Can you make some frames on a color film roll come out black and white without digitizing?
Asked 11/14/2016
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Is it possible to shoot a roll of color film normally, process it as color, and end up with some images printed in black and white while others remain in color from the same roll? I’m not asking about developing color film in black-and-white chemistry, but about using standard color film and somehow getting a black-and-white result for selected frames—or even part of a frame—without digitizing. For example, could a film-only workflow produce an effect like a mostly black-and-white scene with one colored subject, or does that require darkroom masking/compositing after the film is developed?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
9y ago
2 Answers
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Doing this in camera seems impossible. If you really want to do it with film, your process should be something like:
- Take the photo with color film. Process the film normally.
- Make a black and white copy of the color negative. You'll want the copy to also be a negative, so you'll need a black and white positive image of the original negative, if you know what I mean. Your options here probably depend on the film format you're using, but could include black and white positive film, reverse processing, or just making a regular black and white copy and then copying that again.
- Create a pair of complementary masks: one which reveals the area that you want to print in color, and another which reveals the area you want to print in black and white.
- Create some way to register each mask during printing.
- Print using the color negative and color-revealing mask, and then again using the black and white negative and b&w-revealing mask.
That's a lot of work, with a lot of things that can easily go wrong. You've got at least three different development processes to deal with, registration issues, perhaps problems getting the exposure right for the two printing phases. You're copying the image several times, which inevitably means some loss of quality. Even with extreme care in registering the masks on the image, it's going to be very difficult to avoid getting a visible boundary between the color and black and white area. And the printing process doesn't allow for a lot of subtlety. In the taxicab image, for example, there are some colored areas aside from the taxi itself -- look at the turn signals on the other vehicles, the reflections in the wet street, the billboard. It's going to be hard to create a set of masks that provides that.
If your goal is to do things the hard way just for your own enjoyment or to show off, then go for it. If your goal is to produce the best image you can, and if you don't mind the fact that the process is much faster, cheaper, and better in every conceivable sense, use a digital image editor instead.
Originally by user4262. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user4262
9y ago
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Not in any simple in-camera way. A color negative records color information in dye layers, and there isn’t a practical "black-and-white filter" you can use on the camera to make selected frames on a color roll record as true monochrome while other frames stay color.
If you want mixed color and black-and-white results from the same roll, the workable film-only route is after processing: shoot color film, develop it normally, then print selected frames in black and white or use darkroom masking/composite techniques to combine a monochrome version with a color version. That is how effects like a mostly monochrome print with one colored subject would be approached in an all-analog workflow.
If your goal is simply black-and-white images with standard color processing, chromogenic black-and-white film exists and is developed in C-41, but it won’t give color and monochrome on the same negative.
So: same roll, yes; same negative/frame with selective color, only through complex darkroom post-processing—not with a lens filter alone.
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