D76

[Philippe-Georges]

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?

It's due to the influence of D dash 76...

 

[Ian Grant]

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.

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.

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

 

[baachitraka]

The best developer is the person who puts the detail on the negative (exposure) and develops it with some discipline.

 

[Philippe-Georges]

The best developer is the person who puts the detail on the negative (exposure) and develops it with some discipline.

agreed!

 

[grain elevator]

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

How do film and its development have any impact on blacks in the print? You can get those without a negative in the carrier.

 

[NB23]

@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!

I was answering post #67 where it was stated that developers don’t do much difference. Tmax100 looks way different in microphen 1:1 vs xtol 1:1, the difference jumps at me. The whole curve is different.

So there it is: I like tmx in microphen and ilfosol-3 and I dislike it in xtol.

About TMY400, the rare times I have used it I simply Loved it. I recall using rodinal 1:25 with that film. I sense I’d have hated it if I had used xtol
1:1.
The reason why I didn’t use TMZ more is because I had at least 500 rolls of TMX to use up, back then.

 

[NB23]

The best developer is the person who puts the detail on the negative (exposure) and develops it with some discipline.

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.

 

[NB23]

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

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.

 

[Craig75]

I would have thought that if you didn't get enough contrast with xtol then either your times, temperatures or the developer itself were off.

Developers don't make "meaty blacks" - paper and contrast do that.

 

[baachitraka]

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.

Interesting!!! But you did not tell to us, what is the best developer.

 

[MattKing]

In my experience, there is no grain to speak of. This, of course, translates into Absolutely NO acutance.

Technically, this doesn't mean that there is no acutance. You can have very high acutance with fine grain.
The problem is that very fine grain tends to reduce the subjective impression of "sharpness". which itself is a mixture of acutance, resolution and (macro) contrast.
Based on looking at a lot of NB23's work posted here, I understand why he prefers the look of prints with a bit more apparent grain - that look suits what and how he prints. So for that reason, he may prefer a developer that gives different results than X-Tol. But that doesn't mean X-Tol is deficient - just different.
TMY-2 in X-Tol:

 

[McDiesel]

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

Xtol-R

If you're looking to compare the grain structure, here are 100% crops (the original images are 8,300x5,500px):

ID-11

Xtol-R

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.

 

[Ian Grant]

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.

When you use a new film and developer combination, you test and print, it sounds like you didn't.

Ian

 

[Lachlan Young]

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.

Someone overexposed their Tmax 100. It starts to shoulder a bit earlier in Xtol than in other developers with a solvency level closer to D-76 - and you pushed your midtones & highlights up on to that shoulder. Nothing special or weird happening.

Everything you said about Xtol is how I feel about T-Max 400. It prentends to be a digital camera in monochrome mode!

Tmax 400 looks fine if people expose it correctly - in general people need to be less overly generous with exposure with Tmax when using more solvent developers - Delta has better overexposure behaviour in that regard, but Delta's grain structure seems to suffer from rapid rises in granularity when overexposed.

 

[RalphLambrecht]

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.

that's really the point; not the best at anything, but the best compromise of everything.

 

[Lachlan Young]

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.

Richard Henn's work is probably worth orders of magnitude more than any of the various cookbooks of errors.

Rather than secondary reports you can (with minimal effort) find Henn's own comments on D-23 at the point in time that he unveiled D-25 & Microdol in 1945. Specifically he describes D-23 as delivering results very close to D-76 across all measures (by the standards of 1945 emulsions) - and states that while fine grain, D-76/ D-23 are not 'very fine grain' - which was the point of D-25 & Microdol. He suggests that D-23 delivers 'exceptionally good' highlight separation, without offering judgement on D-76 in comparison - and I must emphasise this and re-emphasise this - this is in regard to emulsions made in 1945, not 1955, never mind the 1970s or later - and there were very major (fundamental) changes in emulsion technology 1945-60 - and viewpoints about the role of the HQ in D-76 changed as more was understood about the (more complicated) nature of its action - which was more fully exploitable in PQ developers (as Phenidones appear to produce inhibition rather than exhaustion effects).

 

[removedacct3]

But yes, I used D-76 for all the non-AGFA emulsions.

Care to share what AGFA has to do with it?

 

[Bill Burk]

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.

Are those 120 or 35mm? What are your times and contrast indexes?

 

[McDiesel]

@Bill Burk This was T-Max 400 in 35mm format. ID-11 was 7min @20C, which is taken from Ilford ID-11 datasheet, with promised Gbar of 0.62.

Xtol-R was 7min @24C, the time which I arrived at by measuring densities in the target and comparing it against the ID-11 negative, in other words I tuned my XTol-R times to be simlar to stock ID-11.

 

[Raghu Kuvempunagar]

Scanning is done with a Sony 60MP camera with gamma 1,

Nice scans. Not sure I can see any difference in the 100% crops.

 

[miha]

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.

 

[Lachlan Young]

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'.

 

[cliveh]

Graphs are a really stupid and bias way of expressing anything. If you elongate or contract the X or Y axis, you can make anything look bad or good.

 

[miha]

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'.

Thank you for your feedback, lots of good info. Definitely worth digging in further. Appreciated.