Very dark negatives.

I experimented with a caffenol devloper on a roll of HP5+ 400. The images came out very dark, the entire film is very dark and the frame numbers are also not visible. They are to dark to scan, but have lots of detail when held up to very bright light. Is there a way to bring out more detail?

It sounds like your film is extremely over exposed and/or over developed, or severely fogged. you may be able to do some recovery with a general reducer, but it is highly doubtful.

Things would be a lot easier to diagnose if a traditional developer was used. The problem when dealing with natural products (coffee) is that their composition and hence reactivity varies from batch to batch.

I'm leaning to overdevelopment. I've been using this camera/film combo for quite some time. I think I'll do a roll with traditional chemistry today. The images were not that important.

Its always a good idea when experimenting to have a control of some sort. Split the roll n do half in caf n the other in your dev you always use. Now you have a better idea of how to adjust either development or exposure.

You might want to tell us what the cafennol ingredients were, including the weights and then the processing and times, then show us the negs. At that point somebody or bodies, especially jnanian may be able to say what went wrong

pentaxuser

I'm not really concerned with what went wrong as much as I was wondering what can be done with the negatives when something like this happens. Here is the link though.

http://munk.org/typecast/2014/01/06/caffenol-cc-41-test-1-success/

I think the dev time is a bit long. In fact now that I read it again I realize he is doing this to a C-41 film. Oops I think I had a bunch of tabs open and got mixed up. I actually have a C-41 roll that's been spooled up in a paterson tank for a year and may give that a go and share my results in an alt-process thread.

BenKrohn said:

I experimented with a caffenol devloper on a roll of HP5+ 400. The images came out very dark, the entire film is very dark and the frame numbers are also not visible. They are to dark to scan, but have lots of detail when held up to very bright light. Is there a way to bring out more detail?

Click to expand...

Contact print it on silver bromide or get a lab to do it.

If you want repeatability you need to buy rubosta beans and grind yourself eg JNORIAN or coffee bean supplier.