KODAK EKTAR 100 C-41 VS ECN-2 DEVELOPMENT

This Is a comparison of Kodak Ektar 100 developed in its native C41 developer and motion picture developer ECN-2. The first Gallery includes photos taken with my Nikon D810. The Kodak Ektar 100 was shot on a Nikon FM and Nikon F3HP with 35mm lenses. All shots digital and film were shot at the same settings and metered with a Sekonic Twinmate l-208. All photos are not edited, the negatives were converted with Negative Lab Pro. NLP settings: Source DSLR, Color model None, Pre Saturation 3 default, Tones linear + gamma and Color Kodak. I know playing with theses settings alone will give other results.

I was first exposed to ECN-2 by Matt Melcher on his podcast episodes DYI ECN and ECN-2 Follow up . Matt led me to James Harr’s website. I was truly amazed by the colors of the cross processing and just had to try it myself. With Kodak Ektar 100 being my favorite color negative film it was a no brainer to try it. I used the formula and times from James’s experiences along with some other information I found from Kodak. I purchased four chemicals from Photographers Formulary (Listed bellow) for $76. The CD-3 was purchased from Artcraft Chemical for $25. This will make many liters of chemistry. The reminder was purchased at Walmart. For this experiment the remote remover/ pre wash is not needed. I used Ilfostop Bath, Ilford Rapid Fixer, FPP Archival wash and FPP Foto Flow that I used for black and white development.

You will notice a color shift between the developers. Oddly some scenes look better in ECN-2 then the native C41, others do not. This brief experiment suggests that for some scenes that ECN-2 works well with Ektar 100 but is not a perfect substitute for C41 processing. Further experiments are needed. Over all I’m not disappointed, a few images in ECN-2 are actually Truer to color and give a nice look.

It will be interesting to see how the vision 3 films (50D, 250D and 500T) compare in C41. In the future I have plans to conduct the same experiments with Kodak Portra (160, 400 or 800), Kodak Kodacolor 200 (Color Plus 200) and Kodak Pro Image 100. Maybe others. With winter here I don’t plan on starting those experiments until spring with the possible exception of the Vision 3 500T.

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images are in the following order:

Digital, C41, ECN-2

C41, ECN-2