Why is home processing for color not nearly as wide spread?

Hello everyone,

Why is home processing of color film not nearly as accessible? I can't help to think that with the myriad of BW chemicals and materials for sale, it seems like it was more designed for home processing while color, neither Kodak or Fuji, the big brands, make C41 kits available to the consumer and the RA4 process seems to be marketed only to labs, as most of the papers come on rolls rather then being precut. Why is this? Even the Flexicolor line of chemicals that Kodak produces are really designed for the lab, not home use. Why did color never really catch on as a DIY process? It's certainly possible to be done, but it's not the most readily accessible thing to do.

This is just a legacy of the decline of film in the later part of last Century; there WERE home color developing film kits and many types of cut color paper, but demand vanished, the products were discontinued and the remaining demand was for bulk chemistry/paper for lab processing.

So now, we have a limited selection, but you can adapt it for home use with a bit of work.

As for color paper, pretty much Fuji Crystal RA-4 is what is available and cut sheets are available.

https://www.freestylephoto.biz/category/8-Paper/Color-RA-4-Paper

mehguy said:

Hello everyone,

Why is home processing of color film not nearly as accessible? I can't help to think that with the myriad of BW chemicals and materials for sale, it seems like it was more designed for home processing while color, neither Kodak or Fuji, the big brands, make C41 kits available to the consumer and the RA4 process seems to be marketed only to labs, as most of the papers come on rolls rather then being precut. Why is this? Even the Flexicolor line of chemicals that Kodak produces are really designed for the lab, not home use. Why did color never really catch on as a DIY process? It's certainly possible to be done, but it's not the most readily accessible thing to do.

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You are about 30-40 years too late . In the 70's everyone was printing color. Everything was available. Shops stocked papers and chemistry. First came minilabs and independent processing companies, then inkjet. I still process color, just to stay in practice. I can print from color negatives, Fuji still offers cut sheets.

Kino said:

This is just a legacy of the decline of film in the later part of last Century; there WERE home color developing film kits and many types of cut color paper, but demand vanished, the products were discontinued and the remaining demand was for bulk chemistry/paper for lab processing.

So now, we have a limited selection, but you can adapt it for home use with a bit of work.

As for color paper, pretty much Fuji Crystal RA-4 is what is available and cut sheets are available.

https://www.freestylephoto.biz/category/8-Paper/Color-RA-4-Paper

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But not the same for BW?

I didn't even realize it wasn't a thing. Not that I've developed a roll of film since the 80s, but that's where I'm headed with the hobby this year. When I was looking into it there were kits from some different suppliers. Cinestill, Unicolor, Film Photography Project.. I haven't gotten farther than just poking around on the internets. I mean, I get that it's not like it was in the 70s when my friend's parents used to make their own prints, but chemicals exist, so just the developing color film part seemed totally doable.

Other than temps, it seems a similar enough process to B&W, with plenty of documentation and at least a couple of chemical options. Maybe even easier in that there's less variability on timing.

You don't have the printing options, but developing the film shouldn't be a problem.

mehguy said:

But not the same for BW?

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B&W has always been the domain of individual darkroom users since the beginning. The demand dropped, but there was still enough demand to maintain a core group of products.

Color was always a challenge due to the need for precise temperature control, and when it came to printing, the challenge of dialing in the correct color balance with the aid viewing filters or consumer-grade color analyzers - at least *I* found the process incredibly frustrating.

mehguy said:

But not the same for BW?

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One word. Ilford.

There seems to be a cottage industry level of market in B&W and Ilford has done a lot to service it. Inkjet printers and digital kind of killed color, maybe harder than black and white, I don't know, but that's how it has panned out.

