Originally posted by twilhelm I’ve been developing my own color film since January and find it’s quite enjoyable and not nearly as difficult as I thought it would be.
It's good fun.
I did a 'dummy run' to see how long I could maintain a 30 degree bath for with three bottles of stuff in there (dev, blix and initial soak/rinse water - I keep the stab in another tub as it's not so temperature-critical, so there's room to dunk my tank in the sink which I agitate with the little 'twiddle-stick') and with that in mind, went ahead. Of course, all the chems are shiny and new and I'll need to concentrate on colour film for a bit, doing two lots of 35mm simultaneously when I do 35mm to get more bangs for my buck. I'll have to keep a tally of films I develop too or else wait for one to turn out not so good before extending my development times.
The journey from neg to Flickr goes as follows:- Copied on my lightbox with tripod-mounted Sony RX100 II in RAW, manual focus, 100 ISO and underexposed by half a stop (helps with the autofocus). Sony ARW RAW file into 8 bit TIFF in the Sony software, then into Lightroom 3 where I can use Photoshop 7 for inverting the image (Irfanview can do this too). I use 'Auto Levels' and 'Auto Colour' on Photoshop which removes the orange cast, and adjust levels and gamma as necessary.
I read about a good tip to photo a white or grey sheet somewhere on one photograph so that the correct white level can be picked up as a reference. But one shot on a 120 film equals three shots on a 35mm film and I don't want to squander a frame on such-like.