Developing for shadow detail

[agentlossing]

With Silverfast, use the film profile that give you a good range of tones i.e. not necessarily the profile with the same name as your film.
Pete

I've found that the Silverfast film profiles can be a bit maddening when you don't have a film that easily fits into a box (e.g. Foma 200).

 

[Dan Daniel]

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[Deleted member 65559]

Keep it simple. Because modern film is simply very good. All of those expose for this develop for what are old times talks.

In a way that's true. But is it best? or just good enough? No one has mentioned how you're metering. In camera meter? Spot meter? Incident? For me to get the best darkroom prints, with ease, I need to pay more attention in 35mm than in large format. Careful metering, checking the dynamic range of the light.... exposing & developing appropriately.... makes it easier to get a fine quality print.....that's been my experience.

 

[aizan]

Step 1:
On your next roll, bracket a few typical scenes in 1/2 or 2/3 stop increments (whatever is convenient). Develop for the recommended time. Print or scan it, whatever your ultimate output is.

Step 2:
If your results from Step 1 were too contrasty, with highlights that were too dense and/or flat looking, do another roll at your favorite EI. Develop it for 15-20% less time. Print or scan again.

Repeat Step 2 as necessary until the contrast is good.

Step 3 (optional):
Finesse your results with agitation, or changing developers if you're not getting enough speed, etc.

 

[Freakscene]

A better approach is to do a ring-around. A ring-around, classically, is a 3x3 chart of nine photographs, all of the same scene, arranged in three rows of three. Start with a scene of normal contrast. Horizontally, the rows are “underexposed, “normally exposed,” and “overexposed,” and the vertical columns are “under-developed,” “normally developed,” and “overdeveloped.” This gives visual confirmation of nine different combinations of exposure and development.

A third or half a stop is a waste, it's not enough difference for starting out. Use full stops, and -15%, manufacturer's time, and +10% as under, regular and overdeveloped. Use the same, normal agitation. You need to see the differences.

I learned to print them with the same contrast and enlarger exposure time, but this was a bit controversial; some advocated that each negative should be printed the best it could be. I always opted for the former because it accentuates rather than hides the differences in exposure and development. Proponents of the other approach usually argued that whatever your neg looks like you are going to do your best to print it well. It probably doesn't matter, except the latter approach also gives you more of an idea of how hard or easy a negative will be to print. For scans, to understand your negatives, I'd suggest basic adjustments given that your raw scans should be pretty flat, uninteresting and a long way from your optimised images.

This is the best way to start to calibrate your negs. From there you can fine tune exposure, development time and agitation. With agitation, I found that decreasing it gave my negs streaks and was not different from just decreasing time. I did a long experiment to assess if there was any difference between decreasing time and decreasing agitation and for my purposes the difference was so minimal that the risk of streaks wasn't worth it. So I use developers with long normal development times and adjust purely by time, not by changing agitation.

A roll of E6 film and some scenes with regular contrast will tell you if your meter is behaving.

You need to figure out what works for you.

Marty

 

[aizan]

A ring-around is actually exactly what I recommended, minus the parts the OP doesn't need right now (underexposing and overdeveloping).

 

[thebelbo]

A better approach is to do a ring-around. A ring-around, classically, is a 3x3 chart of nine photographs, all of the same scene, arranged in three rows of three. Start with a scene of normal contrast. Horizontally, the rows are “underexposed, “normally exposed,” and “overexposed,” and the vertical columns are “under-developed,” “normally developed,” and “overdeveloped.” This gives visual confirmation of nine different combinations of exposure and development.

A third or half a stop is a waste, it's not enough difference for starting out. Use full stops, and -15%, manufacturer's time, and +10% as under, regular and overdeveloped. Use the same, normal agitation. You need to see the differences.

I learned to print them with the same contrast and enlarger exposure time, but this was a bit controversial; some advocated that each negative should be printed the best it could be. I always opted for the former because it accentuates rather than hides the differences in exposure and development. Proponents of the other approach usually argued that whatever your neg looks like you are going to do your best to print it well. It probably doesn't matter, except the latter approach also gives you more of an idea of how hard or easy a negative will be to print. For scans, to understand your negatives, I'd suggest basic adjustments given that your raw scans should be pretty flat, uninteresting and a long way from your optimised images.

This is the best way to start to calibrate your negs. From there you can fine tune exposure, development time and agitation. With agitation, I found that decreasing it gave my negs streaks and was not different from just decreasing time. I did a long experiment to assess if there was any difference between decreasing time and decreasing agitation and for my purposes the difference was so minimal that the risk of streaks wasn't worth it. So I use developers with long normal development times and adjust purely by time, not by changing agitation.

A roll of E6 film and some scenes with regular contrast will tell you if your meter is behaving.

You need to figure out what works for you.

