I made a cannabis-based film developer and processed over a hundred test exposures with it.
In this article, I’ll share the results from my new “Sativa Cannanol” film developer and a recipe so you can make it at home. You’ll also see how this cannabis-based developer stacks up against a commercial one and various phenol-based solutions, like coffee, moss, fir, cedar, blood, pond water, EpiPen, and pee.
Plus, you’ll learn about the ethanolic extraction method and various ways to make and improve your own organic homemade developer.
Cannabis: an ideal film developer candidate?
Factory-made chemicals are often the easiest, fastest, cheapest, and best-resolving solution for developing black and white film.
My Vancouver lab uses Ilford DD-X, which yields excellent results in most cases. I just finished a bottle of Ilford Ilfosol 3, which was recommended for better results with my black and white film that expired in 1992.
But black and white film developers can also be made at home. The most famous recipe is Caffenol — a simple mixture of instant coffee, vitamin C, and washing soda. Recipes that use beer, wine, garlic, and other organic compounds can be easily found online. Yet no one seems to have attempted to develop film in weed, so Sativa Cannanol is probably the world’s first. That’s despite the plant’s 3,000-year history of cultivation and increasing availability after 95 years of prohibition .
Cannabis is legal in Canada nationwide and it’s relatively inexpensive. Plants and seeds can be bought at nurseries and grown at home, yielding over 100g of dried flower for less than $100 .
Dispensaries will often sell dried flowers for about $5-10 per gram, which is a lot more expensive than growing but also less hassle and smell. But how much weed do you need to develop a roll of fim?
It turns out that Cannabis sativa strains are rich in phenols (>1800mg/100g by some measurements ), making the plant an ideal candidate for film development. Back-of-theenvelope calculations suggest that we need less than an eighth of the amount of weed by weight than coffee to make a comparable developer. In other words, we only need 1.5g of cannabis to make a 300ml solution (which should be enough for one roll of film).
While the rough estimates ignore the exact chemical composition of each plant and the extraction methods, test results with film appeared very promising (I tried two different strains).
Can you develop film in weed?
Yes! I developed multiple rolls of Ilford HP5+ in various cannabis-based recipes for this article. I was even able to reuse the same developer multiple times (though there was some loss of quality).
Cannabis is just one of the ingredients Daren (@LearnFilmPhotography on YouTube and here), Yvonne (@YvonneHansonPhotography on YouTube), and I tried to develop our film with. Below, you’ll see the samples developed in weed alongside blood, pond water, pee (!), wood, and flowers.
Left to right: Yvonne, Lily, and Daren. At the studio, getting ready to shoot 50 feet of film to see if we can develop it in weed, blood, and pee.
Our tests involved taking over 200 35mm film exposures on 20 bulk-loaded short rolls of
HP5+. In the end, each canister contained eight bracketed exposures of our model, Lily (@lilianlihua on Instagram), and a stationary object with consistent studio lighting. We used those test exposures to determine the best conditions for our experimental developers.
During this experiment, we determined optimal extraction methods, which have significantly improved our results with all types of developers. I’ve also added a final bath specifically for the cannabis developer to prevent a very real problem of intense, unfixable clouds of debris.
Watch.
You Can Develop Film in (just about) ANYTHING — this is Daren’s video summary of our experiment with particular attention given to the science and the experience of putting the experiment together.
Yvonne will be posting her video this coming Wednesday. It’ll focus on the results she got by developing HP5+ in blood. Please follow her on YouTube to get notified once it goes live.
Sativa Cannanol film developer recipe.
Sativa Cannanol takes 420 seconds at 69℉ with continuous agitation to develop HP5+ rated at EI 25-100.
The process involves an optional final wash to help with the sticky debris that can’t be strained out of the solution without a vacuum filter.
If you’d like to try this yourself, you’ll need to start three days in advance as it takes time to extract the phenol compounds from cannabis flowers.
Please also note that I’ve tested results with specific strains of cannabis on HP5+ only. If you’d like to see similar results, you’ll need to seek out the listed sativa plant varieties. If you manage to develop anything else with Sativa Cannanol, please share the results!
