Gast
Hello,
Perhaps someone here has an idea. I’m looking for a way to boost a flat negative film.
(35mm cinema film)
Basically, I’m looking for the exact opposite of a Farmer’s reducer.
The negative film is an old one-off, and all my test prints onto various
materials have failed to produce satisfactory results.
If anyone has had any experience with this, I’d be grateful for
any ideas. Basically, I’m looking for a formula or a solution that
could then be used to fill a developing tank.
Regards,
Ernest
Urnes
Hi Ernest,
I’d suggest having a look at selenium toner. I don’t have much experience with film toning, but it does increase the contrast in paper prints. It might be worth a try.
Best regards, Sven.
uworischki
I might give the copper amplifier a go; as far as I know, Impex still has some remaining stock of ORWO (A605) for 75 cents in the bargain bin...
MirkoBoeddecker
That’s right, we do.
Does it still work well?
Have you tried it out?
Regards,
Mirko
As far as I know, the only thing that really works is uranium amplifiers.
But I’m probably making myself liable to prosecution just by mentioning it here.
So I’m distancing myself from my statement above *right now* :rolleyes:
Urnes
Well, I could share the recipe for Urantoner. :rolleyes:
Regards, Sven.
Gast
Ernest,
Have you tried all the copying methods yet, such as using very hard copying material or dark-field reproduction?
If not, let me clarify first: do you really mean 35 mm cinema film and not 35mm film? If so, are we looking at a range of a few metres to several kilometres?
That would be problematic, as one usually works by eye, at least with chrome developers.
To cut a long story short, as already mentioned, Calbe copper developers are commercially available; however, as chrome developers were previously common in West Germany, I’ll simply venture the guess that copper from Mansfeld was used to save on foreign exchange.
And given that it isn’t Agfacolor after all, it’s perfectly normal for the results to be a bit flat.
I’ve just picked up the Kisselbach and had a look at what it says.
I quote verbatim:
Developer
Highly recommended, especially for 35mm negatives, is the mordant colour developer, commercially known as ‘Fesachrom developer’.
First, the negatives are bleached in a solution.
In the subsequent dye bath, the colorants deposit themselves in accordance with the silver compounds present.
It is worth rinsing the negatives again for 10 minutes before treatment, so that the first bath does not act as a weaker developer.
Chrome Enhancer
Solution A
Water 200 ml
Potassium dichromate 10 g
Solution B
Hydrochloric acid solution 1:10
(specific gravity of hydrochloric acid 1.16)
Mix:
Solution A 40 ml
Solution B 5 ml
Water 180 cc
In this bath, the negatives are bleached, then rinsed and finally fixed in a standard positive developer.
Finally, rinse as normal.
Silver intensifier (Agfa 600)
Solution A
Water 1 litre
Hydroquinone 3 g
Citric acid 3g
Solution B
Water 100 ml
Silver nitrate 5g
To use, mix 100 ml of A with 10 ml of B.
The mixture does not keep.
After enhancement, the negative is rinsed briefly and then treated for two minutes in a fresh acidic fixer.
Finally, rinse thoroughly.
Or simply tone it using direct sulphur toning, but that’s common knowledge, or very easy to find online; I’m too lazy to go to the trouble of writing it out as well.
Good luck
Roland
PS: Once again in a 1950s tone, but formulated by me personally, I hasten to add.
However, you would be well advised to bear in mind that such an intervention on the negative may not necessarily succeed; indeed, it may even result in the complete ruin of the negatives.
It is therefore further recommended that the user first try this out on a less important negative, perhaps one produced specifically for this purpose.
cfb_de
You can forget about uranium-based solutions straight away (just as, in my humble opinion, copper, chromium and other amplifiers are really just a way of easing your conscience: you can’t conjure up something out of nothing), because the last 25g of uranyl nitrate freely available in Europe is sitting right here with me :-)
Now you can only get the stuff in exchange for about twenty-five centimetres of completed/approved/certified paperwork piled high.
