fomapan 400 Xtol

[mexipike]

Alright, so i think I've asked plenty of questions about fomapan 400, and all that, including if it can be pushed and all that kind of stuff. However, I pretty much gave up on pushing, and now am developing it in Xtol. Some people here had said that with Xtol and can be rated at 400 with good results. I did that and developed it for 9.5 minutes, the time from digitaltruth.com, and my negatives are lacking. So, getting to the point, the question is, does anyone have experience with fomapan 400 in Xtol, and at what speed did you rate it, how long was it developed for/temp etc? If so please share. I was thinking about rating it at 320 and developing it the same way

 

[rich815]

How were they "lacking"? I often vary my development times either way by 1 minute and still seem to get very printable/scannable negs with most B&W films in most developers. Are you certain about your exposure meter and technique? Either way B&W film be so subjective and flexible in terms of expression and results that I would guess most people would recommend digitaltruth times as a start and then you tweak from there to get the results you want in your prints. But if your negs are lacking from that please define "lacking" and let's see where you can go from there.

Typically though I run a new film through about 4-5 rolls and tweaks in development in an attempt to learn it's results based on my camera(s) and development technique before expecting to get definitive feedback that would be useful from others (short of guesses that pretty much just say "try this...").

 

[mexipike]

i guess they're lacking in the sense that they really lack middle gray tones. There's a strong black and white, but very little difference in the grays. In short I guess they're too contrasty. My exposure and technique should be fine, as I took a few rolls of HP5 exactly the same way and they came out excellent.

 

[rich815]

Interesting. Were the conditions themselves inherently contrasty? If so try what I do in such: I often pull back my exposure rating of the film about 1/2 to 1 stop and then also development time by -20% as well. In the contrastiest of conditions I've gotten decent tones that way and preserved the highlights and shadows, at least as much as possible in strong contrast (i.e. a bright sunny day in June, northern hemisphere).

 

[tedwhite]

I can't speak about Xtol as I never use it. However, both Fomapan 200 and 400 seem to work just fine developed in D76 1:1. ISO 400 @12-13 minutes. Grayscale perfectly OK.