Darkroom on caffenol.org

Caffenol as paper developer

Wed, 15 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Caffenol-C in all variants makes a wonderful developer for negative film and if used carefully, it can be used for nearly any film speed and a lot of different films. So far I have found one (1) film, that fails in Caffenol: Rollei Retro 400. But this might have been just my fault, so I have just bought a few rolls of this film to make further experiments.

There are not so many examples about using caffenol as a per developer, so I had to try it. Mainly because I had no print developer to hand when my darkroom was built. And as I had no film to develop and I was sorting my negatives, I thought I give it a try.

Scan VS print

Sun, 07 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Yes, the title of this post looks confusing, because of course scanning is an input process and printing is an output process. Ad it’s even more confusing, as the print needs to be scanned as well… But first things first.

My last development of ISO 3200 Film was quite successful and I was quite surprised by the results. The negatives didn’t look as good as HP5 or TMAX but I thought those could be actually ‘thick’ enough to be enlarged onto paper.

Density

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

If you read a bit about caffenol development or development in general, you will quickly learn phrases like “my negatives came out very dense” or “negatives where thin, but scanned fine”. So what does all that mean?

If you develop color films in caffenol, most likely you will get dense negatives (dense meaning you cannot see through the film in this case), positive films and High ISO films will be denser then low ISO films. These negatives are not very good to produce prints on paper, as contrast is quite low and they have an orange mask. High ISO B&W Films will most likely come out very thin and will look like underdeveloped negatives. Both types will scan fine and with a small amount of Post Processing (Level adjustments) they will look good on a screen.