[Athiril]

I've developed Astia 100f with Xtol as a first dev and C41 as a colour dev, and the colour accuracy was fairly decent (as opposed to C41 films being quite a bit far off, even when trying to colour correct digitally).

I live in Australia, so I usually buy c41 film imported from hong kong or U.S, as $12/roll for C41 is a joke, as is the $22/roll for E6, or the $35/roll for Provia 400X :x

You should try the parodinal formula, I refine my tablets by crushing into powder with a mortle and pestle, mixing with methylated spirits, then filtering through a coffee filter into another container.

You can boil the metho off if you have proper lab borosilicate beaker (like $3) and a gas stove (dont use a glass jar, it will crack and shatter), or leave it the sun to slowly evaporate.

A 50/50 mix with water with the metho works well, you need a decent amount of water for the sodium hydroxide to dissolve properly.


p-phenylene diamine (it and its derivatives as the secret sauce in CD's)
4-aminophenol (Rodinal, hydrolysis of paracetamol)


I'll try a 1+25 on some Superia 800 and see how I go.


Didnt do the 1+25... I quickly made up some parodinal from 24x500mg in 100ml of methylated spirits, once filtered it was 70ml, evaporated some spirits off, filled it up to 90ml with boiling water, then added the sodium hydroxide, was ready in about 20 minutes at more or less full strength.

I used this entire solution mixed up to 300ml of water, developed @ 30c for 10 minutes, developer came out basically black, looking coca cola.

The silver negatives were extremely dense, even my box speed shots (ISO800), went up to +16 EV in compensation in 1 EV steps, didnt do any negative shots from box speed.. unfortunately, could see images on a few of them.

After a very mild bleach and fix they were too dense, so I did a complete bleach and fix.

Now they are invisible (apart from the spaces between the frames which there is a difference) except 1 or too which are extremely thin which I can barely make out with my eyes, might have trouble scanning it, so might use my dSLR to macro it once its dry.

Solution to that would be longer development to let it form more dye.. but once the silver is 'black' it has no contrast mask to apply through.. just flat, thus with bracketing of underexposure it would take longer for the silver images to turn completely dense, thus have more time for the developer to apply through those masks to form the dye... that's what I logically think, though I guess it comes at the sacrifice of shadow detail, perhaps.

My guess is youre getting images because you're not doing a complete bleach, so a partial bleach bypass, and thus a luminance/multiply mask is applying from the silver, with some thin hue/saturation added from the barely formed dye layers.

Which is also fine.

My next step is try to some Reala (out of the 800) with bracketing on either side, with lots of negative bracketing, and develop the hell out of it to try the above hypothesis since the rate at which the dye forms is much slower than the rate which the silver develops.


edit:
scanned using colour neg profile, then level adjusted on each channel in photoshop.