I've been scanning many of my 4x5 C41 negatives. Though I have what I am
fairly confident are correct profiles for my scanner (an Epson 4990) and
for the films I've used for the past decade or so, I find that some not
insignificant fraction of my negatives have _very_ strange color casts
when scanned, which can be quite difficult to correct in postprocessing.
In fact, looking at the color histogram for these negatives in Photoshop
shows a huge hole in the cyan channel -- which makes me suspect that much
of the cyan dye in the film either originally developed as, or converted
later to (is this possible?) the colorless leuco-cyan form. I am not
tremendously surprised by this since I know about 50% of my film over the
years was developed with 2-part C41 kits, with combined bleach-fixes that
are notorious for leuco cyan problems (as I didn't know at the time).
If I can reprocess the film to give normal cyan dye, I want to. But some
people have advised me that it should be possible to repeat only the fix
step; thinking about the problem (that the cyan dye is in the wrong
oxidation state) I think it may actually be necessary to repeat the bleach
step as well. I have also seen recommendations to use a bleach for this
kind of reprocessing that differs from the standard C41 bleach.
Can anyone offer informed advice on this?

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Thor Lancelot Simon tls@rek.tjls.com
"The liberties...lose much of their value whenever those who have greater
private means are permitted to use their advantages to control the course
of public debate." -John Rawls
> I've been scanning many of my 4x5 C41 negatives. Though I have what I am
> fairly confident are correct profiles for my scanner (an Epson 4990) and
[quoted text clipped - 18 lines]
>
> Can anyone offer informed advice on this?
You need to repeat the bleach step, and just for safety, the following
steps, wash, fix, and stabilize. Lueco-cyan dye is corrected in the bleach.

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Ken Hart
kwhart@fullnet.com
> If I can reprocess the film to give normal cyan dye, I want to. But
> some people have advised me that it should be possible to repeat
[quoted text clipped - 3 lines]
> to use a bleach for this kind of reprocessing that differs from the
> standard C41 bleach.
> Can anyone offer informed advice on this?
You need to re-BLEACH the film, and then for saftey, refix, wash and
stabilise. You can use BLIX OK as long as it is airated and
regenerated properly.
If you know someone with a dip-dunk running, it may be easier to
just put it through the lot.

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West Australia 6076
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Thor Lancelot Simon - 29 Nov 2006 18:32 GMT
>You need to re-BLEACH the film, and then for saftey, refix, wash and
>stabilise. You can use BLIX OK as long as it is airated and
>regenerated properly.
I've seen suggestions from former Kodak chemistry development folks on
photo.net (I wish I could find the articles again -- their search facility
is awful) that it is almost impossible to make a combined bleach-fix for
C41 that does not impose some additional risk of leuco-cyan dye, and that
suppliers of "2 part" C41 chemistry with a blix are just basically ignoring
this problem rather irresponsibly.
Since I suspect this is why I ended up with this problem in the first
place (and looking at the color histograms of quite a bit of film of
different types that I know was _processed_ at the same time, but shot
under very different conditions, I see no other good explanation for the
hole in the histograms where a lot of cyan ought to be), and I processed
most of the film myself using developer-blix (or developer-blix-stabilizer)
chemistry one-shot, I think I will stick to the canonical process with
separate bleach and fix for any efforts to rectify it!

Signature
Thor Lancelot Simon tls@rek.tjls.com
"The liberties...lose much of their value whenever those who have greater
private means are permitted to use their advantages to control the course
of public debate." -John Rawls