This happens with the resurrection of dying industries. Record album production was all but gone, then vinyl came back as a niche thing and there are places you can get your album mastered and pressed now. They're so busy you have to schedule a slot to get a run done, but it's nowhere near what it was in the 70s. Fountain pens died and now they're back, there's a cottage industry making pens and inks, but it's nowhere near what it was before ballpoints became the thing. Film photography had a similar shakeup with dying demand. Ilford seems to have a healthy and growing grasp on black and white and a customer base so, servicing the cottage industry, there are options.

i remember printing from negatives in the 70s and 80s and though my friends had done plenty of color we almost always did black and white. It was just the thing, maybe it was cheaper (I was a kid, I don't know, it was just cool to "help" my buddy's dad do this stuff) and more accessible, but black and white at home has been a thing and, frankly, if anyone's going to advocate a wet print over an inkjet, it will definitely be B&W enthusiasts.

Kino said:

B&W has always been the domain of individual darkroom users since the beginning. The demand dropped, but there was still enough demand to maintain a core group of products.

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Bet me to it.

I'll be interested to see how it goes in the future. I'm not expecting color printing to expand. But there are at least a good number of folks doing it, enough to keep a manufacturer offering paper.

For C41, I think its because the process is standardized and relatively difficult to do with the technology most people had available to them at home 30 years ago.

There's also a certain class of photographer who seems to get most of their film processing enjoyment from being able to do all manner of fiddling with the chemistry and process details, and these folks are more likely than not to be the ones mentoring the next generation. The standardization of C-41 means they can't have this fun, so they're not interested in pushing color and tend to discourage it. (You can probably find this sentiment even around these forums with some digging.)

Also, its probably hard to maintain accurate temperature and consistent agitation for the short time of C-41 with the equipment your average home tinkerer had affordably available to them back in the day. (Today we greatly benefit from economies of scale with spillover from other industries, and a used market of things we wouldn't have been willing to pay for back then.)

For RA4, I think the total-darkness requirements add a lot of complexity as well. You're not going to be easily able to do RA4 printing in any sort of communal darkroom where newbies would have learned the ropes back then. Today most of us have gotten back into it with our own private darkrooms, where its a lot easier to manage this stuff.

Color requires more accurate temperature control, and process control in general.

Back in say the 1980s-90s it was easy to develop B&W film at home - a reasonably careful teenager could do it. Developing or printing color required more sophisticated equipment. Meanwhile, you could get quick, consistent, and cheap C-41 color processing virtually anywhere. B&W machine processing was less ubiquitous and a little more expensive, sometimes with mediocre results, so there was a reason to develop your own B&W. Plus the kind of person who did B&W photography in the 1990s was more likely to be involved in the whole process. So there is a tradition of B&W amateur developing and supplies that never completely disappeared.

Now, commercial color processing is still available, but less common. You have people inventing ways to control their color processing with a $30 sous-vide temperature unit they got on Amazon ... but in 1990 there were no $30 temp control units (or Amazon), so home color processing was simply less accessible.

In North America, Kodak had much of the market, and serviced it reasonably well. That applied to both colour and black and white. There was actually more people home printing colour than there were people home developing colour film, due to the widespread availability of inexpensive but good quality film processing.
The surge in popularity and availability of enlarger colour light sources was evidence of both that and the popularity of Cibachrome.
But Kodak was always dependent on volume, and when volumes decreased, they left the black and white paper business, stopped producing sheet colour paper, and stopped selling low volume colour chemicals.
They actually reduced their range of black and white chemicals as well, but much of the reduction happened in the lines that were more commonly purchased by commercial labs.
The change is actually quite recent, for those of us who can remember the 1970s!
Colour printing itself isn't much more difficult than printing black and white, particularly considering that it can be done at 68F/20C.

Aging chemicals + messy chemicals + temperature control.

I've talked to a minilab guys and they told todays color film shooter just wants the photos to her/his phone so those can be posted in social easily. They might not collected the negatives at all..

mehguy said:

Why did color never really catch on as a DIY process? It's certainly possible to be done, but it's not the most readily accessible thing to do.

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Color processing once was more widespread. Just think of the variety of materials and tools once on offer.

Concerning b&w home paper processing: how many are there? There is a mass of resources, but they dilute over the mass of people photographing as such. I can count the people I know in person using an own darkroom at one hand.

