3 stop push of Tri X: HC110, D76, Rodinol or Pyrocat HD? Advice Desired

sunnyroller · May 20, 2006

My daughters Pre-K prom was last night and I shot a roll of 120 Tri-X rated at 3200. Not the best of situations, but the lighting was not as good as last time her school had a function in the cafeteria. I had no problem rating Tri-X at 1600 and pushing it in HC 110 to get usuable images from her Christmas program.

I have on hand HC 110, D-76 and Rodinol and am supposed to have Pyrocat arrive on Monday. Which of these will give me the best results salvaging this roll.

Thanks in advance,

Sunny

htmlguru4242 · May 20, 2006

I've had good results with D-76 (standard dilution and 1+1), assuming that this is Tri-X 400 (not the 320 TXP stuff).

Many people reccomend HC-110, but D-76 at the times suggested on the massive dev. chart for 3200 work for me ...

If you've experience using HC-110 for 1600, go ahead and use that for the three stop push ...

sunnyroller · May 20, 2006

Thank you htmlguru4242. Yes, it is the 400 Tri-X, not the 320. I have never pushed Tri-X this far, how should I expect the negs to look?

Thanks,

Sunny

donbga · May 20, 2006

sunnyroller said:
Thank you htmlguru4242. Yes, it is the 400 Tri-X, not the 320. I have never pushed Tri-X this far, how should I expect the negs to look?

Thanks,

Sunny

Don't kid yourself. The film is severly under exposed and what ever developer you use won't correct the problem. At best you will come out with very thin high contrast negatives.

I saw htmlgurus post and wasn't impressed. Tri-X 400 isn't a high speed film and does not push well more than 1 stop at most.

resummerfield · May 20, 2006

donbga said:
.....The film is severly under exposed.....

While the film did not receive optimum exposure, you can get good results by push processing. And in your situation, it was either expose at 3200 or don't get the pics. Consider Rodinal 1+50 at 30 min, 30 seconds intial agitation and short agitation once every 5 minutes.

Ian Grant · May 20, 2006

Definately don't use Rodinal, or HC110.

My preferance would be Microphen which you don't have. Before XP1 & 2 came along Tri-X or HP5 were commonly pushed to 1600 or 3200 ISO for low light & Concert work.

It's about 30 years since I last pushed conventional film to that extent, but I'm sure you should wait for someone with actual current experience of Tri-x under similar conditions to post a more accurate time for D-76.

Ian

df cardwell · May 20, 2006

The best choice of what you have is D76. See the Kodak site for suggestions.

Better is Xtol, it will salvage more shadows than anything else.

good luck

don

jim appleyard · May 20, 2006

If at all possible, do a test roll of Tri-X at 3200 in your dev of choice before you commit to processing the prom roll; it sounds like these might be special and precious moments.

David A. Goldfarb · May 20, 2006

I've gotten a legitimate 3200 out of old TX (400) in RAF Pyro-Metol, but the results will be grainy. I haven't tried it with the current TX yet. Info with links to sample photos here--

(there was a url link here which no longer exists)

theyankeesnapper · May 20, 2006

sunnyroller said:
My daughters Pre-K prom was last night and I shot a roll of 120 Tri-X rated at 3200. Not the best of situations, but the lighting was not as good as last time her school had a function in the cafeteria. I had no problem rating Tri-X at 1600 and pushing it in HC 110 to get usuable images from her Christmas program.

I have on hand HC 110, D-76 and Rodinol and am supposed to have Pyrocat arrive on Monday. Which of these will give me the best results salvaging this roll.

Thanks in advance,

Sunny

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////

I would try Rodinal 1+75 or 1+100 for 25 minutes at 68 degrees F. And/or D-76 stock for 14 minutes at 68 degrees f.

Regards.

Bob McCarthy

Donald Qualls · May 21, 2006

Diafine.

Twice.

I'm completely serious, and I've done this. Tri-X processed in Diafine according to instructions (3 minutes Bath A, 3 minutes Bath B) at reasonable temperatures gives EI 1600 the way most folks meter; if you give the film a thorough water rinse after Bath B (to avoid getting any of that solution into the Bath A), you can then put the film back into Bath A for another three minutes, followed by three minutes in Bath B again, then your regular water stop and fix.

Shadow detail will surely be compromised -- that's already a given, based on how you shot the film -- and the results will be fairly grainy. But you'll get good midtones and quite printable negatives if you didn't cheat on the metering even at 3200.

Alternately, you could use Super Soup:

Mix HC-110 Dilution A, using Dektol 1+9 in place of water. Add 1 g/L ascorbic acid, and 1/2 tsp per 8 ounces sodium carbonate (or 25% more sodium ascorbate, and no additional carbonate needed, though I haven't tested with this variation). Agitate very vigorously (7 inversions in 5 seconds) every 30 seconds for 15 minutes, and you'll get approximately EI 5000 from Tri-X -- drop back to 12 minutes, and you should be pretty close to your EI 3200, and likely get better shadow detail than with two cycles of Diafine. Even better, you'll get contrast that's easy to print.

