I have been meaning to respond to your original post. I was saddened to see how badly your negatives came out, and even more sad to see that you believed and others “confirmed” that this is normal! It is not! Proper Caffenol recipes produce negatives of the HIGHEST quality, indistinguishable from negatives developed in Kodak D76 or similar. Not grainy, not dark and murky. Clear, fine grain, great tonality and contrast. It makes me cringe to see all the people online saying you get poor quality negatives from Caffenol. I have been shooting since the 1990s on dozens of film stocks and with dozens of developers. I have been using nothing but Caffenol for the last few years since I realized its advantages. The only drawback is development time is a bit longer than commercial developers.
08_gruel.recluse Mar 25, ‘24