Home Color Film Processing

With the 75-year Era of Kodachrome coming to an end this year, I'm faced with the dilemma of what color film to use. I've pretty much settled on switching to Kodak's Portra and Ektar color negative film, which gives me a variety of speeds and types to choose from, all of which seem to be quite good.

There has long been a common feeling among photographers that color negative (C-41) film is for amateurs, that “real photographers” shoot transparency (slide) film. I've been guilty of thinking that way at times myself. But a lot of the disdain of color negative film comes from the fact that people are having it processed at mini-labs and printed by automatic machines that try to “correct” the images, which tends to mess up our results and prevent us from getting exactly what we want. But why do we, serious photographers, think it's normal to rely on automatic lab prints, anyway? Would we dream of doing that for our black-and-white work?

Kodak doesn't think C-41 is only for snapshots. Portra and Ektar are professional films, and pro wedding photographers used Portra happily before they went digital, a fact that has escaped the notice of the “C-41 is for snapshots” crowd.

People think C-41 processing is complicated and difficult, and that no one does it themselves unless they have a full-fledged (and expensive) darkroom. Although it had been years since I'd processed C-41, I learned to do it in school, so I wasn't intimidated by it, but somehow I let that old prejudice infect my thought process.

If you have a professional lab near you that can process your film and do a good job, lucky you. I don't. My first thought was to mail it off to a lab, which is relatively expensive and takes a while. Then I considered bringing it to a mini-lab at a drugstore or at Target and have them do processing only, no prints. But that is problematic these days. Consumers aren't shooting much film any more, so mini-labs are not in good shape: they do a few rolls per day, with entirely untrained operators, so you risk questionable equipment maintenance, bad chemicals, scratches on your negatives, and clerks who don't understand the idea of “process only” and will be reluctant to do the work without you paying for prints as well. And, really, they want you to shoot digital and make your prints for you from that, so they don't have incentive to do a good job with film.

So, after flirting with the notion of trusting my film to Target, I decided there was no reason I couldn't just do it myself.

C-41 processing is easy. If you are already processing black-and-white film, you can do C-41. It's only slightly harder, and doesn't require any equipment you don't already have, and you don't need a darkroom.

Searching the web for information on C-41 processing mainly turns up a lot of forum threads alternating between “it's hard” and “it's easy.” Good information, starting with what chemistry to buy, is more scarce. So I decided to write up some easy, no-nonsense instructions for anyone looking to do this for themselves.

Home Processing of C-41 Color Negative Film

Portra 400nc developed in my bathroom

Comments

[J.]

Great information; I've been home processing black and white film for several years, but have been hesitant to do color, though mostly that was because I didn't shoot much color film to begin with. I recently started shooting color film again, and was interested to see if C41 is as touchy as I've heard. Sounds like I'll have to give this a whirl.

[4tostudio]

After reading your article i feel the interest on trying this out at home, i normally do it in the lab but lets see with good result from my home