Is it worth developing my own film?

<p>i got my first film camera, a holga 120n, a few weeks ago. so far ive shot and developed 3 rolls, waiting for another. the first one was developed/printed locally for 18 bucks, and a mail-in place i found on the internet was half that. im wondering if, in the long run, it's cheaper to develop my own film, and learn as i go. thanks for any advice!</p>

<p>I really enjoy developing my own film, but I can't as to whether you will enjoy the experience. You can certainly get it developed cheaper though. If you have a Wal-Mart, you can put it in their drop box, and they'll send it off to Dwayne's for a reasonable price. In the long run, it probably would be cheaper to develop your own film, but it does require some patience. JR</p>

<p>Consider taking a class at a local college in B&W film developing and printing. See if you like it. That way you learn everything you need to know, have help if you need it, and get a chance to practice at a well equipped school lab. If you do like it you can decide from there whether or not to do it yourself at home.</p>

<p>You might want to look around and see if there are any low cost labs you can rent near your home. I live near a fine arts center that charges just over $20 a day to use a well equipped B&W lab for the entire day. They also have a short course for people wanting to learn. There might be something similar in your area.</p>

<p>If you're thinking about developing color yourself that's a little more complicated. I'm afraid I don't have good advice there.</p>

<p>Oh yes...I second the Wal-Mart suggestion. Just don't deal with the front desk. You have to use their drop box for slide film, B&W film, Kodachrome, etc. Make sure you clearly label what you're giving them and what you want on the envelope.</p>

<p>I just shoot color and have the lab process it "only" and then scan in the negative. It's pretty cheap that way. You have to pay a lot more to have B&W 120 film processed here at all.</p>

<p>Nick, what are you shooting?</p>

<p>For black and white I'd say, yes: home development is easy and rewarding. A signif percentage of b/w shooters process their own.</p>

<p>For color negative or slides, I'd pass, leave it to the pros.</p>

<p>Nick, all of those answers are very appropriate, IMO. One other item to consider is how much you'll be shooting. If you're going to shoot one roll of film a month, just sending it out is probably the easiest choice. If you might shoot a few rolls a week, some weeks, doing it yourself becomes very attractive, I think. In addition to the cost, sending it out involves the risk of ruined, scratched, or lost film. As Mendel said, black and white is very easy and inexpensive. Taking a darkroom class to learn developing is a great idea--it'll give you a chance to get your fingers wet, as it were. I develop my own B&W in a bathroom; I load the film into the tanks in a dark closet. I can have a roll in the wash 15 minutes after shooting it, which is very convenient. Good luck! --ken</p>

<p>if you are equipped to scan 120 film fine<br>

I would not even try developing c-41 film at home. too expensive.<br>

as was said "send out" at wal-mart. I don't know if dwayes or fuji does it.<br>

B&W : at home average or inexperienced would be better than most "send out"<br>

This is radical but I think it is true. one problem getting the film on the reel.<br>

don';t even try slide film in a holga. it requires careful exposure and you have no<br>

way to do this with such a basic camera.<br>

If you really want to do 120 slides, get an inexpensive TLR or a 120 folding<br>

camera. I am not a fan of the holga, but you can have a lot of fun.<br>

Keep a notebook. times dilutions developer type etc.<br>

try buying film from www.freestyle.biz or www.ultrafineonline.com<br>

save money take more photos.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>thank you all so much. ive been experimenting with both color and b&w. the color slide rollsthat i had processed in standard c-41 came out nice. and i actually sent my last two rolls of color out to dwayne's, much cheaper than the local shop. they also have a photo class at my high school that you can develop in their private darkroom, and its free to take. i suppose it's a much better alternative to paying to take a college class, on top of the other classes im taking there. if i get decent enough, i may start experiment on my own with my rolls, and buy my own development supplies. maybe keep it cheap and buy some expired rolls, if i can find any.</p>

<p>JDM.... if you can afford a scanner capable of doing medium format... they ain't cheap!</p>

<p>You develop film by carefully following the developer manufacturer's instructions. B&W processing is simple enough to do, and before long you will see that you can process a few rolls of your own in an evening. A stainless steel can and film reel kit will make this very easy for you. Learn how to load film in your reels by taking a roll that's already developed for practice. (Ask your lab to give you back one of your rolls uncut.) The emulsion side of the film faces the inside of the reel. This makes the natural curl of the film coming off the roll from your camera work for you. I like to hold the reel in one hand and the film in the other. Teach yourself how to handle the film by holding it by its edges. Take care never to touch the emulsion surface of your film because the oils in your skin can ruin development under your fingerprints.</p>