Marty

Thanks, I am aware of the methodology and it is on my list to-do as a structured way of arriving to a good EI-Dev time combination. I'm really not worried about exposure: apart from checking my meter I used to shoot with no meter at all with very good results (ie. I can judge the light pretty well), so my focus is Film EI and dev time, something I avoided touching knowing the complexity behind it but I feel now I need to considering that's the only way out of muddy shadows & blocked highlights.

 

[thebelbo]

With Silverfast, use the film profile that give you a good range of tones i.e. not necessarily the profile with the same name as your film.
Pete

Agree, sometimes I chose "unknown" even if a film profile exists because I get the full histogram. I anyhow do levels at a later stage to the level that I want.

 

[Freakscene]

A ring-around is actually exactly what I recommended, minus the parts the OP doesn't need right now (underexposing and overdeveloping).

Maybe, but that’s not what I got from what you wrote. The immediate comparison is the critical part. And I’d argue you need the rest of the exposures to see what the combination of exposure and development does.

I am also certain from having commercially used almost every film developer combination available since the 1990s that unless you want a really esoteric look, most conventional combinations can be adjusted to give the results users want just by modifying exposure and development time. I had clients who insisted on combinations that give/gave unusual results (TMax 100 in Rodinal was one - and Chris Crawford will chime in here but his photos using it show everything that is strange to me about that combination - and those characteristics were much more obvious when wet printed) and mostly did it because they ‘heard it was good’ or ‘saw some photos done that way I (they) liked’. I prefer data.

Marty

 

[Freakscene]

Thanks, I am aware of the methodology and it is on my list to-do as a structured way of arriving to a good EI-Dev time combination. I'm really not worried about exposure: apart from checking my meter I used to shoot with no meter at all with very good results (ie. I can judge the light pretty well), so my focus is Film EI and dev time, something I avoided touching knowing the complexity behind it but I feel now I need to considering that's the only way out of muddy shadows & blocked highlights.

Did you mean what % is standard for a given level of under or over exposure? The old rule was 20-30% per stop, but TMax and Delta films it is closer to 10-15%. Many other films have changed and modern formulations of traditional films such as Tri-X or the Ilford Plus films change density more with less change in development than older versions. It also varies with developer. Partly this is why experimentation is needed. I usually start with the manufacturers recommended time and adjust from there. But some films have limited data, and you need to start from scratch.

Marty

Marty

 

[Charlie Lemay]

This page from my website might help.
http://www.charlielemay.net/azsfiles/zonepg7.htm

 

[thebelbo]

Did you mean what % is standard for a given level of under or over exposure? The old rule was 20-30% per stop, but TMax and Delta films it is closer to 10-15%. Many other films have changed and modern formulations of traditional films such as Tri-X or the Ilford Plus films change density more with less change in development than older versions. It also varies with developer. Partly this is why experimentation is needed. I usually start with the manufacturers recommended time and adjust from there. But some films have limited data, and you need to start from scratch.

Marty

Thanks, I will start there then. Another consideration I have is whether using my condenser enlarger means that I need to further be reducing development time (Kodak recommends it) and where this leads, a link to this post: https://www.rangefinderforum.com/forums/showthread.php?p=3034941#post3034941

I also found interesting what you wrote that you can arrive at similar results with different developers. I always have been using Ilford Ilfosol but I now bought HC-110 and I'm looking at getting Rodinal as well as I would like to explore the differences - having said that your post indicates to focus more on modifying how you develope rather than the developer itself.

 

[aizan]

Ilfosol is a fine grain developer, while HC-110 and Rodinal are very flexible and behave differently depending on dilution. For your developer wardrobe, keep the Ilfosol for films 100 and slower until it runs out, and maybe compare HC-110 and Rodinal after you're familiar with using HC-110 for the whole gamut of film types.

 

[titrisol]

It all depends on how you are metering the light; the donwgrading of the ISO number is a trick to ensure that you get decent shadow detail with an average meter (or center weighted)
Years ago I used to play with different film.dev combinations and my routine was to have a controlled scene that covered the whole tonal range (my bookcase with different tonalities ranging from black to white). Meter for a grey card and then make a roll exposing at box speed as base (0)
Overexpose +2, +1, +1/2, 0, -1/2, -1, -2 underexpose, then place my hand over the lens for one shot, then repeat until the roll was over
I used the snips of the roll as test for the developer that way I knew I was catching the whole range
For each dev test, write down developer, time, temperature and agitation regime
Check for shadow detail and contrast (highlights)
I prefer to agitate less (every minute or 2minutes) to manage contrast

I have used both types of enlarger (condenser and diffuser) and learned long ago not to change the contrast for that. Your negatives will last a long time, and when you revisit them years later you may want to kick yourself.

Hi,

Reviewing my negatives I've realised that I'm not getting enough shadow detail: reading about "exposing for the shadows and developing for the highlights" I've decided to start shooting at half of rated speed and develop less time. In that respect I've shot some FP4+ at EI 64.