compensating developers, why not always use them?

And so we go around and around. We face a choice, either adopt somebody's authority
and use it to shape how we think about what is possible, or see for ourselves what works
and what does not.

The past hundred years of photo history has been weighted down by recursive theory, expressed in clean logic and good facts, yet flawed by a theoretical premise which avoids the practical criteria of field photography.

Phrases like 'compensating developer' have no real meaning. Furthermore, few writers have freely explored the variables and possibilities photo chemistry, and as a result, only proved what they sought to prove.

Some, like Crawley and Lowe, DID blend imagination with the desire to to make better pictures, rather than to keep order in photographic ranks.

The original idea of a compensating developer was to decrease contrast in order to handle extreme contrast in the scene. The Windisch formula is an example of this sort of thing. When modern films ("thin emulsion") appeared in the 50s, they tended to be contrasty, and a variation on the compensating developers was used to control that tendency. The prototype for that was the Beutler formula. These were very active developers with low sulfite and low or no restrainer that were used at high dilutions and minimal agitation. The idea is that at high dilutions, the developer becomes exhausted in the highlights while continuing to work in the shadows, thus reducing contrast. The lack of restrainer combined with high dilution and low agitation means that bromide released from the emulsion during development acts as a restrainer in highlight areas and along edges, giving local contrast to the edges (acutance) while reducing overall contrast.

The Rodinal formula looks like a modern compensating developer, and to some extent it acts like one. It has high acutance and tames contrast to some extent. But it is not compensating in the way the Windisch is, nor does it give the acutance of the Beutler. So there a shades and variations. Along the way, someone found that the contrast of most modern films could be tamed simply by diluting a mild, standard developer like ID-11. ID-11 is not active enough to make it a compensating developer, but people have found that diluting it even more (like 1+3) can give acutance effects with low agitation and currently available films, which are quite resistant to chemical fogging.

Again, thank you for all the answers.

dancqu said:

You've got it bass-ackwards. In fact the only purpose of using
a compensating developer, AFAIK, is to save highlight detail;
restrain much expsosed areas from development thereby
maintaining their printability.

Overly long development in a compensating developer will
eventually produce great density in areas of much exposure.
Gerald Koch alludes to this in the article HE wrote and earlier
mentioned. The classic compensating developer has a high ph,
so speeding development. Of course there all degrees
of compensation. Dan

Click to expand...

You cannot save information by reducing contrast. Long development in any developer will produce high densities. Density is not what gives or takes away information. It is rate of change of density with spacial displacement. Well, you could say if there is no change in density that you know there was one heck of a large area of constant brightness there, but that is only a couple of bits of information.

The real limit on information transfer by reflective media has been known since long before photography. Artists have used the "Fool the eye" technique on paper and canvas and plaster without benefit of compensating developers. So in fact have photographers.

If a person uses a certain developer for a certain reason, that is fine by me. I would rather not try to categorize it by looking at its ingredients and judging it to be a compensating high acutance fine grain ...or whatever developer to be used only for this or that purpose.

I'm getting too old for this business.

The original idea of a compensating developer

Beutler used a developer formula (and dilution) published by Agfa in the 1920s and probably before, following Agfa's directions how to use agitation and dilution to control the scale of a negative. (The Photo-Handbook by Dr. M. Andresen; several editions, much more common in German than English)

Windisch's 'compensating' developer is characteristic of other single agent developers capable of linear performance over a great density range.

Films from the 1950s were no more contrasty than those of today, or the 1920s, '30s, or '40s. What changed was the general desire to process film to a lower contrast than was needed in earlier days, or desired in earlier days by Pictorialists, or by those who practiced what we refer to -today- as 'alternative processes'.

Sandy King and Steven Sherman have gone a long way to re-introduce agitation as a control in contemporary times. Minimal Agitation is exactly the same effect described by some as 'compensation'.

The trick of 'compensation' depends on balancing 3 factors: Exposure, Development Time, and Agitation. The key to the whole visualize a film curve as a photographer's tool (which stores data in a way which can be retrieved without losing essential tonal relationships... local contrast). Because this is a completely subjective process, a Photographer's Negative bears little relationship to a Film Manufacturer's Negative. ISO and CI convey significant information, but it is incomplete for it does not describe the relationship of midtones to the extremes of the scale.

