Erik van Straten
Veteran
Tmax400 in Perceptol.
What film developer is your favorite and why ?
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Ororaro
Well-known
Ilfosol-3 is what people actually talk about when they brag about rodinal. It’s that simple, it’s that good.
Another obviously excellent developer is D76.
There are many more excellent devs out there.
One that I dislike for it’s most BORING curve, and which actually kills the edge in Tri-x (and any film), is XTOL. I can never Not recommend this developer enough. It’s just that bad.
Perceptol is one that kills your film speed by half. No idea why would anyone use this developer only to shoot tri-x at iso 64, or tmx at iso 25 or else ending up with endless gray…
And at last, stand development . Can this absolutely horrible non-techbique stop being a thing, please?? Can’t understand why this even exists as one theoretical (and bad) way to develop film.
Another obviously excellent developer is D76.
There are many more excellent devs out there.
One that I dislike for it’s most BORING curve, and which actually kills the edge in Tri-x (and any film), is XTOL. I can never Not recommend this developer enough. It’s just that bad.
Perceptol is one that kills your film speed by half. No idea why would anyone use this developer only to shoot tri-x at iso 64, or tmx at iso 25 or else ending up with endless gray…
And at last, stand development . Can this absolutely horrible non-techbique stop being a thing, please?? Can’t understand why this even exists as one theoretical (and bad) way to develop film.
webouser2
Member
Kodak HC110, I have used up a bottle of the original syrup and now on the thin concentrate. It works well enough with every B&W film that I use it for. I also have a bottle of R09 that I use occasionally. I develop between zero and 4 rolls of B&W a month so I need something with keeping capabilities.
Steve W
Steve W
ironhorse
Joe DuPont
If you are not planning on printing your negatives but scanning them, how much does the choice of developer actually matter? The flexibility and choices in Lightroom pretty much allow you to create an image to your liking.
chuckroast
Well-known
I still use both. PMK for typical situations, and Pyrocat-HD when I want to do semi stand or EMA.
trix4ever
Well-known
Tri-x in Ilford LC29
stephen_lumsden
Well-known
I started out with Fomadon lqn last year, , but trying Ilfosol 3 now due to availability .Looks great with fomapan 400 in 120, but too contrasty with fomapan 100 in 35mm. I have a lot of rpx400 to process. If that's ok I may try R09 on the fomapan 100.
John Bragg
Well-known
Nice photo and really great tones. I'm currently experimenting with Ilfotec HC. Same formula but higher concentration. I'm considering a 1:49 dilution from the syrup to make the maths easy.
Tri-x in Ilford LC29
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Coldkennels
Barnack-toting Brit.
R09, OG Rodinal, and all the other assorted clones are the developers for Fomapan 100, as far as I'm concerned.
Good tonality, just the right amount of grain, and excellent sharpness. HC-110 and the Ilford "equivalents" (LC29 & Ilfotec HC) bump the contrast up far too much, and D76 makes the film look underwhelming. Rodinal's definitely the way forward for Fomapan 100.
Stand development has a lot of recurring and easily disproven myths around it (I'm glad people have stopped claiming stand development means you can "shoot at different ISOs on the same roll" - patently nonsense), and it does have various very real issues (such as inconsistent results if temperature isn't tightly controlled through the entire development stage), but it does precisely one thing very well: it produces an image when you don't know what the film is, or can't find/work out a development time for it. This was orthographic duplicating film stand developed in Rodinal, for instance:
I've yet to find a single film that looks better when stand developed in Rodinal compared to just developing it with a proper agitation scheme and controlled development time, but it does have its uses.
Pioneer
Veteran
I don't know. I have never tried Lightroom but I am pretty sure I can mess up my photos just fine without it. 😀
besk
Well-known
Xtol. 1:1 Sharp, true film speed with most films, and ecologically good.
Godfrey
somewhat colored
It matters insomuch as you want your negatives to fully express as much detail as possible with a full dynamic range of tonal/color values and very little blocked high or low densities. That gives the maximum amount of detail and tonal/color information for a scanner to capture, and for Lightroom (or other image processing app) to work with in rendering.
I always expose and process my film to achieve as fully expressed a set of detail and tonal values as possible. I haven't shot with color film at all for many years ... Capturing for color with any of my digital cameras using raw capture output simply does a better job than color negative or positive film, for what I'm trying to get to, with fewer problems involving reciprocity failure and color balance, grain and noise.
G
chuckroast
Well-known
Only if you don't take the time to learn how to do it repeatably. Yes, it's more fiddly than conventional development but it absolutely can be mastered and made to work every bit as well as conventional agitation.
I get completely repeatable and reliable semistand/EMA results in every format and every film I use and with only moderate consideration for temp (+-3F from dev to stop/wash to fix). This is repeatable across multiple developers as well, including Pyrocat-HD, D-23, HC-110, and DK-50.
The ISO thing is a red herring as well. Long duration, high dilution, low agitation development will develop shadows to completion, no matter what exposure scheme you use. Sure, if you wildly underexpose, NO development technique will help you, but when used properly, semistand will save a lot of shadow detail that would get lost with ordinary development because the film doesn't sit in solution long enough to pull all the available shadow information out. That's because the whole idea is to let the highlights exhaust (because they develop most rapidly) but the leave the film in developer a long time to give the shadows to get to completion. This isn't magic or folklore, it's chemistry.
Semistand is just another way of doing things. It's not a magic bullet and it's not the only game in town. I find it most useful where the primary subject of interest has a very short tonal range, but the overall scene has a very long SBR. It allows me to build better local contrast in that primary subject (via the long development time) and keep the overall highlights from blocking (via the very highly dilute solution).
