Getting a fine grain

[Ronald Moravec]

Grain is basically built into the film. You can screw around with different developers with very little to show for it. So called fine grain developers have high solvent action that kills fine detail.

So quit fooling around. Options are bigger negative or slower film. Bigger neg is best.

TMax 100 is the finest cleanest easily available film. It works well with my scratch mix D76. The more you dilute the developer, the rougher the grain. If you use stock developer, and then use a stop bath, it works more like 1:1 dilution grain wise. SKIP STOP OR WATER RINSE AND GO STRAIGHT INTO FIX. The only downside is you kill the fix faster. Big deal. I never reuse it on important film anyway. I do use an alkaline fix so water or ss is of little value. In fact alkaline developer, acid fix, and alkaline fix seems silly to me.

The biggest surprise is you will get is over expose one stop and cut development 20%. Shortened time in developer seems to have a much bigger effect than changing developers. To compensate for short times, you need more exposure. The reverse, called pushing, does not work nearly as well if at all. You also get a beautiful tone range with lots of shadow detail and the prints are still sharp. I have tri x prints 6.75 x 10 where you have to look really hard to see the grain.

 

[nworth]

Grain is a characteristic of the film and is not affected, in itself, by the developer. But the developer can affect the appearance of the grain, as noted above. Most films available today have at least reasonably fine grain. Some, like EFKE 25, have extremely fine grain. You usually will not be bothered by the grain with these films regardless of the developer. But the developer does affect the appearance of the grain. A developer like Rodinal and various "acutance" developers emphasizes apparent sharpness and may emphasize whatever grain there is. But with a very fine grain film, the sharpness is what you notice, not the grain. Fine grain developers etch away the edges of the grain and make it less apparent. But they may degrade sharpness just a bit as well. Developers like D-76 and Xtol are compromises that have fine grain characteristics but still produce good sharpness. Also, as noted above, there is no substitute for square inches when it comes to either fine grain or sharpness. A big negative is the easiest way to get both.