Recipe:
1.5g of cannabis flower (Sativa) soaked in 30ml of isopropyl 99% rubbing alcohol (C₃H₈O) for 3 days.
20g washing soda.
5g vitamin C.
Top up with water to 300ml and mix well.
Sativa Cannanol mix (notice the milky-green appearance of the liquid) and thebud that’s responsible for making the developer.
Tip: mix washing soda then vitamin C in 200g of water first, then add cannabis/alcohol mix, then water. This should help with clumping. After adding water, the mixture should look milky and homogenous.
I tried two strains: Super Sativa by Tenzo and Acapulco Gold by Jonny Chronic. The Gold sativa flower is about half the price of Super Sativa and it gives better results (less fogging). Acapulco Gold is a well-known strain that you may find at most dispensaries, which, amongst other things, makes it a better choice.
Development times:
For Ilford HP5+ (EI 25), 420s (7min) at 69℉.
Tip: you may extend development time up to ~20 minutes, which can yield decent results with box speed (EI 400). However, I found that the developer works best with the pull process times.
Agitation:
Continuous or every 30 seconds.
Fix:
Any photographic fixer will do.
Final wash:
Put 3-5 drops of hand soap into your tank, swish around, and wash with water thoroughly until no bubbles appear. This helps to get rid of microscopic debris and plant hairs.
Sativa Cannanol with Ilford HP5+ sample scans.
To figure out the best possible exposure, mixture, and development times for this developer, I’ve shot eight rolls of HP5+ and then one more roll of Kosmo Foto’s Agent Shadow.
Test exposures were bracketed:
Lily’s portraits were taken at -4 -2 +0 +2 +4 stops (metered with the Lumu iOS app and set manually on Pentax K1000 with the stock 50mm SMC Pentax-A 1:1.7). She was consistently lit with studio lights throughout the shoot. It took a while to get through twenty rolls like that!
We’ve also made a bunch of control exposures of a stationary object: my great-grandpa’s Voigtländer Avus. The camera was bracketed in 1-stop increments: -4 -3 -1 +0 +1.
The photos above and below are the best exposures from all the bracket tests on HP5+.
Lily was exposed +4 stops above the box ISO 400 speed (i.e., rated as if the film is ISO 25). Although photos of her at EI 100 and 50 would also worked.
These images were taken on the same strip of film, developed in reused Sativa Cannanol for 420 seconds at 69℉. I’d expect brighter images when the developer is absolutely fresh, but I had a limited amount of weed for this experiment. Below, I’ll show you the effects of reusing the developer up to four times (and I’ll explain why I’m not sharing the results from a fresh developer first).
Ilford HP5+ shot at EI 50 and developed in Sativa Cannanol for 420 seconds at 69℉.
I scanned both of the above frames on PrimeFilm XAs at 5,000DPI in 48-bit colour. The film strips themselves had a slight plum tint which yielded a light-green colour on the negatives when inverted. It was on-brand and so I decided to leave that in.
Note: I use this method to scan all film for my reviews, including all the frames of this experiment. It provides consistent results that make understanding and comparing the emulsion’s attributes possible.
Ilford HP5+ shot at EI 50 and developed in Sativa Cannanol for 420 seconds at 69℉. (5x Crop).
I like how tight the grain looks on HP5+ with this developer. You can see lots of detail even in significant enlargements. This is despite the developed emulsion appearing quite thin when compared to industrial developers and even Caffenol.
Up close, it looks a bit like CineStill 50D. Individual granules are noticeable, but they appear closely packed, giving the image a smooth appearance without losing any contrast or sharpness.
I reused the developer for the above images, which resulted in loss of some apparent brightness and the negatives looked slightly thinner than initially. But it still worked, so I tried a few different techniques to extend Sativa Cannanol’s life. First, by developing film at a much higher temperature: 82℉ instead of 69℉.
In addition to the standard set of model poses and stationary object shots, we made creative use of the remaining frames on the short rolls as well as a variety of other experimental exposures at the set, at home, and on the street. I’m sharing a variety of photos here with the goal of making this article more interesting to read and browse. A set of standard test exposures compared side-by-side is also posted, below.
