FP4+ What am I missing?

Vaughn · May 11, 2024

Years ago it was suggested by a respected reinventor of the wheel, photo-historywise (Terry King), that for platinum printing the combination of FP4+ and Ilford PQ Universal Developer was excellent for expanding to the DR that platinum printing likes and that it treats the mid-tones very nicely. That is not a quote and I do not know what it technically means or even if it is actually true, but I found the combo to provide wonderful negatives for both pt/pd and carbon printing...or at least for the way I work those processes. I like the results, and I bounce back and forth between it and PyrocatHD.

Mark J · May 11, 2024

Ryeman said:
And a pity they didn't show Perceptol. 35mm Fp4 looks absolutely wonderful in Perceptol 1+3. Sharp, crisp, lovely bright mid-tones. Peaches and cream!

I would have shared your enthusiasm for this combination ( popularised by Barry Thornton at the time) in the mid-90's, but in 1998 I tried PMK with FP4+ in a direct comparison to Perceptol 1+2 , on 6x9, and it wasn't a close contest. I rarely used anything but PMK after that. The actuance was higher, and the upper mid-tones and highlights were in a different league.

Keith Tapscott. · May 11, 2024

DREW WILEY said:
But some of the best I've even seen came from the 19th Century!

Yes, I have always admired the photos by Frank Meadow-Suttcliffe taken in the 19th century.

dokko · May 11, 2024

DREW WILEY said:
The interaction of film grain etc with actual printing paper is what it is - you can't always accurately predict it either by a scan or even by looking at grain structure under a microscope, unless, perhaps, you're an expert at that kind of thing. It isn't that simple. And halftone processes are something entirely different. Way too many generic presumptions on this thread.

those are not "generic presumptions".
I actually have scanned films at 40'000ppi, and I can assure you that this resolves grain and image detail much more accurately than any optical enlargement ever could.

of course some people will argue to no ends that optical enlargements have higher resolutions than scans, and this was true with the old scanners from 20 years ago, but it shouldn't be too surprising that with todays technology the situation has changed.

if somebody want to run an independent comparison themselves, feel welcome to send a negative and a piece of an 130x optically enlarged print my way

personally I love optical prints precisely for the slight organic softness that they have, which will actually improve "tonality" in some cases because of the very reasons Henning mentioned above. buy saying they show a more truthful representation of the grain structure than what we can see under a microscope seems just strange to me.

Ryeman · May 11, 2024

Mark J said:
I would have shared your enthusiasm for this combination ( popularised by Barry Thornton at the time) in the mid-90's, but in 1998 I tried PMK with FP4+ in a direct comparison to Perceptol 1+2 , on 6x9, and it wasn't a close contest. I rarely used anything but PMK after that. The actuance was higher, and the upper mid-tones and highlights were in a different league.

This doesn't fit in with my experience. I have tried PMK, Pyrocat HD and other pyro developers with 35mm Fp4 and they all gave results that were no different to dilute Perceptol. All excellent, sharp. with superb upper mid-tones. I settled on Perceptol because it is the easiest to obtain.

Mark J · May 11, 2024

I'm glad you're getting what you need.
I saw the test negs & contact sheets yesterday - maybe I will do some selective enlargements soon to remind myself what I saw.

DREW WILEY · May 11, 2024

That's not it dokko - how your eye might perceive grain, even under an optical microscope, how scanners variously do,
and how layers of printing paper emulsion react, are all potentially different. What is your final objective? - if it's a phD thesis on hypotheticals, fine, do it your way. I already know what a gigantic enlargement of a 35 mm image looks like;
it's called a freeway billboard designed for a "normal viewing distance" of a third mile away at 70 mph. No need to convert that into meters and kilometers per hour. It's going to look like mush regardless, grain and all, and nobody cares. But I seldom enlarge anything more than 8X, and I do care.

