LEDs on devices in the darkroom, including smoke detectors.
* Developer contaminated with blix. This tends to give pronounced green/cyan fog, the severity of which varies with the degree of contamination. Suspects are backflow and/or splashing in rack-style development devices (e.g. RT) or insufficient cleaning of development tubes or tanks if these are used.
Things to try:
* If the cyan issue extends to the white borders of your prints, try this: take a sheet/strip of paper right out of the box and develop & blix. Don't expose and handle it as briefly humanly as possible to reduce exposure to any extraneous light sources.
* If you're using drums or a RT machine: mix a (small) batch of fresh developer (with starter if your chemistry requires it) and blix and develop a test strip/sheet in trays, at room temperature (development time of 2 minutes is usually good).
A picture is as usual worth a thousand words. See if you can get up an example; this usually helps narrowing down the possible problems.
A detailed description of your equipment, materials and working methods also helps.
im working on getting a picture up, it keeps telling me the file is too big. I just have to transfer the pic over to my desktop to reduce the file size on my, shouldn't take me too long.
i dont think its the paper because this has happened on multiple batches of paper, its the fuji crystal archive.
I thought it could be tainted chemicals, at first also, so I dumped all my chemicals and mixed new batches, at least 3 times now.
I am using a jobo, and a rotator.
I am interested in what you mentioned about the LED lights affecting it. I have tried to get rid of all lights, but there may be some faint lights still. I am going to check this out. I think you may be on to something.
This looks like your blix is not working properly. If mixing new batch does not help, buy a new blix. Even the concentrates can go bad. Which kind of chemistry are you using?
Ok, thanks for putting up the example @ashcorra
Your print looks very blue to me, but your yellow filtration is at a fairly normal spot. What kind of negatives are you printing, and do you get the same problems when printing fresh negatives on fresh C41 film? Does the problem occur with all negatives you've tried (from different films)?
Can you tell us a little bit more about your enlarger, the chemistry you use and your procedures? Have you tried the test where you process a sheet of paper without exposing it?
In your darkroom with all lights out, let your eyes accommodate to the light for a few minutes. Any light that's still visible at that point can be a problem. However, the severity of the problem would suggest a light source that would be fairly easy to see even immediately after turning off the lights.
Sorry, but I disagree. Unblixed color prints look fairly normal with just a bit lower saturation and slightly higher contrast. The most notable characteristic is that they tend to fade to yellow/tan (especially the lighter tones) when exposed to normal light (the remaining silver prints out). The blix as such does nothing with the actual dye hues or color balance.
Your print looks very blue to me, but your yellow filtration is at a fairly normal spot. What kind of negatives are you printing, and do you get the same problems when printing fresh negatives on fresh C41 film? Does the problem occur with all negatives you've tried (from different films)?
Can you tell us a little bit more about your enlarger, the chemistry you use and your procedures? Have you tried the test where you process a sheet of paper without exposing it?
In your darkroom with all lights out, let your eyes accommodate to the light for a few minutes. Any light that's still visible at that point can be a problem. However, the severity of the problem would suggest a light source that would be fairly easy to see even immediately after turning off the lights.
Sorry, but I disagree. Unblixed color prints look fairly normal with just a bit lower saturation and slightly higher contrast. The most notable characteristic is that they tend to fade to yellow/tan (especially the lighter tones) when exposed to normal light (the remaining silver prints out). The blix as such does nothing with the actual dye hues or color balance.
{Moderator note: the following two posts were moved here from another thread}
Probably. In my eyes, these pictures look very different. For picture posted by Timsch, I am almost sure it is caused by red light, I don´t know, whether it is in his darkroom, or if the paper had this problem when he bought it. Aschorra´s picture is very different. From a picture taken by a cell phone, it is hard to say anything, but the most obvious cause would be problems with developer - for instance, carryover of hypo. According to Kodak documentation, 0.1 mL of blix in 1L of developer is enough to ruin it totally. But he said mixing new batch of chemistry did not help. I thought about blix, but this is definietly not the problem. What I thought, is that many of the Durst enlargers have a knob called "B filter", which switches on Y40 M40 extra filter for negatives needing more than 130 of filtration (in Durst values, these are not universal with all manufacturers of enlargers). But the picture looks patchy. Could it be using too little of developer in the drum (such as 30 mL instead of 75, if the latter is the minimum amount posted by the manufacturer of the drum)? Maybe the problem is not with RA-4, but the negative is bad - due to expired film, processing failure producing leukocyan dyes., or a very old and badly stored negative with faded cyan dyes. Maybe the light bulb in the enlarger should be changed to a new one. Hard to say. these are just some ideas.
This is where the solution of timsch's problem might be of some help to ashcorra, were we to know it and assuming of course that timsch has found the solution
pentaxuser
Probably. In my eyes, these pictures look very different. For picture posted by Timsch, I am almost sure it is caused by red light, I don´t know, whether it is in his darkroom, or if the paper had this problem when he bought it. Aschorra´s picture is very different. From a picture taken by a cell phone, it is hard to say anything, but the most obvious cause would be problems with developer - for instance, carryover of hypo. According to Kodak documentation, 0.1 mL of blix in 1L of developer is enough to ruin it totally. But he said mixing new batch of chemistry did not help. I thought about blix, but this is definietly not the problem. What I thought, is that many of the Durst enlargers have a knob called "B filter", which switches on Y40 M40 extra filter for negatives needing more than 130 of filtration (in Durst values, these are not universal with all manufacturers of enlargers). But the picture looks patchy. Could it be using too little of developer in the drum (such as 30 mL instead of 75, if the latter is the minimum amount posted by the manufacturer of the drum)? Maybe the problem is not with RA-4, but the negative is bad - due to expired film, processing failure producing leukocyan dyes., or a very old and badly stored negative with faded cyan dyes. Maybe the light bulb in the enlarger should be changed to a new one. Hard to say. these are just some ideas.
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Some useful ideas there, Samu. I have a Durst with that ability to add that Y and M increase but it requires that you take a definite action and is not something that you can do accidentally and not notice it so it is possible but seems unlike to have been the cause in this case
pentaxuser
pentaxuser
This degree of contamination will most likely result in measurable color shifts, but from my experience it won't result in such a massive color shift as we're seeing here. It would have to be a much more significant amount of carryover. But something like that could easily happen in a home setting. However, OP apparently has eliminated this possibility.
Unlikely, IMO. You generally get clear signs of unevenness in development with grossly insufficient developer formulas.
'Leuco' dyes are not intended to be produced in color film. In fact, if the image-forming dyes are partly in their leuco ('colorless') state in the finished negative, it's due to a (major) processing problem. It's virtually impossible with today's C41 films. Expired film or faded negatives are indeed possibilities, but generally you'd expect that the color balance would respond fairly normally to changes in filtration. You'd just end up at a rather extreme filter stack for a decent looking print. Since OP hasn't informed us on process and materials details, for now we can only guess.
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