As you can see, the hotter development temperature did little to improve the reused developer’s speed (the background in the photo above looks more than two stops darker than the first photo of Lily, posted above); its potency continued to decrease with each use.
Ilford HP5+, developed in 1g Cannabis sativa seconds at 82℉.
I also tried to develop a few personal test shots on HP5+ for longer times. A macro shot of the sativa bud you saw in the poster above was developed for 42 minutes (stand, no agitation). Unfortunately, that fogged up the film to become exceedingly dense, which gave my scanner a lot of trouble. I could barely see the image against strong light. The resulting digitizations showed massive amounts of colour shifts (after equalization), which I kept in as they added interest to the otherwise grainy, faded photos.
You may’ve noticed tiny specs all over the 42-minute stand development samples, which are an artifact specific to cannabis-based developers. While there was some debris in most organic developers we tried, cannabis flowers released their tiny, sticky hairs and pieces of material that aren’t strainable without proper equipment.
This is why, the first use of Sativa Cannanol mix yielded a portrait that had an unfixable amount of grime:
Ilford HP5+ shot at EI 100 and developed in Sativa Cannanol for 420 seconds at 69℉. Some Curves adjustments in Photoshop.
That is not to say that the effect is uninteresting. Seeing images like that out of the tank of the first cannabis-based developer ever felt captivating. The colour shift and the grime gave the film a look I’ve yet to see from anything else.
But I wanted to get the most out of this developer; and thus, I continued to experiment with times and the process until I completely ran out of weed.
The first change I adapted was washing film with soap immediately after fixing. It’s important to note that delaying this step (i.e., letting the film dry and washing it later) is counter-productive, as the grime becomes permanently embedded in the emulsion.
Determining the development time for Sativa Cannanol.
Sativa Cannanol is not a strong developer, at least when used with the Acapulco Gold strain. This is why I’m glad that we heavily bracketed our exposures, although more work can be done in the future to determine the optimal box speed development time for HP5+ and other films.
Film density (i.e., how dark the highlights and the frames overall appear compared to the blank edges) was an important factor for determining an optimal development time. However, that wasn’t the only thing I considered. In fact, you’ll notice that after a certain amount of density is achieved on a negative, there’s no significant improvement to either film grain or the amount of visual information in shadows/highlights. And yet, the scans do show very plainly which frames turned out either too dark or too bright.
Having scanned all the negatives and inverted them, I’ve arranged the results in a grid. The most potent developers (when it comes to shadow detail resolution) are at the top, and the worst of the bunch are at the bottom.
I then used this visual guide to estimate a film exposure value with HP5+ that can produce a brightness similar to the box speed with a commercial developer.
For Sativa Cannanol, when developed for seven minutes, it appears that HP5+ needs to be exposed at ISO 25 (or +4 stops of exposure). A good scanner will let you shoot HP5+ at box speed (+0) and then adjust the results in post without significant loss of quality (our homemade developers seem to be significantly better than the commercial stuff at preserving shadows). However, one could say that if we are to judge by the overall brightness of the results, even more exposure is needed to match the commercial developer with the cannabis-based one — but that’s not what I’m using as a guide, I’m looking at shadow detail.
Sativa Cannanol vs. other organic phenol developers.
You may’ve noticed that Caffenol (a simple mix of 15g of washing soda, 5g of vitamin C, and
12g of instant coffee) is ranked higher than the commercial developer, Black, White, and Green (by Flic Film) in the comparison grid above. While the store-bought stuff seems to make brighter results verall, we’re looking at shadow detail, for which coffee seems to be more effective.
Alas, weed isn’t very practical for developing photographic film. Unless you get it for free or cheaper than what I paid for it at the dispensary ($22.39 CAD/3.5g with taxes or $7 USD for a single roll of film). It’s not very potent, which will force you to shoot an ISO 400 film at EI 25 for good results. But you can certainly create detailed, well-resolving images with cannabis if you’re inclined to do so. And it works with the easy-to-remember 69℉/420s temperature/dev time numbers (all other developers in this experiment used 68℉/10m).
In order for this to work, cannabis has to be soaked in 99% alcohol (I used isopropyl from a local pharmacy), which gives the developer a very strong smell. But unlike other materials, the weed’s musk is strong enough to cover most of the alcohol vapour, which I think makes it a lot more tolerable. Once the alcohol evaporates, the developed negatives continue to smell a little like weed.
