Yodica Antares 400

Yodica Antares 400 is Kodak Gold or ColorPlus 200 pre-exposed by hand in Milan with a red-to-blue gradient, then respooled into 36-exposure cartridges. Marco Barbereschi and Cinzia Cancedda started Yodica in 2018 wanting to make C-41 stocks that did something other people's stocks did not, and Antares was one of the first. Warm red sits at the top of the frame, cooler blues run the bottom, and every roll lands somewhere different.

The effect is not subtle and it is not random in the way light leaks are random. Yodica's pre-exposure has structure. Hold a camera level and the red lives in your sky, the blue in your foreground, so most landscape compositions get a soft sunset gradient whether the actual sky was overcast or not. Rotate to portrait and the gradient becomes a vertical bar across the subject. Some shooters love that. Some hate it.

Yodica rates the film at ISO 400 because the underlying 200 emulsion loses about a stop to the pre-exposure. The color effects intensify with another half stop of underexposure. Push to 800 and the gradient turns aggressive in a way that can read as cheap. Shoot at box speed and the effect sits behind the image rather than on top of it.

C-41 at any lab. No special chemistry. Auto-correction will try to neutralize the cast, so a flat scan and a manual grade in post gives the most usable result. Compared with Lomochrome Purple, the Yodica look is more directional and less total: Purple inverts the whole palette, Antares just paints on a sky.

Available in 35mm 36 exposure only. No 120, no DX coding. You can read Gold or ColorPlus on the rebate edge if you stretch a strip across a light table.

Reciprocity exponent is 1.20. Zone Light Meter applies the correction past one second. A metered five-second exposure becomes roughly seven and a half seconds at the negative; a 30-second reading climbs to about 60. The pre-exposure layer wanders at very long exposures, so for night work bracket more than the math suggests.