The Darkroom Cookbook Forum

Hello, I have available to me some D76, Rodinal and PMK Pyro. I am looking for a recommendation on which one would be better and times for developing 10 year expired C41 film. Thanks in advance.

while waiting for the pros to weigh in, I'll offer what i've tried:



- I tried D76 (with some Kodak film i couldnt recall). didnt work out very well. film was thin & lacking in contrast.

- I tried CatPTEA (with carbonate activator), Portra400 turned out quite nicely, with good contrast @ 7.5min



So I (for now) ASSUMES that a higher-energy developer is more suitable for this so-called cross-process, perhaps because color film essentially has less silver & more dye, so solvent developer like d-76 has less sites to act on but surface high-energy dev could activate the dye along w the silver better. This is my hypothesis, based on very limited data points & theoretical reasoning.



If it follows so, then among the developers you listed, i'd probably try Rodinal or PMK, even though its pH isnt exactly as high as I would prefer. for PMK, perhaps start with 13 mins dev time? If you're chemically-inclined, perhaps try adding some carbonate to increase the pH (for PMK).

i've also tested C-41 film with 510-pyro & it works, dev time abt 7-8mins. So i guess the rest should, too.

have a single exposed roll of [Ilford C-41 B&W and some Photoflo equal good times developing color film with black-and-white chemistry.

Kind of reviving this old thread. About a year ago I loaded some 35mm C-41 ISO 800 film in a camera and forgot about it for weeks. I picked up the camera to grab some backyard photos of my pups. The camera's ISO was set to 100 and I presumed it was BW film. When I finished the roll and unloaded the film, I discovered the error. I was going to trash the film since I was not running any C41 at the time but decided to try stand development in Rodinal just as an experiment. I souped the film in Rodinal 50:1 for one hour with one gentle 5 second agitation at 30 minutes. The negatives were a bit thin and quite grainy and of course the film still has the orange mask, but the images still scanned ok. It was just an experiment to make something out of my mistake and not something I would normally do. Examples attached

Great images, John, and ones you'll cherish for years to come, grain and all.