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Rodinal and HP5 plus: whats a good mix?

I shoot HP5+ at 250-320 and develop in Rodinal 1+50 at 18 degree Celsius (!) for 12 minutes. 8 (rather gentle) inversions after pouring in and 2 slow, gentle inversions every full minute. 3, if the lighting was really flat.

Beautiful tonality, shadows, midtones, highlights not blown out (finally, took me a while to get there, hence the dev process rather on the edge of underdeveloping). Prints nicely on G3 (Ilford PE & RC). No visible grain on 8x10" prints from MF. Loving it.
 
Generally, a Rodinal/HP5+ thread will be a mix of "love it" and "you must be some kind of idiot!"

I like it myself - tried DD-X, but Rodinal has a bit of mojo or something. But if you're just developing Rodinal at 1+50, you're missing out on one of its strengths - the way it affects the tonal curve via dilution. I generally like it at 1+25 - particularly for how it renders facial details, but you lower mids will suffer so take that into account when exposing.

I've tested cooler temps for grain control (no difference in my tests) - higher dilutions definitely give more grain, it's subtle but visible. But if you don't want grain there are much better films that HP5 out there.
 

I do love skin tones indeed going 1+25, although I find this dilution more suited to FP4+.

Re temperature, I found quite some improvements - grain-wise - going from 20 to 18 deg, however hardly any (none) when going below that. So 16=18 deg as far as grain and tonality is concerned, but dev times become too long for my taste.

Anyway, I do use HP5+ as my main film for years now, tried a number of devs from D-76, XTOL, FX-39 and finally Rodinal. It took me quite some time to make find a suitable tonality (for my taste), and how long it actually took me to get highlights and grain under control. But once I got there I knew I was here to stay for a long time..
 


I quite like it with HP5. Usually 1+25, sometimes 1+50. But it is indeed a matter of personal tastes.
 
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