CineStill C-41 kits in liquid (box) and powdered (bag) form, along with FPP’s powdered C-41 kit.
If you have hard water (as I do) and will need a surfactant (as I do) to prevent water spots, Kodak Photo-Flo can of course be used - and in fact, I use it even if there is as stabilizer/rinse in the kit. Powdered kits are not entirely different, other than the stabilizer/rinse being omitted in some brands (CineStill omits it FPP does not) modern film stocks apparently don’t need the stabilizer, and the one in the liquid kit is as much a surfactant (rinse aid) as a stabilizer. When it’s done, you have a 1 liter bottle for each of developer, blix (bleach/fix), and stabilizer/rinse.
Indeed, mixing the chemistry is easy, and the instructions give you the precise measurements needed, along with what to do, and in what order to do it. But whoever makes them, the instruction sheets are virtually identical in design and layout - only the branding is changed, and of course the mixing instructions when it comes to the liquid kits vs. The truth is that I don’t know, but it would appear that all of these kits are actually made by Unicolor. But the CineStill branded kits appear to be identical to the ones sold under the Film Photography Project (FPP), Freestyle / Arista EDU, and Unicolor names, among others. CineStill also sells a powdered version of the kit. While I purchased a CineStill liquid C-41 kit, in reality, the kit and its contents are identical to other liquid 1 quart / 1 liter kits from other sources. Here’s what everything looked like when set-up: Water bath with immersion circulator, chemistry bottles, and a Paterson tank during one of the C-41 processing steps. The bottles are made of PET, have tight-fitting caps, and are reasonably heavy gauge, and they’ve been perfect for my darkroom use.Īll that was truly needed to begin was simply to mix the chemistry into the 1 liter bottles, set-up the water bath, get everything up to temp, and follow the directions. I’ve been using them for black and white processing, and just consumed more of them so I’d have the bottles to reuse for 1 liter (1 quart) color chemistry kits too. Walmart stores in the US carry a range of store brand 1 liter flavored soda waters called “Clear American” whose labels are easy to remove, with a few little spots of adhesive that can cleanly be removed with a touch of Goo Gone - an easily sourced adhesive solvent.
I already owned an Anova Precision Cooker (immersion circulator), and wanted to upgrade for the kitchen to the newest model - leaving the older one available for darkroom use.
To contain a temperature-controlled water bath for the chemistry (since it all needs to be held at 102☏) I’d chosen a tub from IKEA, the so-called “Pluggis.” I also got a couple of plastic organizers from The Container Store to set inside, which allowed the bottles to be held in-place in an organized fashion. I’d already previously figured-out how I’d be doing this, physically speaking: I didn’t work very hard at choosing subjects I didn’t waste the shots, but I didn’t exactly invest in them either. Instead, I took a cheap roll of Lomography Color Negative 400, loaded it into my Mamiya RB67, and spent an afternoon snapping-off its 10 6×7 images. To hedge my bets, I decided not to process any of the “real” rolls of film that were sitting in a pile. As it turns out, the worries were unnecessary. I have to confess: I’d been dragging my feet, fearful of this moment - worried whether I’d end-up simply ruining some film and losing shots I’d worked so hard to capture. A few months ago, before the COVID-19 pandemic dug its claws fully into the United States, I finally decided it was time to open-up the box of CineStill C-41 chemistry that had been sitting on a shelf since December, and set about processing the pile of color negative film that had been accumulating up to now.