<p>The process is simple: (1) Load the film in the processing reel in total darkness. (2) Put the reel in the processing can you use. Now you can work in ordinary light. (3) Pour the developer in the can and start your timer. (4) Agitate the chemical reaction by turning the can over several times during development. Tap the can gently on your counter top to jar any air bells (trapped air bubbles) loose from the emulsion. (5) Quickly pour the developer out at the end of the time and pour in the stop bath. Agitate. Pour out at the end of the recommended time. (6) Pour in the fixer. Agitate. Pour out at the end of the recommended time. (7) Open the can and rinse the film with clean running water. (8) Take your film out of the reel and hang it in a dust-free place to dry. Some people finish the rinse by pouring in a little water with a wetting agent in it to reduce spotting. You will encounter advice and accessories designed to wipe loose water off the film, but if you decide to use something like this make sure to touch the emulsion side of the film gently because it is nothing more than a thin layer of gelatin. Better to try this sort of thing only if you discover that you need to solve a water spotting problem.</p>

<p>Color processing requires careful attention to time and temperature for all chemicals used for developing and rinsing. IMO there is so little latitude that the equipment needed to get everything right is beyond the means of the average hobbyist.</p>

<p>A scanner for MF is cheap a used/refurbished Epson 4490 was $69 last time I looked.</p>

<p>so i can take a freshly developed roll of b&w film, scan it onto my computer and order prints from there? that sounds great. or would it be cheaper to take it into one of those one hour shops and have them scan it? and judging from everyone's responses, i think ill leave the color rolls to the professionals at dwayne's. thanks again(:<br>

also, i have a pretty good scanner that is part of my laser printer. ive used it for scanning printed photos of previous rolls onto my computer before, but what makes an epson so much better than anything else?</p>

<p>Yes you can. You know already that images on film are the negative (opposite) of what your final print will look like. That is the white areas on the film will be black on the print & vice versa. It takes a little getting used to for you to actually make some sense of the image you see before and immediately after scanning. Many scanner software packages can convert the image from a negative to a positive and then save the result as a jpg file ready for you to send off.</p>

<p>I think I would scan the negatives twice to identify and process the "keepers." The first step is to make contact prints by cutting the film into strips about 11" long and then scanning two or three of them at once. The result will look a little like a set of thumbnails for the shoot. Keep track of which negative goes where. Convert the images to positives and then look through them to see which ones are the best. Scan the best ones again at a higher resolution for printing.</p>

<p>Dots and pixels can be confusing. All digital optical equipment has a tiny size spot manufactured into it, which is the smallest area that can be described with the data it captures for what it "sees." Printers and scanners call this spot a 'dot' and imaging devices call it a 'pixel.' Make sense of want these spots are by imagining the square tiles on an ordinary bathroom wall or floor. They are laid out in a grid one spot deep that covers a surface that might be the bed of a scanner or the sensor in a camera. Printers and scanners use a measure called 'DPI' or 'Dots Per Inch' to tell you how fine the result will be. Imaging devices use the term 'Resolution' to mean the same thing. Resolution has a traditional well-understood meaning in the graphics world but it is also handy to use term like 'PPI' or 'Pixels Per Inch' for measuring resolution.</p>

<p>This whole thing falls back into your lap when you ask what DPI do I use to get the picture size I want in a print? The answer is to use the DPI that matches the resolution your image printer will have. Quite often photo printing services will tell you the minimum pixel size you nees to get a common size picture. Costco, for example, tells you that the minimum size for a 4x6 print is 690x460 pixels. Find the resolution by dividing the size inches into the dimension in pixels. The long dimension is 115 PPI. This means that you need to scan using at least 115 DPI. Image printers typically can handle much greater resolutions than 115, often as high as 600 DPI or more, so you can be quite comfortable scanning at 300 DPI. (Some people feel that the human eye cannot see specks smaller than 300 DPI without magnification, although enginnering and scientific firms can obtain optical devices capable of close to 30,000 DPI!)</p>

<p>Ordinary computer devices don't all have the same DPI built into them. Monitors typically display only 72 DPI so that a photo shown at 100% resolution looks huge. There is no need for concern. At 72 DPI you are only seeing about 1/4" of an image that has a resolution of 300 PPI. This difference causes confusion because it is natural to ask why the picture on the screen is not the same size as the print you get in life. This is something that just takes your patience and understanding to get used to just like looking at negatives takes some getting used to.</p>

<p>I hope all this helps.</p>

<p>Nick, you can have your negs scanned at a 1hr place, but only if it's an uncut roll. And here lies the problem... for whatever reason, most flatbed scanners have a neg carrier that requires the negs to be cut. The 1hr place requires them to not be cut, but once they scan it they will then cut them however they want... which for whatever reason tends to be shorter than a standard negative sleeve... so if you want to store your negs in a good negative file, they will all be cut wrong to fit! So, if you go the 1hr route (it costs like $2-$3 to get a CD made) you need to tell them to not cut your negatives. But, be warned, 1hr places don't have a way to keep their machines clean, since they are out in the open... a very strange policy that I have yet to fully understand the validity of... as if I WANT to watch a high schooler wearing no gloves and a dusty jacket stuff my negs into a dusty machine that should be a clean dust-free environment! In this environment, scratched negs becomes an issue. Since you typically cannot scan your negs at home BEFORE taking them to the 1hr shop, it is a risky situation, and yes I have had negs ruined at 1hr labs before. I keep going back because it's cheaper than a new scanner and dramatically less work, and the people never know how to charge me so I typically end up getting away with paying half of the cost.</p>

