Topic: Colour film in B&W developer?

[choppert]

From the cheapskates thread...

For experiments & where perfect colour balance is not important, and you're scanning use colour film and DIY develop.

What about using cheap colour film and developing it in B&W developer?
Looking at the web it sounds like it's quite do-able.  Has anyone any views/experience of this?

Andrea - did I see a photo of yours on Flickr (of some steps) taken on colour and processed as B&W?

Chops

[al]

Yep, it's doable, you get very dark, dense negs.  They scan in OK though.  When I did mine, I treated the film as if it was an "average" B&W film of the same speed, e.g. developed at 20C and for ISO100 used the time quoted for films like FP4 etc.
When scanned you get some odd colours !

Here's a couple I did a couple of years ago:

[Mike (happyforest)]

This is Agfa Vista 200 developed in Ilford LC29 diltued 1:29 for 5 and a half minutes.  Agitation was for first 30 secs then 5 secs every 30 seconds.

[Sorry, image deleted during forum software upgrade. Please re-upload if so inclined.]

[sausage100uk]

I accidently deved a c41 film as ERA 100 B&W, looked lovely, dense but very scannable might try it on purpose soon

[Andrea.]

Yes, quite right I have done it a few times. You can scan them but too dense to print properly tho.

[tinm@n]

I did it once this year and want to try it again.  After scanning in I really had to whack up the levels in Photoshop, which I normally avoid doing as much as possible.

[formica]

when people are doing this are they scanning as colour or as bw? the roll i did i scanned as colour, and most of the shots i didn't care for(the colour) but there were a few that had really nice colour.  i seem to recall reading on flickr somewhere where someone added some sort of diy bleach step to make the film more normal.  but i can't seem to find any reference to that now.

              william

[formica]

it looks like there's a group on flickr devoted to this issue:

 http://flickr.com/groups/c41inbw/


               william