Colour Reversal (aka E6) processing with Xtol & C41 Developer
Status: Success & Preliminary Testing

(Once I have tweaked everything, I will be publishing some cheap recipes that will let you do B&W neg, Colour Neg, Colour Slide/Reversal, and B&W Slide/Reversal all with the same set of chemicals - they will mix up to 4 universal chemicals).

So E6 chemicals and kits can be expensive, especially in Australia, and in Australia I haven't (yet anyway) been able to find a way to get CD-3 or CD-4 to make some colour developer with.

For those of you who like experimentation, and want to make positive films (from either E6 films, or cross-processing C41 or B&W negatives), then this is the article for you.

The critical parts of the E6 process goes like this: First Developer, Reversal/Fogging, Colour Developer, Bleach and Fix, this is the minimum you need to get an image (okay you can do a bleach bypass or a combined bleach/fix).

The first developer is a black & white developer, it develops a black and white negative on the film, the reversal/fogging stage exposes the undeveloped silver, either chemically or to light, (since you cant really overexpose it, we can just pull it out and expose it to a nice bright bulb on each side of the reel).

This in an effect creates a mask for the colour developer, and it activates the dyes on the various filtered layers to the opposite of whatever the negative image is and thus a positive image.

The bleach and fixer stage removes remaining silver on the film, and you are left with a postiive! (For B&W process films you will want to use toner in place of Colour Developer, which will create a positive mask on the silver which the bleach and fix should leave alone).

I have developed some Reala 100 (35mm) in Xtol @ 1+1 24c for 7 minutes (Needs more development in this stage- thinking of trialling upping the temp to 31c for the same time), then exposed it to light, and developed it in C41 Colour Developer @ 31c for 8 minutes.

The result is a washed out positive with an orange mask and low colour definition - I need to fine tune the development stage, here is a preliminary result with some colour balancing (still not balanced! and NB: I shot this on my dSLR quickly for reference.. with a 5600K backlight AND some green cellophane over the backlight to help cancel out part of the orange mask).

The result is quite clearly a positive - which is a step in the right direction

Success! I have developed some Superia XTRA 800 which turned out brilliantly, as I vastly changed my first developer temperature and times, still needs some tweaking, there is a blue cast, due to it being a C41 film and as well night shots on this roll - but the full colour range is there! The grain also looks pretty nice too (due to the Xtol I would suspect), here is a preliminary result:

I have read online about people using high dilution Rodinal stand development and getting 16-stops of tonal range out of their negative, and other techniques such as sitting the reel in developer and then putting it in water (in darkness of course) to allow the shadows develop faster than the highlights, then back to developer and repeat.

This DIY method of processing reversal films really allows you to open up the versatility and techniques of B&W developing to the colour world, I hope to apply some of these techniques and see if I am able to pull out an extreme tonal range from Velvia for example.

I also plan on trying adding some Sodium Thiocyanate to Xtol, which supposes increases yellow in normal E6 processing, (or I can mix up my own B&W dev and add Sodium Thiocyanate), this would go someway to countering the blue cast present from processing C41 films this way to get a positive - if this works, we are now able to get to a high speed (800 & 1600), fine grain (due to the kind of developer Xtol is - remember it's just 3 layers of B&W negs intially - or 4 in the case of this Superia XTRA 800!), large tonal range/latitude, and somewhat normal looking slide!