Well we seem to get fewer of the kind of threads that ask for the "magic bullet " developer that all newcomers believed existed and it was only the mean old guys who refused to reveal what it was
Maybe your quote above should be the stock answer? It has a kind of understated beginning that suddenly delivers the knock-out punch
pentaxuser
Xtol is “so great” for shadow detail and all that kind of stuff, but ultimately it ruined a lot of prints for me. The sum of perfect features makes for suuuuch boringness that I can’t even explain.
Developing ONE film and alalyzing ONE print from a XTOL negative will impress anyone. Wow, no grain. Wow, shadow details. Wow, lotsa shadows. Wow, lots of grays. But print a small body of work and you will soon start questioning why your prints look so bland. Totally Half-Baked results.
Here’s my situation; I’m presently printing my negatives from 2018, on my last 10 boxes of 11x14 Oriental FB. That’s 500 sheets of extremely fine paper. Many prints don’t look good, they totally lack character and contrast that even a filter 4 or 5 cannot properly salvage.
At first I blamed myself for poor processing, for poor printing skills. But how could I be such a poor printer after 30 years of sustained work and after so many fine prints? I then blamed the paper that could indeed be unfresh. But how could it be unfresh and yet give me acceptable blacks and a lot of great prints as I was going through negatives? So then I blamed the fact that a few of the films were expired. Okay, that might explain why I’d have stellar prints as well as abysmal prints from my 2018 films. And then I thought that maybe the poor prints were coming from X-Ray zapped films. A lot of theories were on my mind until I understood what was going on: I used two developers for my tmax100 in 2018: xtol 1:1 and Microphen 1:1. And it became clear that all my prints involving tmax100 developed in Microphen 1:1 were gorgeous while all my prints involving Xtol 1:1 were pretty bland. The frustrating part is the time and papers lost during the process.
Basicaly, TMAX100 is a great film that looks great in Ilfosol-3 and Microphen, and looks really bad in xtol 1:1.
This is important to know because it dawned on me while perusing a few photobooks from the masters (Sergio Larrain and Bruce Gilden’s lost and found) that, while their shooting skills are undeniable, a lot of their mastery lies in the look of their prints. The film, the processing, the grain, the master printer, the retoucher: the final look. The character.
It dawned on me especially because I was quite fond of my own 2018 shots but yet I was sooooo far away in terms of the final look on a lot of my prints. It was depressing, and a lot of it was XTOL’s fault, which took me some time
to understand. Simply put, a lot of Larrain’s and Gilden’s shots wouldn’t have even made it into their respective books if they had been shot on tmax and developed in xtol1:1. The extra meaty blacks and thick grays in their images would have not existed, and those do account for at least 33% of the overall effect that their images induce to the viewers.
Anyhow, long story short: I will never use xtol again.