How would 8x10 tri-x negs look with rodinal?

[Sean]

Just curious how they would look and also how well they would contact print on azo. Would there be grain from deving in rodinal that would defeat the purpose of using 8x10? thanks!

 

[Donald Miller]

Just curious how they would look and also how well they would contact print on azo. Would there be grain from deving in rodinal that would defeat the purpose of using 8x10? thanks!

More of a consideration then the grain is whether TriX can build the density range that Azo will tolerate without blocking highlights densities. In my experience, ABC Pyro with TriX is very unforgiving in this regard. This becomes problematic if TriX is not rated properly and if one wants to expand contrast as in N+ situations. As Jeff mentioned, this should be interesting.

 

[photomc]

Sean,

I have not used this combo, Rodinal + Xtol, but Unblinking Eye has a discussion of it at:
http://unblinkingeye.com/Articles/Rodinal/rodinal.html

I have been thinking about trying it, even have the Xtol and Rodinal. Whatever you do, please share with us the results.

 

[garryl]

You might want to ask this guy, as he seems to have tried it ~~

http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=008114

 

[David A. Goldfarb]

Give it a try and run some tests. I wouldn't worry about grain for contact printing. One of the real attractions of contact printing is that you can forget about grain and think about tonality, micro contrast, and edge sharpness. ABC pyro is a terribly grainy developer, but it's a great choice for Azo and other contact print methods, because it produces a crisp neg with a long scale. ABC would be a lousy choice for smaller negs. I think that the main reason that pyro disappeared as a commercially available option for so many years was from the overall decrease in format size.

As a general rule, I find that my N+1 development time for negs targeted for enlargement is about my N time for negs targeted for Azo, so you might try your N+1 development time for small format negs in Rodinal as your starting point for Tri-X 8x10" for Azo, or if you haven't figured out an N+1 time, just increase your development time by about 20% over normal for Azo and adjust from there.

 

[Sean]

Thanks for the links and info everyone. I thought I would try Rodinal for dev and as an azo paper dev. Not that I anticipate this will work but it's easy to get Rodinal around here, it's liquid, seems like a flexible formula and I've heard of people producing very nice prints on azo using Rodinal (have also heard of it being crap with azo, but will have to experiment and see what happens). I'll document everything I do incase anyone else is interested. May be a few months before I'm ready though..