Grain on HP5+

[snusmumriken]

This is HP5 in T-max developer, printed with a Componon-S on 11x14 Ilford MGFB. I think it is pretty grainy. View attachment 346704

For the OP's benefit, I'd say that this very grainy for HP5+ too. It is quite a contrasty print, which will have exaggerated the grain; but I also wonder if T-Max developer is the best choice for this film (unless you like grain)?

On my own 12x16 prints from HP5+ (also on MGFB) I have to study the photograph stupidly close to see the grain at all. I've just looked at several prints to confirm this. I use a metol-only two-bath developer, and am generally printing at G2 ± 1.

 

[Roger Cole]

Scan of darkroom print. 35mm HP5+ rated at 160, Rodinal, cropped square.

View attachment 346707

This cropped print scan looks less grainy (considerably, to me) than the previous two presumably full frame scans. Both of the earlier ones look somewhat over developed to me, but that can be a result of more contrast in the scan. If they are, though, that will increase grain.

The apparent "grain" being the result of over-sharpening in the can makes sense.

 

[pentaxuser]

You have heard of degrees, correct? More reticulated, less reticulated. The example at the top of the page looks less reticulated than what you showed - but still looks reticulated.

But who cares?

The OP for one However I agree that we need to know what the temperature variation was in the process I was always under the impression that with modern emulsions such as HP5+ it has to be fairly large to be that noticeable but I am unsure of what the scan represents in terms of an darkroom print nor the answer to the $64,000 question which is: How much is the scanner responsible?

I just noticed a scan of a darkroom print of an HP5+ negative processed in D76 by Awty in the Gallery and that looks considerably less grainy

pentaxuser

 

[ic-racer]

This is HP5 in T-max developer, printed with a Componon-S on 11x14 Ilford MGFB. I think it is pretty grainy. View attachment 346704

I want to clarify my response to my image above:

"I think it is pretty grainy... compared to 35mm HP5 I have been using since 1984 and exclusively since 2017. I don't recall HP5 was that grainy."

Same process all these years... Jobo & Tmax Dev 24C, Componon-S lenses, Diffusion enlargers, Ilford MGFB paper , etc.

I just processed 25 rolls of HP5 35mm in the last two days. I'll see how they print.

 

[runswithsizzers]

I'm not sure if this kind of grain is normal.

I have processed two rolls of Ilford HP5+ in LegacyPro EcoPro chemistry which should produce results very similar to Adox XT-3. Compared to my results, your example has more pronounced grain. I have examples of my results posted <here> and <here>. Keep in mind, that my posted examples have been adjusted some in Lightroom.

I agree with the others who believe the grain characteristics you are seeing are probably due more to digital post-processing than anything else. I use a digital camera to "scan" my negatives, and then I post-process the RAW files in Lightroom. So I have control over how much sharpening gets applied. Which is, not much! I almost never add any additional sharpeneing over the modest amount Lightroom applies by default to all RAW files. Before I started using a digital camera to copy my negatives, I used an old Minolta film scanner, and the files from the film scanner did often exhibit the kind of exaggerated grain I see in your example.

 

[Lumipan]

Thanks everyone,

@runswithsizzers, I see your greys (shadows) look very nice, great images. I'm wondering is there something in the developing process one might do to get a similar result?

I think the scanner is somewhat responsible for the grain , but next time I still might try to agitate a bit less as suggested. That should result in less grain? Or is there something more I could do for less grain.
I think grain can look nice, but would like to learn how to reduce the amount anyway.

 

[awty]

The difference between a low res neg scan HP5 (using D76 1:1 in a rotary processor @12 minutes 20C) and a low res print scan.
Yours looks slightly over processed.
Neg Scan

Print scan

 

[runswithsizzers]

Thanks everyone,

@runswithsizzers, I see your greys (shadows) look very nice, great images. I'm wondering is there something in the developing process one might do to get a similar result?

I think the scanner is somewhat responsible for the grain , but next time I still might try to agitate a bit less as suggested. That should result in less grain? Or is there something more I could do for less grain.
I think grain can look nice, but would like to learn how to reduce the amount anyway.