Everything else that was soaked in isopropyl was significantly less pleasant to work with, but the results were sometimes better than Cannanol and always cheaper.
Caffenol, for example, can yield a mix that costs under 50¢/roll with all the ingredients, if you buy your instant coffee in bulk. But I’d like to warn you that I haven’t tested it against all black and white emulsions; thus, I’d suggest at least having a look at the Massive Dev Chart to see if there are times for your film of choice before switching.
Yvonne’s portrait of me on HP5+ at box speed, developed in pig’s blood. If not for
the smelly nature of it, the results are rather good.
One of the nastiest developers we’ve tried was made from pig’s blood. Though it’s not listed in the chart above (this was Yvonne’s project for which she used her own roll of film — and none of us was keen on trying this again with a standardized set of images). It wasn’t the smell — it was the lumpy, gory mess.
Daren did the pee experiment on his own (for which I’m very glad). This is probably the worst idea, despite being sold as “viable” by Grant Haist himself. As you can see, the results of this smelly formula are worse than nothing. That is, adding piss to a mixture of washing soda and vitamin C, decreased its potency as a developer. And it stank the part; as Daren puts it: “It smelled mostly like piss, kinda like Windex, but without the ‘clean’ smell. And it definitely lingered on my hands for a bit — I had to wash them literally every time I did an inversion.” Eww.
The most financially crushing and disappointing idea is EpiPen. EpiPen is a life-saving injectable medication for severe allergies that contains phenolic compounds. A small vile of it can cost up to $700 in some countries, but we’ve got an expired set. Alas, like pee, it’s worse than nothing.
We’ve also tried developing in pond water and seawater, both of which yielded nothing. Moss did a little worse than weed, but fir needles and cedar wood had a bit more potency, the latter being the best non-coffee homebrew developer.
Ethanolic extraction.
Purification and extraction of active chemical compounds is a complex science, which can sometimes involve expensive equipment and dangerous compounds. But getting the extraction wrong could mean that we aren’t taking advantage of the material.
Coffee and tea are very effective for film development. Their active ingredients are soluble in water after some steeping/brewing. However, this method does not work for everything, particularly cannabis.
Cannabis flowers are sticky and oily and they do not dissolve in water. The easiest way to overcome this is to perform an ethanolic extraction .
A good ethanolic extraction technique involves heating, agitation, and high-proof ethanol (something like Everclear). Unfortunately, it’s quite difficult to find 99% alcohol, so I opted for 99% isopropyl (rubbing alcohol), which some sources claim to have similar effectiveness to ethanol and naphtha. The extraction method I used was also simplified to soaking the material at room temperature for three days.
For the purposes of the developer, we did not evaporate alcohol, which would theoretically leave us with a residue with just the extracted material. Instead, we used the tincture as an ingredient with the washing soda and vitamin C which was later diluted with water. This worked very well with cannabis as the result was a murky emulsion which kept all the stuff permanently suspended and evenly distributed.
We also made vodka-cannabis tincture which, as expected, produced much worse results. I also tested various alcohol volumes, with the best result thus far coming from 1.5g of cannabis to 30ml of 99% isopropyl.
Further yet, we’ve tested ethanolic extraction with cedar against simply soaking it in water. Turns out, soaking organic material in alcohol makes a big, positive difference in terms of its effectiveness as a developer.
How cannabis/phenol film developers work
Industrial developers often contain the necessary electrons to initiate development. active ingredients, metol and coffee contain several phenols, making it hydroquinone. These two chemicals are superadditive, they have a synergistic effect. Both can be classified as phenols, a group of chemicals containing one or two electron-rich groups of atoms, which are suitable as a developer, especially in combination with vitamin C, which provides a superadditivity similar to industrial products. This occurrence of phenols in coffee is the basis of Caffenol developer.
Phytogram
It appears that phenol content is the key to making a film developer. It’s no surprise, then, that some photographers and lab technicians theorize that we could develop film with practically anything. Phenols are plentiful in nature, being a building block of life.