Besides, if one has precision enlarging equipment, and the will to do so, they can easily achieve optical printing detail finer than the resolution the human eye can detect, even close up. I began by making large Cibachrome images; and that's a medium just like film itself, capable of holding extreme detail. Then I graduated up to even better enlarging lenses, full 8x10 sheet film, along with the advent of even more precise films. The name of the game is neither detail for detail's sake, or big for sake of big, but about all kinds of things factoring into a successful composition which can be appreciated at many levels, including nose-up wearing reading glasses if desired. There's nothing "organically soft" about that. If I want a softer look, there are all kinds of ways to achieve that; but it's not by default.

Over thirty years ago I saw samples of classified photos taken with exceptional cameras and films which would blow people's minds even today in terms of technical resolution. They had their reasons and an equivalent extreme budget. But I could care less if you can scan film at a million DPI. Dots of what ?? Even inkjet machine nozzles tend to clog. What's the point? Seeing a single film grain a meter wide might be interesting in its own right. I had a college background in microscopy. But that has darn little in common with the esthetics of personal printmaking.

cliveh · May 11, 2024

Would painters spend this much conversation on the chemical construction of their paint and mixture of additives? Or would they be more concerned about the visual effect after application to the canvass?

DREW WILEY · May 11, 2024

Ryeman - I use dilute 1:3 Perceptol for precisely one reason - to increase grain growth just enough in TMax100 to give it better edge acutance, yet without annoying grain increase. The effect is quite different from 1:1 Perceptol. For most other films I prefer PMK pyro. I once used 1:1 Perceptol for FP4, but found out I got much better highlight control using staining pyro formulas. That made a very significant difference back in the day of mainly graded papers, not quite so much with today's excellent VC papers, but still a potential factor.

Cliveh - Serious painters can be even more fanatical, sometimes for seemingly sillier reasons. Manet once got into a sword duel with another painter over such a question. Fortunately, they were both too drunken to inflict serious harm. But exacting additive formulations can make a giant difference in terms of the long-term integrity of the layering of paint. That was true even of oil based house paints. If sequential layers don't expand and contract at the same rate over time, then they will either blister, peel, or crack. You can't just layer up things any way you please.

Mark J · May 11, 2024

I think the two are inextricably linked, aren't they Clive ?
Wasn't lapis lazuli a key development as a pigment in painting?
It must be considered that a lot of development in painting took place before chemistry became a proper technical subject.

dokko · May 11, 2024

DREW WILEY said:
But it has darn little in common with the esthetics of printmaking.

well, the question for me would be "what kind of print making"?

if all you ever want to do is make traditional optical 30x40" b/w prints of an 8x10" negative, then I completely agree grain size is not really a factor, nor does scanning make any sense.

I've scanned 35mm negatives for people who made 240cm wide prints from digital files (because they wanted to do major retouching), and of 8x10" slides that were printed 15meter wide at 300ppi for an art project.

in cases like this grain structure starts to have a huge impact on tonality (as does the integrity of the scan).

but even on smaller scales, there are reasons why people use a certain technique or workflow that are not always obvious to outsiders.

MattKing · May 11, 2024

cliveh said:
Would painters spend this much conversation on the chemical construction of their paint and mixture of additives? Or would they be more concerned about the visual effect after application to the canvass?

Yes and no.
They probably spend more time talking about the quality of the house wine/landlord's lager, and which happy hour appetizer is the best deal.
Just like photographers.

DREW WILEY · May 11, 2024

Mark, there were many grades of Lapis lazuli. The best of it is a much purer blue than any synthetic blue pigment, and more permanent than even Pthalo blue, but also somewhat toxic and extremely expensive, more than gold per ounce today. Very few places in the world carry it. Likewise with the finest greens and reds. There's a reason why even Pope Leo had to borrow a lot of money and also loot Germany to finance his artistic taste. Once the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was cleaned, the vibrancy of all those costly toxic pigments is still intact after all that time.

A great deal can be learned just through centuries of accumulated practical knowledge. Everything nowadays seems way too reliant on the latest Tech innovations. And in terms of tonality control, I've looked at original Margaret Cameron platinum prints she made in the chicken coop that put to shame most prints being made today. Yeah, even her rich husband complained about how much money she spent on the ingredients; but otherwise, it was about as low-tech as photography gets.