Do, please, test the Super Soup with a roll shot under similar conditions as a test before committing your important images -- it works for me, but I could be specially blessed....

sunnyroller · May 24, 2006

Thanks to Donald Qualls!

I can't say thank you enough to Donald Qualls for sharing his super soup recipe. I got better than expected results with this developer. Some of the images were not usable, but that was from camera shake and too slow of shutter speed. (Available darkness + moving subject = lots of fuzzy pics).

However, thanks to Donald I was able to get a good contact sheet from these extreme negatives.

Here are 2 images from the roll. They are at the extreme ends of the conditions I was shooting under and this developer maximized both of them.

sunnyroller · May 24, 2006

Oops. I forgot to mention that the scan of the ones with the balloons makes it look really blown out, but it isn't. I think it is going to print pretty easy. We were working on 16 x 20 prints today so I didn't have time to do anything with the negs other than pop a contact sheet off. I am going to try to work this print up over the next week and see what I get.

Thanks,
Sunny

MMfoto · May 24, 2006

Donald Qualls said:
...Alternately, you could use Super Soup:

Mix HC-110 Dilution A, using Dektol 1+9 in place of water. Add 1 g/L ascorbic acid, and 1/2 tsp per 8 ounces sodium carbonate (or 25% more sodium ascorbate, and no additional carbonate needed...

Good god Donald, How did you come up with that! Looks like it worked pretty well for Sunny.

Donald Qualls · May 25, 2006

MMfoto said:
Good god Donald, How did you come up with that! Looks like it worked pretty well for Sunny.

You know what they say about the ancestry of invention?

I had a Tri-X 320 negative that I was certain would be good -- and when unloading it from the plate holder, I realized the notches weren't where they should have been; the film had been exposed through the base. Since I had the opportunity to correct things, having spotted the problem before pouring the developer, I pretty much just threw together the hottest brew I could make with stuff I had in the house that day, made a WAG on development time, agitated like all heck -- and it worked.

So I wrote down what I'd done. Later, I tried it again -- got night sky images that picked up sky glow in 40 second exposures and other stuff that let me conclude that Super Soup was getting about EI 4000-5000 from TXT 320, and 5000-6400 from TX 400. And doing it with something like normal contrast, and not excessive fog.

I have no idea why it works (it gives shadow detail about like a one stop push, too), I just use it when needed.

nworth · May 26, 2006

D-76 (undiluted) and sometimes D-76 with 18 grams per liter of additional borax (20 g/l total) are the traditional push formulations fot Tri-X. HC-110 may work. Pyrocat HD is not a highly active developer and is less likely to give good results, although it might work at reduced dilutions. It sounds like these pictures are of some importance to you. Unless you have some good information on the developer and film combination for push processing, you will need to experiment before committing your valuable photos to processing. Take a roll of Tri-X and expose it to a standard subject (maybe a room interior similar to where your valuable photos were taken) at ISO 3200 (or whatever speed you used for the good stuff). Snip the roll into short lengths, and process each length for a different time in the chosen developer. Keep careful records, and be sure you can associate each film strip with the processing time you used. (You might staple a piece of paper identifying the processing time to each strip after you process it. Labels don't stick well to wet film, but staples work in the short run.) After you are done, chose the best strip and use the corresponding processing time.

The Massive Development Chart (www.digitaltruth.com) Suggests 11 minutes in undiluted D-76 or 16 minutes in D-76 1+1 for 400TX rated at EI 3200. These may be good starting points, but I would still experiment before committing valuable exposures to the process. You might try 6.5, 8, 11, 14, and 22 minutes in undiluted D-76, for instance. (That works out roughly to 0.5, 0.7, 1.0, 1.4, and 2.0 times the recommended value.) For other developers, you might try a sequence like 1.4, 1.7, 2, 2.4, and 2.8 times the normal (EI 400) developing time.

Long developing times increases the contrast as well as the density. Don't expect negatives of the same excellent quality you get with normally exposed Tri-X.

Donald Qualls · May 27, 2006

Everything you say is technically correct, nworth -- but it doesn't explain what I (and now Sunny) get from my Super Soup. I've hypothesized that there's some interaction between whatever phenidone derivative is in HC-110, hydroquinone, metol, and ascorbate, in conjunction with the mixture of HC-110's organic alkali and the sodium carbonate accelerator in the Dektol. Surely there's a LOT of active developer in the working solution, but that, the long time, and the high agitation would normally produce extremely high contrast; instead, at least with TXT and TX, I get approximately normal contrast and shadow detail that appears to have gained two stops of real film speed (based on eyeball and printing, since I don't have the equipment to test in a way that gives numbers).

Fortunately, I don't have to know *how* it works to know it *does* work.

3 stop push of Tri X: HC110, D76, Rodinol or Pyrocat HD? Advice Desired

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