----- Original Message ----- From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: OT: tonality of different B&W workflows?
I've never been a big fan of C41 BW. It seems to me that it is a format that was created for the convenience of the labs.
The moder spate of them (this excludes XP-2) were created to fill a market niche.
What happened was a few years ago (10 or so) there was a sudden resurgence in the use of black and white for fashion advertising.
This, of course, led to a renewed interest in B&W photography on a consumer/amateur photographer level.
The problem was that by this time, almost no one was doing their own black and white processing, and commercial black and white was also becoming a rarity.
When I was in that end of the game, it was all we could do to keep up with the demand for black and white processing with the facilities we had, and there wasn't going to be more facilities made available, because no one knew when the bubble would burst.
The, along came Kodak with T-Max 400CN, and the problem was pretty much solved overnight.
Fortunately, at about the same time, I was getting out of the black and white processing business, and moving on to other things, because the market dried up almost overnight.
The chromogenics are actually not a convenience for us. Since they are, in fact, a colour film, they are run side by side with regular C41 films.
The nature of them makes them very sensitive to normal chemical fluctuations, and since they are being printed on colour paper (not many labs run chromogenic paper) they are also a bugger to get a neutral colour balance on.
William Robb
William Robb