Best regards,
Franz
Gast
Franz,
I’ve just read your post; I was going to mention that in mine too, but then I forgot.
Apart from the fact that I doubt the author is still interested, ‘flawy’ can also mean ‘underdeveloped’, and in that case, depending on the film and the developer, there should still be something that can be done.
Roland
cfb_de
Hi Roland,
You’re going to have to take the flak for everyone else now.
If the negatives are ‘underdeveloped’, they’re probably already fixed by now. So we can only hope that they’re at least properly exposed, so that we can salvage something using variable-contrast printing material (does that even exist for motion picture film?).
At most, you can “enhance” the density visible to the human eye. But where there was no shadow before, there won’t be one afterwards either. Regardless of chrome, copper, silver, uranium and other magic potions of days gone by.
All that wonderful stuff from our forebears is not actually suitable as an “enhancer”, but only as a “toner”. [Modern term: “staining developer”]
Back then, “enhancement” was used to get the film off the glass plate within acceptable processing times. Electronic timers with tenths of a second and measurement functions hadn’t been invented yet.
Back then, ‘enhancement’ was used to achieve greater overall density (see ‘over-developed’) or greater contrast (NB: back then they didn’t have MG papers, the Zone System hadn’t been invented, and often the exposure papers were, at best, ‘floppy soft’) in the negative.
But they *never* “intensified” the image to achieve detail in the shadows where previously there was only the bare film base. That is impossible, and our forebears were not so foolish as to demand it. And they were certainly not so foolish as to subject an entire cinema film to such a treatment (which would mean the irretrievable loss of the original!).
Back then, they simply made two or three copies until it had maximum blackness, but no shadows left. The OP should go and watch the reconstructed version at the Metropolis cinema.
There you can see quite clearly how the work was done. During the analogue recycling of the old film reel, the shadows were lost during the second duplication; when the film was remastered for digital cinema, the highlights were then lost. This cinema reconstruction is a work of literary scholarship and is shown every evening in Germany in some ‘art house cinema’ as a ‘reconstructed original’.
Even the most outlandish chemistry is incapable of turning “nothing” into “something great”. Only mysticism can do that, but it has nothing to do with science-based photography. We don’t conjure up snakes; we perform exposure on silver halides.
Best regards,
Franz
Gast
Hello everyone,
Thank you very much in advance for all your replies. I’ve only just got back to work today, so
I’m only just getting round to replying now.
The original is a 35 mm cinema film; the base material is triacetate cellulose and it is a black-and-white film.
We’ve already tried the following: transferring it to sound film stock, i.e. very high-contrast
material. Adjusting the exposure didn’t yield good results either.
I forgot to mention one thing. Unfortunately, the process must be able to be disposed of correctly in accordance with local water protection regulations
and disposal options. (It’s a state-run operation here)
This uranium process is unfortunately out of the question; it’s been tried here before and, due to the regulations,
is almost impossible to use.
Best regards and thanks for the help
ernest
Gast
Hello Franz,
I’ll reply directly here as well:
The problem isn’t about conjuring up detail out of thin air.
The material does have detail; it’s just that it’s extremely low in contrast.
However, the film stock (very hard stock) we used to try the transfer
is too sensitive to reproduce the grey scales accurately, so density errors occur.
And no, there is no contrast-reversal film stock for cine film.
Incidentally, before we subject any material to a process, we naturally
test it first on test rolls or a single scene; otherwise we’d probably
have no unique prints left lying around.
So I think toning would be the right approach, as it would allow us to extract more density from
the material without
re-copying – which always means a loss of information, and ultimately a loss of detail.
Regards,
Ernest
Gast
Ernest,
The easiest thing to do is to use standard Kinepositiv film and develop it for longer, until it comes out hard.
Kodak isn’t really suitable, though – it’s too foolproof. You’re better off with something from Eastern Europe, perhaps Filmotec, Foma, Tasma or Svema.
Roland