For this experiment, we used Daniel Keating’s proposed method for estimating the
amount of material needed to develop film: by comparing the material’s phenol content to the known 214mg/100g of coffee and then modifying the Caffenol-C-H recipe accordingly.
We sourced phenol content from various open scientific papers. For example, Cannabis sativa is estimated to have >1800mg/100g by some measurements , which is 8.4x more than in coffee.
This is, of course, very approximate due to the highly variable chemical composition of organic material (including coffee), and the imperfect extraction methodology.
What we’ve learned & tips for improving your phenol developer.
Experimenting with homemade developers isn’t hard. It may even be easier than mixing certain commercial chemicals.
Of course, there’s no guarantee you’ll get results and there are no development times in the massive dev chart (although you may find a few references there for various Caffenol mixes ). We can rely on estimates as a guide when it comes to quantities — but the only way to know if something works is to just try it.
Consistency and refined techniques matter. I’ve noticed that the slight difference in cannabis strains could influence the amount of fogging HP5+ produced when developed for longer times. The volume and type of alcohol mattered.
Sativa Cannanol with Super Sativa. 4th re-use, developed for 20 minutes, yielding dense (nearly opaque) negatives and scans with colour streaks.
Mechanical processes are particularly important to get right with low-density film.
While it’s true that low-density negatives can still yield high-quality images, imperfections such as water spots, streaking across sprocket holes, and uneven development are more apparent.
Average film density will not tell you how bright or dark scanned/printed images will appear. Their inherent brightness is relative and it’s baked into the resulting scans (unless they’re auto-corrected). I made scans from film that looked dense, which came out looking under-exposed, and I made scans from film that looked thin, which looked over-exposed.
Home-scanning using this method helped me circumvent scanner software’s opaque attempts to auto-correct images. Having full control over the scanner output was important for cutting out noise from the experiment.
Black and white film that’s exceedingly dense (i.e., you need a strong light to see any images) can yield interesting colour shifts when scanned with capable hardware. I used PrimeFilm XAs and Nikon CoolScan 5000ED, both of which produce 16-bit-per-channel images (highly recommended for scanning dense negatives). The example above shows poor colour depth and large grain but I’m glad I scanned it in colour, which showed fascinating red streaks on the right, likely a residue from my squeegee slide and purple tint in some highlights. (Note: the image above had appeared darker originally; I “brightened” it by applying a curve correction layer in Photoshop — this increased the colourization effect slightly).
My chemistry knowledge is limited. I would love to know how altering the quantities of each of the ingredients would affect film development without setting up a costly experiment. I’m sure there’s a way to decrease fog, increase the speed, and improve yield for Sativa Cannanol or any exotic developer.
So far, Caffenol still reigns supreme as the most potent developer, capable of producing excellent results; on par with commercial chemistry. Our specific conditions produced images that appeared slightly less bright than the ones developed in the commercial developer but with denser, easy-to-scan negatives.
Caffenol can be as cheap or cheaper than a commercial film developer (provided you use the cheapest instant coffee in bulk). However, the development times aren’t as easily available and the consistency of the results depends on the purity and the source of the ingredients.
Home-made film developers can be more eco-friendly than commercial ones; the ingredients are simple and fairly safe — sometimes even edible. But we can not pat ourselves on the back too much: The Caffenol Cookbook and others list potassium bromate as one of the ingredients meant to help with fogging. This chemical is considered harmful in Canada, and so are some others used as restraining agents.
Cannabis sativa/Super Sativa. Pentax K1000 with Portra 800, SMC Pentax-M Macro 1:4 100mm, and extension tubes.
Acknowledgements.
The “leaf” icon design inside the poster up top: Brusheezy.com .
Model photography, film development coordination: Daren Zomerman.
All photos on pig’s blood roll and studio coordination: Yvonne Hanson.
Modelling: Lily Li Hua.
Photography, media, film development: Dmitri Tcherbadji.
This project (including this article and two videos on Daren and Yvonne’s channels) was a collaborative effort. It would not work or would not be as interesting otherwise.
This article is free to read until the end of May 2024 in celebration of the international counterculture holiday . After that, I’ll be available in the GOLD members’ collection. Thank you for your support!