<p>u are so cool!</p>

<p>Nick,</p>

<p>It's a bit of a cliche already, but now's a great time to be getting into film, especially if you live in the U.S. and therefore have access to tons of cheap secondhand stuff.</p>

<p>As for developing you're own negs, absolutely! Once you get the hang of it, you'll find you'll get better results than at the store, especially when you discover film/developers combos that you like (i.e. Acros + D-76 1:3@16.5 mins). Spend time over on the film developing forum on this site to get a taste for it.</p>

<p>As for colour, there is a Japan-made kit (I think by Naniwa) designed for simple home developing, although the process is more difficult than for b&w.</p>

<p>As for printing, if you're gonna get into DIY, go all the way and invest in some secondhand darkroom equipment (all very cheapish on eBay). Again, go over to the printing and finishing forum on this site for a peek at what you're missing out on.</p>

<p>Film is good.</p>

<p>Here's the <a href="http://www.japanexposures.com/shop/product_info.php?cPath=23&products_id=224 ">Naniwa Color Kit N</a> for processing colour nega at home if you're interested. Instructions in English.</p>

<p>IMHO the choice whether to develop your film or not is not only a matter of money. Doing your developing and printing allows you to take full control of the process, something that you cannot have when relying on external labs and one of the main claimed advantages of digital. You have to enjoy the process as well. From my side, I don't have that much spare time and therefore I prefer to rely on an external lab, I found a good pro one in my area, I call talk with the counter and tell him exactly what I need. For sure this is a more expensive route, especially for B&W, but I prefer to make a different use of my time and besides this is one of the reasons why I did not turn to digital, I don't want to spend a significant amount of my time sitting at a computer to edit my pictures.</p>

<p>Black and white developing is cheap, and easy enough to do in your own home. No darkroom is required, and you can get all the equipment and chemicals for about $70. I do my own black and white developing because most labs nowadays seem incapable of developing it properly.<br>

I began my own developing when tray-processing 4x5 large format film. The trays were $1 each (I needed only 3 of them). 1 liter bottles for the developer were $3 each, only 2 are required. A box of ID-11 or Perceptol developer costs less than $4, a bottle of Rapid fix fixer costs less than $10, and will make 4 liters of fixer solution. The only other items I needed were a thermometer ($8), and an egg timer (which I already had).<br>

My first sheets of film were a pain to process, as I had set the trays in my bathtub to keep the temperature constant. I got developer and fixer all over my fingers, and managed to spill more onto other parts of my body in the process. Despite all this, my negatives came out properly developed, and I was very happy.<br>

It was during this time that I got a good deal on an old Canon F1 35mm film camera. I shot a couple rolls of film and took them to the local camera shop. They couldn't develop black and white on site, so I had to wait a couple days for it. The results were less than pleasing. I hunted around on ebay and picked up a Jobo developing tank with 4x5 and 35mm reels for less than $30. After the tank arrived, I tried processing a roll of 35mm film in it, and voila! Perfection! It now takes me less time to develop my own black and white film than it does to take it to the local camera shop, and it costs only a few cents per image.<br>

I found a used Epson 4970 film scanner at a local junk shop for $10. I installed the software which came with it, and scanned my first film images and transferred them to my computer. Wow. Now I could email and post my film images as easily as I did images from my digital equipment.<br>

I recently began color processing using a Naniwa color kit. The process is more complicated than with black and white film, but not really difficult. It is also much less expensive. It costs me about $6 to develop a 24 exposure roll of film at a lab, and about $34 to develop 20 sheets of 4x5 film. The Naniwa kit costs under $20 (here in Japan) and will develop 15 36-exposure rolls of 35mm film.</p>

<p>Nick,<br>

I develop my own B/W but have color negs done at a one-hr lab for $2 per roll - hard to top that. 120 chromogenic B/W costs the same.<br>

If you must develop your own and expect to do quite a bit you might try divided D-76 which is very economical. I have used nothing but for the past thirty years. <br>

Part A is reusable indefinitely, and part B is household borax. Used photo lab equipment is very cheap now - wonder why that is? It has very loose temp and processing times. It has a wide latitude which is good for my pans and should be good for other iffy exposure, home-made and novelty cameras. Go here for more details:<br>

<a href="http://www.jackspcs.com/dd76v.htm">http://www.jackspcs.com/dd76v.htm</a><br>

Go here for a chemical kit. A liter should get you by for a year, plus a box of 20 Mule Team Borax.<br>

<a href="http://www.photoformulary.com">http://www.photoformulary.com</a></p>

<p>AZ</p>