Thoughts on developing film at low/high temperatures.

[Vetus]

This article claims that grain and contrast can be controlled by developing films at lower or higher temperatures than 20 degrees C. Your thought and experience please.

Rodinal by Jan Caspary

Jan gets beautiful results using Rodinal and he was kind enough to accept writing something about his experiments for this little corner on the web. The result is a great article about one of the m…

cookingfilm.wordpress.com

 

[koraks]

Higher temperature = more active developer. This has been known since the dawn of photography.

There's no magic about higher or lower temperature development. The net effect amounts to the same as shortening or lengthening the development time.

Note that in his list towards the end he also changes agitation as well as developer dilution.

The stories about 'magic effects' of one or another parameter are virtually always problematic in their testing methodology or how the tests are reported on.

The Flickr gallery linked to in the article contains a large number of photos with very obvious local tonal adjustments that were done digitally, sometimes resulting in rather oppressive artifacts.

IDK, this same thing keeps popping up time and again and there's generally just no beginning to trying to separate out the wheat from the chaff. Believe what you want to believe, experiment, and do what works best for you. Use other people's musings to take inspiration from, but view everything critical and ask yourself at least three times what's not written down or being told.

 

[loccdor]

I know there are certain developers that go very poorly at much lower than 20C. As in the time/temperature stops being linear. Can't recall precisely which one(s). People were speaking about having problems with cold winter darkrooms.

 

[koraks]

IIR hydroquinone slows down dramatically around 15C, so any HQ developer would start to behave erratically at around that cut-off point.

There's a neat graph of the temperature vs. activity of several developing agents; as I recall it doesn't show the effects of temperature on super-additive pairs. I'm sure this has been investigated by Kodak, Harman/Ilford et al many times throughout history, though. Of course, the blog referred to discusses Rodinal which is not a super-additive pair. I don't know what the temp/activity relationship for Rodinal is, but I expect it's not nicely linear the temperature range is expanded greatly beyond let's say 17-25C. This in itself can explain why people see 'funny' things happening (desirable or not) if they try running film through very hot or very cold developer.

Wouldn't Mortensen sometimes develop his film in very dilute developer in a fridge for several days?

 

[Alan9940]

I've never experienced this myself, but I've read that temps above 26 - 27C can cause the emulsion to literally detach from the base. I've never developed film that hot. And, @koraks is exactly right...hydroquinone basically stops working below about 15 - 16C and I doubt that it's a linear falloff as the temp drops below 20C. Therefore, any formula, such as D-76, is going to be problematic in really cold temp.

 

[cirwin2010]

Just a thought, if this is something you want to try, you may want to have some sort of water bath to keep the temperature of the tank steady. If there is a large delta from the initial developer temp and air temp, you can certainly expect the developer temp to change over time. This may lead to difficultly standardizing the results.

 

[snusmumriken]

There was a previous thread on a similar theme here. The graph @koraks referred to above was in post #4 of that thread.

 

[MattKing]

I've never experienced this myself, but I've read that temps above 26 - 27C can cause the emulsion to literally detach from the base. I've never developed film that hot. And, @koraks is exactly right...hydroquinone basically stops working below about 15 - 16C and I doubt that it's a linear falloff as the temp drops below 20C. Therefore, any formula, such as D-76, is going to be problematic in really cold temp.

Modern films are quite robust and well hardened, so this sort of damage is much less likely than in days of yore.
High temperatures do usually end up shortening development times too much - at least if one needs consistency.

 

[ic-racer]

Your thought and experience please.

You can also control contrast and grain by altering development time and agitation technique.

 

[Maris]

My heavily used, heavily replenished Xtol that was first mixed in 2021 delivers quasi-linear results from:

25 minutes at 12 Celcius to 2minutes 45 seconds at 34 Celcius. I haven't tested outside those limits.

All black and white films, whatever the type (ok, not lith), whatever the speed, go into development for a time determined by the time vs temperature chart.
Negative densities are well matched by giving each film its own individual exposure index prior to exposure, as established by testing.
Negative contrasts come out reasonably close.

How can this work? I think ancient Xtol , active but of unknown composition, becomes a particularly "forgiving" developer.
Minor shifts in density and contrast are easily accommodated by modern variable contrast enlarging paper.

Here's an example:

Massive Snow Gum, Charlotte Pass
Gelatin-silver photograph on Fomabrom Variant III VC FB photographic paper, image size 24.5cm X 19.5cm, from a 8x10 Fomapan 200 negative
exposed at EI=100 in a Tachihara 810HD triple extension field view camera fitted with a Schneider Super Angulon 121mm f8.

The negative was tray developed at 31 Celcius for 3minutes 50 seconds and prints easily. This approach works in my old darkroom; for you, not gospel.

 

[retina_restoration]

The stories about 'magic effects' of one or another parameter are virtually always problematic in their testing methodology or how the tests are reported on.

Any "technique" you read about on the web that purports to have discovered "magical" properties is often best ignored. I read the article and looked at the images and found nothing remarkable there.

 

[John Wiegerink]

I try to stick very close to the manufactures recommended temperature and don't see much reason to change that. I have a temp control valve and being in Michigan my tap temperature is always fine straight out of my well. I remember reading an article in the old Darkroom Techniques magazine where folks were actually developing Tmax film at 90F and more. This was just after Tmax was introduced and users were having problems with it. They resorted to higher developing temperatures and liked the results better. This was before Kodak reformulated Tmax.