Thank you. As far as my developing process goes, I don't do anything special. I just try to follow standard operating procedures as best as I can understand them. You may have noticed, I listed some specific details about how each roll was processed at the top of each album page.

 

[albireo]

I used an old Minolta film scanner, and the files from the film scanner did often exhibit the kind of exaggerated grain I see in your example.

I use an old Minolta 35mm film scanner (amongst other dedicated film scanners) and the grain is extremely fine in all of my scans, comparable to the beautiful grain rendition one gets out of a well focused darkroom print.

This unless I've underexposed or overdeveloped my negatives, or both - which, when scanning, results in what is often perceived as "exaggerated grain".

Hint: scanning is extremely sensitive to errors in exposure and processing.

In general, your Minolta was able to produce much better looking grain from your negatives than you give it credit for, but you should have learnt to use it to output raw linear positives (easily done with, for instance, Vuescan) rather than software edited images.

 

[runswithsizzers]

I use an old Minolta 35mm film scanner (amongst other dedicated film scanners) and the grain is extremely fine in all of my scans, comparable to the beautiful grain rendition one gets out of a well focused darkroom print.

This unless I've underexposed or overdeveloped my negatives, or both - which, when scanning, results in what is often perceived as "exaggerated grain".

Hint: scanning is extremely sensitive to errors in exposure and processing.

In general, your Minolta was able to produce much better looking grain from your negatives than you give it credit for, but you should have learnt to use it to output raw linear positives (easily done with, for instance, Vuescan) rather than software edited images.

Yes, all true. I should have been more clear. The exaggerated grain-like effect I saw when scanning with my Minolta film scanner was not an inherent, hardware determined problem, but rather an unfortunate result of some combination of suboptimal negatives and scanner settings. In my case, I was using Vuescan, which for me, was confusing to learn and slow to use. I did eventually get good results from the film scanner, but only after I quit trying to get finished results out of the scanner via Vuescan, and switched to Photoshop/Lightroom for post processing.

What I meant to say was, Film scanners can produce results similar to the OP's example if the scanner software is not setup properly. And for me, the artifacts produced by suboptimal scanning are easier to avoid when camera scanning. Sorry if I implied otherwise.

BTW, my Minolta film scanner was the Dimage Scan Elite F-2900 purchased as old stock in 2002. It was not a bad scanner, but perhaps lacking the greatness of some of Minolta's other models(?)

 

[radiant]

Most of film scanners cannot resolve the grain. They emphasize the film grain with digital noise.

So if you scan your negative and see it as "grainy" it is in reality most digital noise and artefacts. Probably your negative is underexposed and/or underdeveloped and scanner is just trying to increase gain to get information out - and while increasing the gain it also increases noise.

 

[albireo]

Most of film scanners cannot resolve the grain. They emphasize the film grain with digital noise.

Evidence? Please show us the peer reviewed papers describing this effect.

The usual 3-4 'articles' permanently cited in support of this theory won't do I'm afraid.

 

[koraks]

Evidence? Please show us the peer reviewed papers describing this effect.

The usual 3-4 'articles' permanently cited in support of this theory won't do I'm afraid.

We'll mark the response to your post for a double-blind peer review. Please hold as we assemble a team of reviewers and hone our acceptance criteria.

 

[albireo]

We'll mark the response to your post for a double-blind peer review. Please hold as we assemble a team of reviewers and hone our acceptance criteria.

Just curious, should the moderator of a forum that prides itself with being driven by empirical evidence mock a request for methodological rigour?

 

[koraks]

Well, a theoretical framework would not make empirical evidence. So there's that. And asking for theoretical foundations is also not quite (at all) the same as methodological rigor.

I also believe that this is a forum. As such, academic rigor is not the first thing that comes to mind in assessing each other's posts.

Having said that, by all means have at it and try to split this particular hair. I'm not sure how productive it is, but as an academic exercise, it might work. However, I doubt it will unless there's a very constructive attitude on both sides of the debate.

Finally, my response was made as a regular user. I would have made it explicit if I had intervened as a moderator.

