In the darkroom – Printing from colour negatives developed as B&W

A while ago I wrote about some testing I did with developing colour film in black and white chemicals. www.beauphoto.com/an-experiment-with-developing-colour-film-in-bw-chemistry The results were good, and scanning from the negatives gave me some interesting images. Dense or weird negatives are easy to scan and correct, but printing them in the darkroom is a different story. I thought I’d give it a try with two of the films to see what I could get.

I tried to choose two negatives that were pretty close in terms of silver density. The colour of the base makes a huge differnce in the overall print exposure so I wanted to at least have the image density be similar. I printed these with an Omega condenser enlarger on Ilford MG RC Pearl paper. I used Ilford Multigrade filters to control contrast.

The first film I tried making a print from was the Harman Phoenix 200. It has quite a clear base for a colour film and I thought it would be a relatively easy negative to print. It seems to have nice contrast and good details, though I found the highlights to be a bit ‘glowy’. You might be able to see it in the image here. This exposure was 12 seconds using a an Ilford Mulitgrade 2 filter.

Overall, I am surprised I was able to get a decent print from the colour film. I think it is worth experimenting with if you happen to have a lot of colour film but prefer to shoot black and white. (Though with colour film getting more expensive, you could probably sell it off to fund your black and white habit!) Of course you can always scan colour negatives and convert them to black and white files, but because the silver layer is bleached out when processing, the images won’t have the same feel of film grain that the black and white processed films do. Printing colour negatives on black and white paper in the darkroom is very difficult and doesn’t usually result in very good images. I should have also included a print from the Ilford FP4 roll – a true black and white film – to compare to, but I didn’t have that strip of film with me that day. Watch for a potential update when I have a chance to get back into the darkroom to give it a try. Let us know your experiences with this, and if you have any favourite films we should test.