Don_ih · May 11, 2024

The original question (but not the original question of this thread) that people seem concerned with here is "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"

DREW WILEY · May 11, 2024

Duns Scotus, the basis of our term, "dunce" - not because he was stupid, but because he had a tremendous amount of knowledge for that time, much of which was irrelevant and useless. A computer chip maker might have a valid reason to make more angels dance on the head of a pin, but I sure don't.

DREW WILEY · May 11, 2024

dokko - I'm plenty aware of big scale art projects. Many aspiring fresco muralists would recognize that just from my family name. But I differentiate those kind of projects from photography per se. The same could be said for old camera lucida projections. Call that a hybrid art form, if you wish. I can admire Photorealist paintings, for example, while clearly distinguishing those from the characteristics of actual photographs. Where all these current digitally-altered mega-prints fit in, I don't even care to classify. Not my cup of tea.

dokko · May 11, 2024

Don_ih said:
The original question (but not the original question of this thread) that people seem concerned with here is "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"

the original question was what people use FP4 for with the reasoning that it has barely finer grain than HP5.

the response from several people was that it has finer grain than HP5, to which some people argued that that this doesn't matter if you shoot large format, to which other people replied first it does even for moderate enlargements because the smaller grain can also affect the gray scale rendering, and it makes a serious difference on large prints, to which some people argue, printing big is not really print making.

nuff said.

Don_ih · May 11, 2024

dokko said:
the original question

I was making an allusion to a very famous ridiculous argument in the history of theology, which predates this thread by a few hundred years. I said it's not the original question of this thread.

Carry on.

DREW WILEY · May 11, 2024

C'mom, dokko ... please don't twist people's words. And Don's analogy makes perfect sense. A lot of fuss expended on a somewhat real, but relatively minor, aspect of the whole question.

Augustus Caesar · May 11, 2024

dokko said:
the original question was what people use FP4 for with the reasoning that it has barely finer grain than HP5.

the response from several people was that it has finer grain than HP5, to which some people argued that that this doesn't matter if you shoot large format, to which other people replied first it does even for moderate enlargements because the smaller grain can also affect the gray scale rendering, and it makes a serious difference on large prints, to which some people argue, printing big is not really print making.

nuff said.

I agree. There is some difference in granularity and sharpness between FP4 and HP5, but it is not huge. If the goal is to make 7X enlargements, the difference will be hardly noticeable. I have made15X enlargements from 35mm Tri-X in which the grain is hardly noticeable.

The general rule is to use the slowest material that will allow you to get sharp photos. There is no rule against increasing illumination levels, I might add.

As far as gain and tonality is concerned, finer grain does provide better tonality, but only to a point. Lith films and copy films have extremely fine grain, but poor tonality (i.e., hard to get mid-tones).

DREW WILEY · May 12, 2024

Sounds like studio talk. How do you increase illumination on a mountain on the opposite side of a 6,000 ft deep canyon? Either the sun and weather do it for you, or it simply isn't going to happen.

I can easily see grain on even a 5X enlargement from 35mm Tri-X. Whether that bothers someone or not is an independent question.

And grain is blatantly detectable with a 7X enlargement of HP5. Again, that might or might not really matter, depending on the subject and how its viewed.

Don_ih · May 12, 2024

DREW WILEY said:
How do you increase illumination on a mountain on the opposite side of a 6,000 ft deep canyon?

Detonate a nuclear bomb in there.

DREW WILEY · May 12, 2024

In the canyon upriver from my old place, which is over 8,000 ft deep, the equivalent energy of over 22 thermonuclear hydrogen bombs was released in what is now known as the Creek Fire, several years ago. It created the highest non-volcanic thermal cloud ever recorded - over 70,000 feet high, and sent high-altitude ash not only clear across the US, but as far as London. That was once basically my back yard. So my remarks about the futility of flash fill in many cases certainly apply to my own experience - I've taken hundreds of backpacking trips with 4x5 cameras in that wilderness.

pentaxuser · May 13, 2024

Well dokko did give a pretty good summation of the original question, IMO

pentaxuser

Milpool · May 13, 2024

This is still going? We’ve already had the photography is about pictures not materials mic drop.

FP4+ What am I missing?

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