We have accepted as fact what our photographic forebears did not, that shadows and highlights were all that could be controlled in the photographic process. A remarkable thing happens when we change our Visualisation of a negative (Visualisation, that troubling idea Adams kept harping on in the Preface to all his books, the part of the process that doesn't fit on a graph or in a spreadsheet or database).

If we consider the midtones as the pivot point of a curve, the mean of an SBR, we can easily reshape a negative by treating Zone V as a constant. If we EXPOSE for the midtones, DEVELOP for the shadows, and AGITATE for the highlights we can maintain local contrast in a negative with full shadows and controlled highlights, usually with full ISO speed and good secondary characteristics like grain and acutance. THIS is what COMPENSATION is about, and what was described almost a hundred years ago and achieved as a matter of course by photographers like Weston.

And DILUTION ? A developer needs 10 to 20 minutes to develop film to be controllable, sometimes longer, depending on its sensitivity to bromide and other stuff. Diluted 1+15 (from concentrate) HC-110 is not a 'compensating developer' for it is too active. Diluted 1+63 ~ 1+127. yes. Dilution does not 'do compensation', but a suitable concentration of developer is needed to establish the conditions for potential 'compensation'.

Of course, a 'compensated negative', with fat shadows, linear midtones, and modulated highlights is not useful for every visualisation. Countless photographers made breathtaking images with straight-from-the-box BTZS processes. Whether we use constant agitation or no agitation, shoot barefoot or shod, or anything.

As Jim Dow says, "There ARE no standards" (Dead Link Removed). The only important thing is that we each find are way to make the images we are obsessed to make.

The essential step to that end is to learn HOW to use the process, not search for magic bullets. Almost every developer and film combinations can give excellent results in normal circumstances. MANY combinations can give excellent results in a variety of circumstances. As several posts have confirmed, D-76/ID-11 CAN give a variety of results, and is an excellent way to either begin a photo career or conduct a long career. The results depend completely on HOW it used by the photographer.

And, as always, a tip of the hat to Gadget Gainer for his good sense.

.

Pierods - sorry I didn't reply sooner. All your assumptions are pretty much correct. I'm not particularly scientific about it but after experiment I found that about 10% over the recpommended Ilford Dev times give the results I like (Quite contrastly, using a diffuser enlarger). The other posts here hive much more detailed advice than I can but I really can't stress enough that there's no substitute for doing your own tests to find what works for you.

Rob

Any way you look at it, it's going to be very difficult or impossible to put everything on paper that may cause your heart to flutter when you look at the Grand Canyon in the west, or Seneca Rocks in my country without some serious and studious dodging, burning and any other trick you can think of, including local reduction or intensification and unsharp masking. Some of this may be needed in order to undo what a compensating developer did, or didn't do that it was expected to do. If the information is in the negative, you can bring it out in the printing. It's not good enough to say that both highlight and shadow densities are included. I mean that the density range of the negative is only one bit, one yes or no answer, one "on" or "off" switch. How many such switches must a digital camera have to make a reasonably good image? If you want real compensation, that is the way to go to approximate the nearly instantaneous adaptation of the human eye. Our desire is more to approximate the way a painter modifies what can be put on paper so that wherever one looks in a scene, it appears to the viewer as if one had adapted the vision, but without actually doing the adaptation. We can keep everything in focus easilly enough, but the techniques an artist does to perpetrate the trickery is not easily canned in film or developer.

gainer said:

Any way you look at it, it's going to be very difficult or impossible to put everything on paper that may cause your heart to flutter when you look at the Grand Canyon in the west, or Seneca Rocks in my country without some serious and studious dodging, burning and any other trick you can think of...

Click to expand...

Agreed, it's very true.

But before opening the trick bag I want the best negative I can achieve through exposure and development.

Well, I agree with you on that point, if you will allow that the negative that best serves your purpose for a given scene may not be exactly like the one that best serves my purpose.

gainer said:

Well, I agree with you on that point, if you will allow that the negative that best serves your purpose for a given scene may not be exactly like the one that best serves my purpose.

Click to expand...

Very interesting point, my friend, and indeed, you went to the root of what I am trying to achieve.

My original dilemma was, a negative from Jeanloup Sieff cannot possibly have been developed similarly to a negative from George Hurrell (time and format differences apart).

Then I became aware that Sieff had the biggest collection of D&B masks ever seen on Earth, Hurrell was a former painter who retouched his negs by hand, and so we converge on both points.