I have a Jobo CPP2 and a proper darkroom. With the pass of time I am getting bored of developing C41, but not RA4 which keeps my interest. I suppose RA4 is a more rewarding process where you get what you were really looking for when you pressed the camera shutter (a print). I will continue doing C41 by myself but because it is much cheaper than sending to a lab

Today's color film and prints are a 'top-down' medium reliant on specially produced materials & chemistry. It was specifically engineered to satisfy large scale consumer demand via distributed finishing labs (unlike kodachrome).

B&W photography is very much an enstaunched 'bottom-up' medium, well researched and practiced for a hundred(s) years. Very accessible to the masses.

Colour kits were always expensive and had a short shelf life once opened. I dabbled with Cibachrome and had great success with transparency processing with a Jobo, but soon found my spiritual home with Monochrome. That was 35 years ago and I now feel just the same.

In all my many years of doing my own processing I only did B&W a few times otherwise all my darkroom works were color. When I did B&W I love the low cost of DIY. For color I never could do it for less than what thed e lab charged me. I did it because nobody would make a print my way so I had to do it myself.
Also back in the days, if you shoot B&W you have to send out for processing if you don't do it yourself. For color you can have your film developed and printed in an hour. I started my darkroom work because I couldn't wait to see my pictures. But when the 1 hr. processing were available there wasn't such a need any more.
So I know why most people only do B&W darkroom work and not color.

Almost 20yrs ago when I had access to a darkroom with a colour processor (durst thermaphot, i think) I looked into printing with RA4. Then I found out about cost of doing RA4 and the short shelf-life of chems.
That's as far as my foray into RA4 went apart from using some expired paper + fuji chems I found in the darkroo (very pink + yellow results).

Now i'm not a broke student I would probably look into it again but not unless I had a personal darkroom.

I have noticed recently that Tetenal have been sponsoring Youtube channels about RA4 so maybe they are looking to make things a little more accessible.

It's fiddly. It can be expensive here in Australia. temperature is far more important than many would have it believed. The limited stability of the chemistry when mixed. The problems of finding new stocks of C41 kits, again here in Oz Land.

I got a very early start in color processing in 1963 with the (now ancient) Anscochrome home processing kits. Of this process I remember very little as there isn't much historical data available online. For all that, many of my old slides have not yet faded, which amazes me.

In the 1980s and 1990s I played around with C41 processing and dabbled into E6 with mixed results - equally good and rotten. In 2001 or 2002 I bought a Jobo Duolab and Jobo tanks and FINALLY stabilized the temperatures, at which time 90% of my technical problems vanished in a gunpowder flash.

Some would have us think temperatures can be varied with C41. Not so. That is, unless you enjoy the extensive post processing involved with correcting the color shifts. Also contrast problems, these can be fixed for the most part in the scanning process, but again, for some of us life is just too short for such unnecessary tasks.

I used the Tetenal kits for many years, until prices went up and there were supply problems. Then I changed over to Rollei kits but found the results were unpredictable. As well, if I wanted the best results from a kit, I had to hoard my exposed films and process in one or two long sessions before the chemistry began its inevitable shift to non-usability.

Many have posted online and boasted about the numbers of C41 films they could process with one kit. I (and all others I know) found if you went over the recommended numbers (usually 10-12 films per liter) and kept the mixed chemistry too long, you had uneven results.

I gave up E6 in 2005 or 2006 when the big Nikon digital push really got under way but used C41 kits until 2012 or 2013 when it all got too difficult. I then gave up all color film work and "turncoated" entirely to Nikon digital color.

I still buy an occasional C41 kit when they aren't out of stock in my Melbourne retail supply shop. They give fine results with Ilford's XP2 B&W C41 films. I still have the problems I've noted, except varying the processing temperatures which XP2 seems better suited for.

As for color printing, in my time (1970s-2000) a few darkroom fanatics I knew did it. All gave up in the long term. The filtration was complex and results inconsistent, also too expensive. Lab prints were cheaper if one resisted the mad urge to have prints made from every negative taken.

All this based on my own experience. Others may care to add their own comments.