The one tricky thing with semistand/EMA is that it's easy to get too much of a good thing and get overly strong mid tone contrast. I am currently working through some tests to increase exposure (lower EI) but increase the dilution significantly to rein in mid tone contrast and lower overall CI. I am finding this is - at least directionally - producing easier to print negatives.
p.giannakis
Pan Giannakis
I wasted plenty of films trying to learn stand developing. I started with films being destroyed by bromide drag and moved towards negatives that in the best of cases were in no way, shape or form better than standard developing.
Standard developing worked for me from the beginning and with time I got even better at it. So personally I don't see why to recommend stand developing and when others ask my view I tell them not to bother.
Standard developing worked for me from the beginning and with time I got even better at it. So personally I don't see why to recommend stand developing and when others ask my view I tell them not to bother.
chuckroast
Well-known
That's kind of like saying, I've never won a Formula 1 race, so no one else should try it either. It's absolutely true that stand techniques require careful dialing it - that's why I made all my notes available to save people the film wasting I also went through. It IS fiddly, but once you get it right it does very powerful things for certain kinds of subjects.
I use both conventional and stand and have done for some time now. I can think of a number of specific examples where conventional development would not have solved the problem. Here's just one. In the original scene, the central area of boards had absolutely no local contrast and would have looked boring. But N+2 development would have made them look better. The problem is that this would also have blown out the bright area on frame right and bottom. Standing development fixed this by expanding the central contrast while holding the highlights in bounds. (I am aware that this print needs some further burning on the perimeter.)
Is this the ONLY way to solve this problem. No. Some kind of pre-bleach like SLIMT might have worked, Some version of N+3 combined with a high compensating mechanism like two bath might have worked. What I know is that stand DID work:
p.giannakis
Pan Giannakis
This is called a false equation. I never drove an F1 therefore my view in Formula is irrelevant. I have developed quite a few films therefore my view is relevant.
I have not seen any side by side comparison between films developed in standard developing and stand developing that shows some sort of benefit. Actually I don't recall reading about stand developing in the pre-internet time.
Stand developing comes with so many shortcomings ranging from the hussle to keep steady temperature over a period of hours and uneven developing to increased grain, bromide drag and loss of accutance. And all these in order to solve problems that are rare and - push come to shove - are just a click on Photoshop.
Nah.. not for me.
Over and out.
chuckroast
Well-known
I've driven Formula 3, though not as a competitor. I highly recommend it 😉
Standing development techniques have been in use for well over a century. It's not new or novel.
I have never had ANY problems due to temp variation. Quite to the contrary, because the shadows develop to completion and the highlights exhaust quickly, it's actually less sensitive to temps unless you have super hot or super cold developer (which would also mess with conventional development). I have a temperature driven development timer, and I've found that - over an hour of standing - for any reasonable temperature, it just doesn't matter much.
I cannot click on Photoshop when I am silver printing.
Coldkennels
Barnack-toting Brit.
Ah, I went through all the stand developing rigamarole 10+ years ago to try to get the best out of it. I understand the theory, and like I said, it has its place, but I've never seen anything - either shot myself or by someone else - where stand development is convincingly better than conventional development. And, if I'm honest... that shot you linked to isn't really helping at all, Chuck. Highlights are still blown out, and the area that should naturally be in shadow looks far too bright for my tastes.
As for bromide drag: I pinned that one down to the agitation regimen used to start the process off. Pouring the Rodinal slowly and agitating much smoother than I would normally seemed to deal with any uneven development, but temp changes were a bigger issue.
I live in an old house, built in the 1840s, with stone walls and no insulation. The results I got from stand developing in the summer were WILDLY different to the results I got in the winter as a result. I could probably invest in equipment to keep the tank at 20ºC for an hour in the winter, but honestly, why bother? It's much easier to keep the developer at 20ºC for eight minutes instead - and when there's little (if any) noticeable difference in the finished product, I'm going to take the eight minute option.
As for bromide drag: I pinned that one down to the agitation regimen used to start the process off. Pouring the Rodinal slowly and agitating much smoother than I would normally seemed to deal with any uneven development, but temp changes were a bigger issue.
I live in an old house, built in the 1840s, with stone walls and no insulation. The results I got from stand developing in the summer were WILDLY different to the results I got in the winter as a result. I could probably invest in equipment to keep the tank at 20ºC for an hour in the winter, but honestly, why bother? It's much easier to keep the developer at 20ºC for eight minutes instead - and when there's little (if any) noticeable difference in the finished product, I'm going to take the eight minute option.
chuckroast
Well-known
As I noted above, the foreground needs to be burned in (this is a scan of a silver print on a really crappy scanner). But they are well preserved.
The more relevant point here is that any form of conventional development in this scene would have doomed the boards to boring lack of contrast or made the snow complete blank. They day overall was entirely gray and overcast, but the sun was punching through in the frame right.
I am comfortable using a half dozen developers and various agitation schemes to get what I want out of a negative, but I'm not religious about it. People should use what they want. I just see a ton of stuff with real uninteresting mid-tone contrast that would benefit from standing development. Here's another example of something that had a lot of bright light on it but that actually didn't have much of a contrast range in the mid tones. Standing both fixed that and sharpened the edges a bunch:
p.giannakis
Pan Giannakis
Started with Rodinal, then moved to ID-11, then ilfosol and finally settled to HC110 since 2011. The HC110 gives me the best value for money when used in dilution E, shelf life of a few decades and works very well with all 400 ISO films I like (except Delta 400 which needs special treatment in HC110 to get the results I like).
I still have some of the original syrup left, once I run out of it I will go back to either ilfosol or try DD-X.
I still have some of the original syrup left, once I run out of it I will go back to either ilfosol or try DD-X.
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