If I painted on B&W film with color and then printed using a color enlarger/paper what would be the result?

Question

What I want to do is paint on the negative and then print in a color dark room. I'm hoping that the print will come out B&W with the exception of the part I colored in. Will this be the result or will it turn out differently?

Answer 1

You're forgetting two things...the fact that a negative reverses color, and also the density of the negative affects the exposure of the photo paper and the tone of the picture.  Hold a negative up to a light, and you will see that the negative has a certain density - how much light passes through.  The density depends on how the film was exposed when you took the picture with the camera.  An underexposed film will have really "thin" negatives, meaning that a lot of light passes through and details look faint.  Overexposed film will have "dense" negatives, so that they look really dark.  Badly overexposed film will look almost black.  Correctly exposed film will have varying degrees of densitiy...shadows will be lighter and brighter areas will be darker, but not completely black.

I really don't think your idea would work.  Even if it did, it probably wouldn't look right.  If you just paint a negative, it will not have any differences in density, so you won't have any mid-tones.  Everything in the picture would just be either really dark or really light.  It would look fake.  Also, the paint would probably make the negative so dense and block so much light from the enlarger that it would be hard to expose the photo paper, unless you use a really long exposure.  And then, that would cause another problem because you would overexpose some parts of the picture, but underexpose other parts.  You'll have to do a lot of dodging and burning.  I think this is going to be a really tough project.

Go ahead and try it if you want.  You might get some interesting effects, but probably nothing like what you're hoping for.  But it might be an interesting experiment.  Just do it with a negative you don't care about and don't mind messing up.  At most, you'll just waste a couple of sheets of photographic paper.

Answer 2

What is going to happen is that the painted area will most likely block the light, and thus you will have a white silhouetted image of the painted area. If the even goes through the painted area, it will be a lighter in the painted area and the color will be distorted.

Answer 3

No.

But go ahead and try it, it may give you some interesting results.  If you look at a colour negative you will see that just adding colour is not exactly what you need to do ... Hopefully you are planing on using transparent paint.