Foma Retro Special Developer + Foma Retropan 320 in 120. Processing advice sought.

Hi

I love Foma film in medium format and have been using their 100,200,400 products almost exclusively for the past couple of years.

I'm now curious about their 'Foma Retropan 320' product, again in 120 format, and I'm considering purchasing a few rolls. These will be self-processed and initially scanned by myself, with a view on wet printing once time and space allows it

I have read Foma offers a specific developer to process this film, called 'Retro Special Developer'. Based on my experience with Foma 200/400, and how much better my results are when I stick to using Foma's own developers, I'm tempted to go ahead and get the Retro Special, too.

I have a few questions for those who already tested this combo. Based on the official pdf technical data sheet found here

https://www.foma.cz/en/retrodevelopers

recommended processing time for EI320 @20C is 4-5 minutes. I'm a bit uncomfortable with such a short development time, and I assume this is for the mixed stock.

Has anyone tried the developer in 1+1 configuration and if so, what processing times would they recommend?

Don't dilute the developer - the film needs all the development it can get. I used the 640 times & rated about 160 I recall. I seem to recollect that the 320 times equated to about a 0.5 contrast index and the 640 to a 0.56. The developer is seemingly heavily buffered (or something like that) to give it decent capacity when reused without needing significant time alterations.

The film is spectacularly grainy, and rather beautiful. The characteristic curve is a bit odd compared to many other films, so it may give slightly unexpected results. Most of the problems seem to have come from people making assumptions without reading the data sheet & then complaining that the film wasn't Kodak TXP320 (or whatever their cheapskate fantasies wanted). It is definitely a fun material & very different from most of the other films on the market currently.

Thank you so much Lachlan for taking the time to sharing that. That's exactly the info I was looking for. Sounds like a good starting point then would be to expose generously and develop for the EI640 times to approach a .6 gamma. I will go ahead with that.

Yes my feeling is that it will be grainier and fuzzier than what I'm used from their 100/200/400. Apart from that, I have no initial preconceptions about the film, so pretty happy to experiment and see what I get out of it. I have seen a few scanned examples on flickr but honestly based only on those I cannot get an impression about the film characteristics, because it seems to me that the majority are just poorly exposed/developed/poorly scanned snapshots taken in haste.

@albireo I do have quite a few 3000ppi scans (Hasselblad X5) I have made of Retro 320, I could screengrab a few images of the visible granularity if that's of use to you? Have also printed from Retro 320 in the darkroom & you definitely see the granularity in a 3x print, let alone 5x. It should make for some spectacular lith prints too.

This is a great (unfortunately discontinued) film that needs a lot (!) of light. In very bright contrasty situations and exposed at aroun 200iso (or less) it can give spectacular results with 'glowing' yet hardly blown out highlights and good shadow detail.
I rather develop it near 6 minutes than 4-5.
Enjoy it while its still out there

@chris77 I do wonder how many (or few) coating runs were ever made of Retro 320 - it didn't help that it seemed to confuse some of the less than creative noisemakers on the internet who all got very bent out of shape that it wasn't a cheap copy of TXP320.

Lachlan Young said:

@chris77 I do wonder how many (or few) coating runs were ever made of Retro 320 - it didn't help that it seemed to confuse some of the less than creative noisemakers on the internet who all got very bent out of shape that it wasn't a cheap copy of TXP320.

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I cannot say but last time i contacted foma they gave me this information and i have to say that i would rather have seen another film disappear.
At first i didn't like it but just because i hadn't exposed and developed it properly.

Lachlan Young said:

@albireo I do have quite a few 3000ppi scans (Hasselblad X5) I have made of Retro 320, I could screengrab a few images of the visible granularity if that's of use to you? Have also printed from Retro 320 in the darkroom & you definitely see the granularity in a 3x print, let alone 5x. It should make for some spectacular lith prints too.

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Thank you Lachlan, if that's not too much of a bother that would be interesting to see.

I have been scouring Flickr to see what people have been doing with this film. I thought this particular shot was interesting - I can't say for sure it's due to the film and not the post-processing, but the photographer did something with the highlights that I find extremely appealing.

