Film Experiment: Cross Processing

Did you know that movie film is basically the same as still film with one difference: Movie film has an additional coating called remjet. Three fairly common films have this coating: Kodachrome, Seattle Film Works, and Photoworks. The latter two are movie film tailings -- lengths of film not needed during movie filming. The remjet doesn't affect film developing, but scanning the negatives is much harder because the coating darkens when it dries. So it needs to be removed in order to obtain the best negative results. For this week's Monday installment, I used a roll of Photoworks film and crossprocessed it as black and white. I've experimented with this before, twice, with varied results.

To complete the crossprocessing, the film needs a bleach bath to remove the remjet. I use a quart stainless steel bowl and about three ounces of bleach to the quart. This provides a slow remjet dissolve and prevents the bleach from destroying the negatives' images. Some of the results are below. The first result will be before the bleach treatment, the second afterward. You'll notice that before the bleach treatment the negatives were thicker, yielding poorer contrast and substantial negative noise. After, the negatives exhibit a roughness and some image flaws from bleach image erosion. However, they are substantially more contrasty with finer image quality and markedly less scanner noise. Also, both images of the same subject were post-processed the same way. Only two images, one of the dog images and the Pier 14 image, received any post-processing other than automatic contrast balancing.



I still don't get this sculpture, but it frames the buildings behind it well. 1/400th at f11. You can see in the second image where the bleach began to erode the negative along the top. When the bleach bath removes the remjet layer, it begins outward and moves in. The 35mm film's advance sprocket holes provide an edge next to the frame for the bleach to begin working on, so sometimes the remjet-removed images have a saw-tooth-like finish where the bleach had greater action than in the rest of the image.

Also note that the bleached image has greater highlight detail but some shadow detail loss. Also, the sky is nicely toned in the second image. Overall, I think the second image is more successful, though neither is superb. The framing is acceptable, but I should have underexposed the image a 1/3 stop to darken the highlights a bit.




For some reason this statue apparently causes some controversy. Some people seem to want it removed. It's Ghandi! So what if it's a nonsequitor at the Ferry Building. Guess what, the bow and arrow on the Embarcadero -- it's a bigger and far more prominent nonsequitor.
Anyway, this shot was taken at 1/2,000th and f4. I like the second image better, again, because it adds depth and detail to the sky, reveals shadow details and increases highlight details.




This picture needed some gamma correction to bring out shadows in the first, so to ensure proper comparison I dropped the gamma in the second. I think it was .45. 1/160th at f22.
The second provides improved dynamic range and less scanner noise. Also, on the first, you'll note the horizontal lines on the right. This was the sixth negative in the strip so the scanner interprets the end of a negative strip, when curled, as horizontal lines. These negatives could have used a longer wash, probably due to the remjet and the differences in how color film reacts to fixer. So even though I washed the negatives for about seven minutes, the still curled. After the bleach bath, which removed the last fixer, the negatives laid exceptionally flat and the scanner didn't add the horizontal lines.




I didn't track the shutter and aperture speeds for the dog pictures, but I did need a flash. This is why all my clean clothes have dog hair: when I put the laundry up to fold, the dogs decide to hide in it. The second image, after the bleach, has less scanner noise and better contrast.




This is the second picture that needed gamma correction. Hannah's nose was too close to the flash and was blown out as a huge highlight. Dropping the image gamma to .65 fixed that.

Overall, what was this post's point? That old Kodachrome, Seattle Film Works, and Photoworks film you have lying around is not unusable garbage. In fact, with creative processing, it can be used quite effectively and with good results. All three were very high-quality films and yield great monochrome tonal ranges, crisp detail, and nice results when handled well.

Next time I cross process some of the Seattle Film Works or Photoworks film in my fridge, I'll post a YouTube video showing how to do it.