I learned to process B&W film and to make B&W dark room prints in England in the early to mid 80s. The perception back then was that it was relatively easy to do B&W. Indeed it still is today, all one needs as the bare minimum are two fairly harmless chemicals, a changing bag and a tank/reel. Knock yourself out developing film in your kitchen or bathroom. A dark room, or at least a makeshift one, is needed to make prints but there were lots of school, college and public dark rooms around back then. I could book my school dark room, even after I left the school, for free once a week. B&W was easy, the required apparatus was not difficult to buy or store, the need for temperature accuracy was not critical.

Colour had a reputation of being possible but more difficult....more chemicals, which were more hazardous and more likely to cause stains. Critical temperature. More steps involved. More chance that if you made a relatively small error, you'd get unusable results (compare with B&W where even quite significant errors developing can be recovered at the printing stage). Colour film and colour chemicals were more expensive. We literally did not have sous-vide machines or any other economical way to automatically adjust temperature. Fiddling by adding cold/hot water to sinks or baths full of water in which one has floated one's tanks and chemicals is.....not easy. Colour chemicals have a shorter shelf life, especially once opened. So unless you have lots of films to develop at once, or in a short space of time (eg two weeks) it's not so convenient to do colour at home.

Also consider this. By the C22 era, and more so in C41 (so post-1976) colour print film processing was standardised. Colour reversal was standardised to E4 and then E6. B&W has never been standardised. Sure, most B&W developers will work with *any* photographic emulsion but timings are not standard. Automation of colour processing was easy because each film required exactly the same process....the same chemicals, the same steps, the same temperature. So commercial labs loved the standardised processes, and not so much B&W. It was and remains cheaper to process B&W film at home. Colour was more expensive, and in the 80s and 90s pretty much every mini lab operator was at least decent....you could get incredibly cheap, decent quality, consistent C41 processing and prints for little money.

Enthusiasts would do colour. Today I have one friend who has a colour dark room set up. But it is tricky to get consistent results. That's a hobby of course, some people want to spend hours in the dark room fiddling with filters and getting it "just right". And that's great. But it's not for everyone. If it were, scanning would never have become "a thing".

Photoshop.

I

mehguy said:

Hello everyone,

Why is home processing of color film not nearly as accessible? I can't help to think that with the myriad of BW chemicals and materials for sale, it seems like it was more designed for home processing while color, neither Kodak or Fuji, the big brands, make C41 kits available to the consumer and the RA4 process seems to be marketed only to labs, as most of the papers come on rolls rather then being precut. Why is this? Even the Flexicolor line of chemicals that Kodak produces are really designed for the lab, not home use. Why did color never really catch on as a DIY process? It's certainly possible to be done, but it's not the most readily accessible thing to do.

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sorry to sound like a pessimist but it’s because maybe 40 people are interested, compared to maybe 1000 people interested in b/w. Besides that it has to do with profits and promotion..

Probably because it is a PITA, and after you have done it a couple of times to prove to yourself that you are more than capable of doing it at home, you send it off. That, and the photofinisher will save you the tedium of scanning and color correcting your negatives so you can quickly post them to the web.

Black and white is different. It is quick and easy. You can do it yourself in less time that it takes to drive over to the post office. Plus, you have about a hundred different developers (including coffee and vitamin C) to play around with. Besides, notwithstanding William Eggleston, color photography is not real photography.

I have always farmed out my E6 chrome processing and C41 color neg processing to commercial labs. Why? These are standardized processes which a calibrated machine can do by itself, not involving esthetic variables. I don't want to waste the time. Color printing, however, is all about personal decisions clear up to the final processing itself. I want every aspect of that under my personal control, which integrally means having the actually processing equipment itself in direct proximity for sake of evaluating the results immediately.

Actual RA4 development itself is quite easy. What leads up to that can be learned in an afternoon in terms of exposure basics, but just like any other medium, might take a lifetime to perfect in terms of personal expectations. For the timid, there's always the option of defaulting to digital printing instead, or else pathetic denial that color photography is somehow lesser than black and white. I do both, and do both well. You can make either as simple as you wish, or take them as far as you wish.