Can old Kodachrome film be cross-processed, or only developed as black and white?
Asked 12/17/2019
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We found an old roll of 120 film in my grandfather’s camera years ago. A lab returned it unprocessed, and later I suspected it may have been Kodachrome. If a lab can no longer run the original Kodachrome process, would it still have been possible to cross-process the film just to recover an image? For example, could it be developed as black and white, or is any sort of color recovery possible without the original process?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
6y ago
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The heart of all commercial films that I'm aware of is silver-light chemistry, so it is possible to develop any film as black and white. That is what labs will do nowadays if you ask them to develop a roll of Kodachrome, since the K-14 process is no longer supported by anyone. (Dwayne's Photo processed its last roll of Kodachrome on 18-Jan-2011.)
If you know the process and have access to the right chemicals, you could develop Kodachrome in color, but part of why it's dead is how complicated K-14 is. It involves developing the film and exposing to light multiple times to develop each of the color layers.
Someone Figured Out a Process For Developing Kodachrome Film In Color, but he's not revealing the procedure or formulas required.
Because the dyes are not embedded in Kodachrome film, attempting to cross process with C-41 or E-6 would likely result in blank film because the bleaching step would wash the silver away.
See also:
Originally by user75526. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user75526
6y ago
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Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
Kodachrome generally cannot be meaningfully cross-processed for color using normal color-film chemistry. Its original K-14 process was unusually complex, and unlike most color films, the color dyes were not built into the film in the same way. That’s why standard color cross-processing is not a practical way to recover images.
However, Kodachrome can still be developed as black and white, because the silver-based image can be processed with conventional B&W chemistry. In fact, after K-14 ended, that was the usual fallback for old Kodachrome rolls.
So if the goal was simply to see whether any image remained, black-and-white processing would have been the realistic option. Recovering color would have required the specialized Kodachrome process or an experimental substitute, and that has not been generally available for years.
One important note: if the film was unrolled and exposed to light, any recoverable images may have been damaged or destroyed.
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