Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Hair dye and coffee

It is a real challenge to develop C41 films without CD-4. Persistence must produce results. Why not using the superaditivity with hair dye and coffee? Everybody will say it is nonsense, coffee is a black and white developer that will compete with the color developer but, from my experience, coffee is a weak b&w developer and also a weaker color developer. It did work in Caffcol I with CD4, it works in Caffcol II in the second bath maybe only lowering the pH but works. And now the time has come to abandon CD-4 as a substance that is not easy to buy and is expensive. Instead of CD-4 I am using now hair dye. Yes, professional hair dye with lots of color developers inside. First I used only hair dye and soda, now I added coffee to the recipe and it gave good results as shown below. The images are not silver, not b&w because silver was bleached and fixed out. Images in fast b&w but from the dyes of the C41 film negatives.

Example 1

Example 2

Example 3
Note:
 I still will not disclosure the recipe, I hope to get better results with some more patience and, why not, some disasters. Well, you may also try it and see how difficult it is to tweak the parameters to achieve an 'uncertain' result.

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