 

[albireo]

I also believe that this is a forum. As such, academic rigor is not the first thing that comes to mind in assessing each other's posts.

I'm not sure I agree that the above is being applied equally to all content discussed on these boards. There is excellent solid foundational knowledge, offered and demanded, for some of the topics of interests here.

It's just that we're debating scanning in this particular thread, and for some reason, when it comes to the big dark scanning babadook, all attempts at rigour crumble down (not only on here to be fair, on many film photography forums). Odd.

 

[Pieter12]

Makes me glad I don't scan negatives.

 

[koraks]

It's just that we're debating scanning here, and for some reason, when it comes to the big dark scanning babadook, all attempts at rigour crumble down (not only on here to be fair, on many film photography forums). Odd.

I don't think it's specific to scanning, really. I wouldn't make too much of it.

 

[albireo]

@Lumipan You are looking at a ridiculously over-sharpened scan. Even asking "is this grain normal" is beside the point because you can't evaluate grain with this file, you're looking at a digitally introduced defect. A major one, I would add. Here's a full-sized scan of HP5+ developed in Xtol which is a similar developer. No sharpening has been applied, which should give you a better idea for what to expect.

I had missed this. Gorgeous work @Steven Lee. Hats off to you.

And I agree with your assessment on what's wrong with the original file.

 

[Alex Benjamin]

big dark scanning babadook

The word "babadook" has just now entered my vocabulary.

 

[Steven Lee]

@albireo thank you for the kind words.

 

[eli griggs]

Just curious, should the moderator of a forum that prides itself with being driven by empirical evidence mock a request for methodological rigour?

Yes

 

[Don_ih]

when it comes to the big dark scanning babadook, all attempts at rigour crumble down

Rigour is difficult to attain in something as variegated as scanning. Typically, someone shows a scan and not a picture of a negative. That scan could have been done with a camera or flatbed or drum scanner. That scan could have been done by a lab or the person posting. The person posting may or may not have the negative. The person posting may or may not have applied some automated "fixing" to the scan and may or may not know it. Or perhaps the lab did and the the person posting doesn't know. The scan resolution may or may not be high enough but we can't tell because the image has to meet the requirements of the forum (the image may have been mushed when converted). All of these scans are generally jpg files that are encoded at unknown quality.

So someone posts and there is immediately a flood of people asking or assuming some or all of these things. And without knowing any of them, some people assume the person posting is doing things as they would do them (for example, I assumed he scanned it on a flatbed, I assumed he applied no sharpening).

Now, you can create a form with a bunch of checkboxes that must be filled out whenever anyone asks a question about something, but you will often find the person posting doesn't know a lot of the answers. Also, it kind of ruins the casual nature of the forum and would make people uncomfortable seeking help.

 

[radiant]

We'll mark the response to your post for a double-blind peer review. Please hold as we assemble a team of reviewers and hone our acceptance criteria.

But we cannot assemble the team. It would bias the result and completely void the research, writing and publishing the papers! Oh the horror!

 

[Henning Serger]

I think the scanner is somewhat responsible for the grain , but next time I still might try to agitate a bit less as suggested. That should result in less grain? Or is there something more I could do for less grain.
I think grain can look nice, but would like to learn how to reduce the amount anyway.

Scanners, especially cheap(er) amateur scanners, are indeed increasing the impression of a coarser grain. Real drum scanners e.g. don't have that problem in direct comparison.

But for a general evaluation you also have be aware of your benchmarks: "Fineness of grain" is also a quite subjective thing (for one person a certain level of grain might be fine, but a different person says it is coarse grain).
I have tested over the years about 95% of all films in market in my photo research lab. And when you evaluate grain with 50x and 100X enlargement factors, you really see all differences.

And HP5+ does not belong to the fine(r) grained ISO 400/27° BW films. The ranking in "fineness of grain" is the following:
1. Kodak TMY-2.
2. Ilford XP2 400.
3. Ilford Delta 400.
4. Kodak Tri-X.
5. Ilford HP5+.
And the other films of that class follow behind with coarser grain.

So it is just important to have realistic expectations as well.

Best regards,
Henning