color film - black and white prints

[molaselake]

Ok, here's the deal: A co-worker of mine had another co-worker take pictures for her wedding. Unfortunately, the girl who took the pictures is not exactly adept at doing so. The bride decided to take the negatives (they're in color) to me ( I only do black and white and develop my own stuff) and see if I could fix them. However, I'm not sure if there is anything special I need to do or any specific filter I need to use when developing these as black and white prints. I'd just like to give her back some nice prints because that's horribly disapointing not to have good pictures on such a special day. Oh, and the color prints are pretty dark...

[MarcusK]

Hey! You are absolutely right about the disappointment...

Now its been a while since i did some darkroom work, a couple of years basically....but i did try the colour negative on the b&w development. They were pretty nice....our theme was 60's theme, and by developping in B&W prints, it gave a better mood than in color.

As to what filters or other techniques, personally, i figure in this case, it will have to be a trial and error approach! Can't remember the filters i used, but once i dig the files up, i'll see if i have them written up somewhere...this might take a while though!

Hope you manage getting the results you are looking for and sorry couldn't be of more help!

Cheers,

Marc

[Asylum Steve]

Molaselake, please let me be clear that I am not trying to turn this into a film/digital discussion. I had my own darkroom for 15 years and shot film for much longer than that (with many fond memories, I might add).

But really, the quickest and easiest way to get bw prints from color originals would be to scan them into a computer and then convert them to bw in photoshop.

It sounds like you're thinking of simply putting the color negs in an enlarger and then using a traditional bw paper and chemistry to produce the prints. The chances of this working are very slim. The reason is that bw paper is not sensitive to red or amber light (which is why you can work under safelights with those colors).

The paper will not "see" these colors in the negative, meaning the tonality and contrast of prints made this way will be WAY off and quite unatural looking.

Granted, Kodak does make a special paper that is panchromatic (sensitive to all colored light), but it is for making bw prints from color reversal originals, and it must be processed in total darkness. I've used it, and trust me it is a MAJOR hassle to use.

Seriously, scanning and converting a decent color original to bw would take me maybe 5 minutes in ps, so unless you really want to experiment in the darkroom, I think it you'd get better results faster with a computer.

[molaselake]

Thank you to both of you for responding.

I don't actually have the color prints, just the negatives. My scanner is not film compatible, so it would probably turn out even worse if I tried scanning the negatives. I guess I'll just try it in the darkroom and see what I get. They couldn't be any worse than what the woman has already .

[Asylum Steve]

They couldn't be any worse than what the woman has already .

Good point. And hey, playing around in the darkroom is good, so maybe you'll learn something...

OTOH, it probably wouldn't be to expensive to have a photo CD made from the negs. That would be an easy way to get them onto your computer...

[zrfraser]

I tried making prints from color negs on bw paper and lets say the results were interesting, but not usuable. You may have better luck, but my experience was not the best. I learned a lot and it was fun to see how they would trun out, but like I said the prints were very poor.

Z