It's due to the influence of D dash 76...
It's due to the influence of D dash 76...I noticed that some folks type X-tol with a dash. Where is this coming from? Kodak packaging and datasheets say XTOL or Xtol. Is this from the good ole days?
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.
agreed!The best developer is the person who puts the detail on the negative (exposure) and develops it with some discipline.
How do film and its development have any impact on blacks in the print? You can get those without a negative in the carrier.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
@NB23 I enjoyed your comment. You must hate T-Max 400 then? Everything you said about Xtol is how I feel about T-Max 400. It prentends to be a digital camera in monochrome mode!
The best developer is the person who puts the detail on the negative (exposure) and develops it with some discipline.
I know this graph, and it is wrong. At least for TMX in xtol 1:1 (let’s take for granted that xtol 1:1 is the same as Xtol full strength). In my experience, there is no grain to speak of. This, of course, translates into Absolutely NO acutance. Just the opposite of what the graph is trying to tell us.I used a lot of Tmax 100 35mm to 5x4, processing it in replenished Xtol or Rodinal I never gad any issues. What you are saying seems to indicate that your EI and development times for Xtol were wrong.
Xtol was introduced to bring out the best in Tmax films and overcome the failings of D76.
View attachment 302826
My Tmax 100 films in Xtol negatives print as easily at the same filtration as those in Rodinal, also Pyrocat HD, and that's the same for other films I used like Agfa AP/APX 100 & 25, EFKE PL25 and Fortepan 200.
Ian
Interesting!!! But you did not tell to us, what is the best developer.All this is bla bla bla. Stories for kids.
I’ve been printing in average 4 hours a day for the past 30 years. Yes, 28 hours a week, times 52, times 30. This equals to 43,680 hours. Round it to 40K or 45K, as you wish.
Technically, this doesn't mean that there is no acutance. You can have very high acutance with fine grain.In my experience, there is no grain to speak of. This, of course, translates into Absolutely NO acutance.
I know this graph, and it is wrong. At least for TMX in xtol 1:1 (let’s take for granted that xtol 1:1 is the same as Xtol full strength). In my experience, there is no grain to speak of. This, of course, translates into Absolutely NO acutance. Just the opposite of what the graph is trying to tell us.
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.
Everything you said about Xtol is how I feel about T-Max 400. It prentends to be a digital camera in monochrome mode!
that's really the point; not the best at anything, but the best compromise of everything.It's not the best in any one aspect. You can beat it for grain, effective film speed, sharpness, storage life, whatever. But it does so many things well enough that it has become the standard against which others are compared.
It's a very good all around developer. I could get by with just D76 if I had to. But there is no one best developer for all needs and all photographers.
IDK, I haven't heard of Henn before, but since you mentioned it, I noticed his name was mentioned several times in The Film Developing Cookbook, ed. 2. If you happen to have the book, you can read he believed D23 to be a superior developer.
Care to share what AGFA has to do with it?But yes, I used D-76 for all the non-AGFA emulsions.
Are those 120 or 35mm? What are your times and contrast indexes?Since we're sharing samples. Here's the same TMax 400 exposure, from the same roll, developed in D76 and in replenished Xtol (100% identical scanning procedure - same gamma, white & black points)
D76
View attachment 302843
Xtol-R
View attachment 302844
If you're looking to compare the grain structure, here are 100% crops (the original images are 8,300x5,500px):
ID-11
View attachment 302845
Xtol-R
View attachment 302846
Make your own conclusions. For my purposes the differences are microscopic. I have the same scene done with all films I use, and developed in several developers, and I am in the camp of "chemistry hardly matters".
BTW, the difference between full strength Xtol, Xtol 1+1 and replenished are much smaller than D76 vs Xtol, that's why I find some of the heated archived debates on "replenishing for better tonality" completely silly.
P.S. Some disclaimers: I use automatic, repeatable agitation. The datasheet times are used for D76. The development time for Xtol-R was derived by measuring density vs D76 with a densitometer. Scanning is done with a Sony 60MP camera with gamma 1, then the same adjustment layers applied to all scans.
Scanning is done with a Sony 60MP camera with gamma 1,
Richard Henn's work is probably worth orders of magnitude more than any of the various cookbooks of errors.
I'm sure it is (there is no reason to assume to the contrary). But since the aforementioned book (which you find is a book of errors) is the only source either of us is able to present in order to understand how Henn thought of his invention (D23), I'm not willing to be persuaded the other way.
Henn & Crabtree's articles in Popular Photography September (pg. 40 et seq) & October 1945 (pg. 32 et seq) are available in full on Google Books. The Sept 1945 issue also has an article on Brodovitch's epochal 'Ballet' book, attempting to explain it to an audience to whom it would have seemed quite alien.
However, before you take everything in those two Henn articles at absolute face value, bear in mind that they were written early in his career (I think he was about 30-ish) & the chapter in the SPSE handbook (essentially the industry textbook - which has been described as 'being on every photographic engineer's desk') on photographic emulsions & chemistry he & his colleagues wrote in the late 1960s/ very early 1970s is illustrative of both the rapid & deep (and often confidential) scientisation of photographic/ imaging science & engineering in the intervening & a growing body of knowledge about the more complex (and exploitable) behaviours of HQ (and its derivatives & equivalents) - in other words, while Metol only developers still seemed to offer potentially beneficial properties in terms of balancing sharpness to granularity at that time, clear hints are given that other, potentially better mechanisms - that were being researched confidentially at that time - exploiting PQ/ PA characteristics in ways that neither Metol alone nor MQ could deliver - and clearer evidence of this starts to emerge at the end of the 1970s. In other words, this could be taken as an illustration of an idea that emerged in the 1960s/70s - that of the 'half-life of knowledge'.
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