Interestingly - Lachlan - his findings regarding processing match well with yours.

summer forest by Yury Shulhevich, on Flickr

Makiflex Retro 320 - 2 by Nokton48, on Flickr

9x12cm Foma Retro 320 cut film, exposed at EI 125. Plaubel Makiflex Standard camera body, Kern-Arau 360mm F11 Repro Process lens, exposure 1/15 sec at F22, Developed in straight Microdol-X developer, 30 minutes development at 18C, in a JOBO Multitank 5. Scanned on Epson 4490 scanner.

The negative is cropped somewhat (about 6.5cmx9cm) for easy scanning. Observations: Even at 30 minutes development, the negatives are quite low contrast. Also, there is a dark blue antihalation dye on the back of the film, which turned my Microdol-X BLUE! And it even turned my Kodak Rapid Fixer BLUE! After thirty minutes washing, all traces of the dye was completely rinsed away.

I LIKE THIS FILM! I am so glad I have it. Of course, I am NOT following the FOMA instructions, just going by my own intuition.
Since this film is not available in 120 size, this is a good alternative for me.

Hi Nokton, thanks for sharing your sample photo and for the info. Great stuff

I'm not sure what you mean, however, when you say this film 'is not available in 120 size'. I'm staring at my newly bought 10 rolls of 120 Foma Retro as I type this.

At the time I made this photo was made it was only available in sheet film (I use 9x12cm have 200 sheets)

Now I have many 120 rolls and Retro developer which I have not tried yet.

It worked pretty well with Legacy Mic-X also a soft developer

@albireo Sorry about the delay, had to go and rake through a couple of hard drives to find the files. All are sectional screenshots of 3000ppi scans (to see the granularity/ behaviour thereof) & I've prepared them as follows: bigger image is 50% to show how the granularity will generally appear in a decently sized print at reasonably close inspection; smaller image about 33% to give a broader context of what outputting at 300ppi would roughly look like; the paler images are only inverted and black and white points set, the contrastier ones I've put a moderate curve on (done very freely, no great intention, just to give an impression of how they change) - hopefully it gives a sense of the way that the apparent granularity and halation shifts; I've given mainly fairly mid-tone, not super contrasty subjects, apart from one night time image to show how specular sources are handled. These are not in any way finished images, but they might give some insight into how the material behaves. Feel free to download them, I can't guarantee that Google Drive isn't compressing them for the web. No sharpening or downsampling has been done at any point, these are direct screenshots of the files.

Image 1 - for context, the wall is a sort of off-cream colour, the panel is a darkish green.

Image 2 - fairly mild mid-toned image, but shows some of the granularity and the way halation can affect rendering even in relatively non contrasty environment

Image 3 - mainly to show halation on light sources.

Thank you Lachlan for taking the time to doing this. Looks like a fascinating film and I've been studying your samples with interest. I don't know much about 'classic' or 'retro' black and white film and I'm wondering what warrants the 'retro' film denomination: the impression I'm getting from your samples and other well processed samples I'm seeing is that - for the lack of a better term - the film shows a 'highly non-linear' increase in grain size with negative density, much more so than current formulation film stocks. Is this something you noticed? It seems that as we move up in density gradient on the negative towards strong highlights two things happen

1. grain increases in size and separation
2. halo effects and other local dispersion give a 'dreamy/glowing' quality to the highlight proximity on the negative

If the above is true, the film might be 'retro' in the sense that it fails to 'contain' high dynamic range scenes and settles, instead, on giving up 'gracefully', by producing glowing, but pleasant, 'inexact' density on the negative, rather than linearly blocking.

That leaves the question open on what the film does with shadows and midtones. My impression is that mid greys are being expanded, so perhaps little linearity there too. Would be interesting to see how the film performs in a low dynamic range situation, let's say 2 stops max around the 18% grey, no strong highlights, no sky. Will it see ample shades of greys where there are only few? This would make it a great film for overcast/dull day detail photography.

I've shot a couple of rolls in my TLR and am looking forward to processing them. Will report back.

@albireo - you'll always see more granularity in the midtones of a film - the visible granularity follows a bell curve distribution as you go from shadows to highlights, and the characteristic curve of Retropan suggests it has little in the way of a toe or shoulder, which could be characteristic of some pre-1950's emulsions - to quote Ron Mowrey on these older emulsions, "A single emulsion could be tailored to give almost the curve desired, but with sacrifices in mid scale contrast in one way or another. Often, the result was a film with no clear shoulder or a very soft toe." Retropan's behaviour does seem consistent with this, as does its somewhat lumpy curve.