Daft question time, colour negatives in B&W darkroom

MrDrizz

MrDrizz

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Mark
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What would happen if I used a colour negative with B&W paper and chemicals?

I bet there's a name for this isn't there.
 
I've done it, a very long time ago, with fair results. I imagine with the right filtration, paper and developer you could get something decent enough.
 
Certainly worth trying Mark, but it will depend on the negative as it will have some kind of orange tint that will affect the enlarger filtration.
 
I've also done it, and it worked for me, but this was decades ago with fixed grade paper and hence no colour filters used. Kodak used to make Panalure paper (brand name of the paper) for this purpose; from memory you had to work in the dark without a safelight as it was panchromatic, but I've never used it.
 
IIRC the image is low contrast, a bit grainy and with some colours having unexpected tonal response.
 
They work just fine and with the right negative you can get good results in my experience. Different 'colours' on the negative can act as a colour filter and hence you get odd bits of local contrast (ie, something very green - magenta on the neg - can print very contrasty), but you can alter contrast using magenta & yellow filters, or with standard multigrade filters as you would a bw neg and on the whole it's manageable. Exposure times are very long though compared to bw negs due to the density of the orange base so id' perhaps do a first test strip with 15s intervals to get a rough feel :)
 
ancient_mariner said:
IIRC the image is low contrast, a bit grainy and with some colours having unexpected tonal response.
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Simon Tickle said:
They work just fine and with the right negative you can get good results in my experience. Different 'colours' on the negative can act as a colour filter and hence you get odd bits of local contrast (ie, something very green - magenta on the neg - can print very contrasty), but you can alter contrast using magenta & yellow filters, or with standard multigrade filters as you would a bw neg and on the whole it's manageable. Exposure times are very long though compared to bw negs due to the density of the orange base so id' perhaps do a first test strip with 15s intervals to get a rough feel :)
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I've done it in the not too distant past and both of these posts are bang on the money.
 
Why not print in colour; I know you will need more kit and colour chemicals. I used to do this; some of my darkroom session would have been B&W an some colour.

Dave
 
Dave Canon said:
Why not print in colour; I know you will need more kit and colour chemicals. I used to do this; some of my darkroom session would have been B&W an some colour.

Dave
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Well at first, with colour negs, used to do proofs in B\W and the winners were then done in colour prints......the results were quite good like converting colour jpgs into B\W.
 
Interesting I also did the contact sheets in colour as well. While I could have printed B&W from the colour negatives as I would for digital, I often used to carry two cameras in those days, one loaded with B&W film and the other colour. Photography is so much easier now.

Dave
 
Dave Canon said:
Why not print in colour; I know you will need more kit and colour chemicals. I used to do this; some of my darkroom session would have been B&W an some colour.

Dave
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My enlarger is very basic, don't I need a colour filter head to get good colour prints.
 
MrDrizz said:
My enlarger is very basic, don't I need a colour filter head to get good colour prints.
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Yes. I had an excellent Durst colour enlarger with built in filters. I also needed filters for B&W paper eventually as I started using Ilford Multigrade which allowed one to cover a range of grades by using the filters. For colour, I had a colour Analyser which I used on the film leader. Often books indicated that you choose a well balanced frame and analyse that to get your setting but the main thing is to counter the orange mask so just analysing that in the film leader worked fine for me and only occasionally were further tweaks required. At the time very few in my club were printing in colour colour and commercial prints were not allowed so I won the colour print competitions frequently.

Dave
 
From about 20 years ago, here are a couple of shots from a portrait session on Fuji Reala, now sadly gone! While I did once try the Panalure that @StephenM referred to above, I'm pretty sure that this one was done on Tetenal TT Comfort paper as I was using that at the time.

425772-b6d75182ae38c9f1.jpg

hilda-scan.jpg
 
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