Rodinal grain

Steven Lee · Mar 7, 2023

I am a bit confused by how frequently Rodinal is described as grainy developer. I enjoy evaluating my negaties with a high-powered loupe on a light table, and the grain I see from Rodinal using HP5+ for example, is extremely fine. Individual particles do not lump together like they do with Ilfotec HC, DD-X, Xtol, ID-11, or Microphen. The only thing ID-11 and Xtol add is simply lower "nano-contrast" with a bit of solvent action, making those lumps look less contrasty. But the lumps are still bigger than Rodinal's grain! Apologies for mentioning scanning in an analog thread, but the same thing becomes apparent once you start scanning at 4000ppi+ - Rodinal grain begins to look finer than those developers.

The loupe and the scans are the only two ways that formed my opinion on Rodinal grain. Now I wonder: why am I the only person on earth who doesn't think that Rodinal is a grainy developer?

One area to explore is wet prints. I haven't printed in ages, and I only printed D76 negatives back then, so I never saw a wet print from a Rodinal negative. Those who do, how does that compare to grain produced by typical generic MQ/PQ developers? Maybe Rodinal's small but sharp grain doesn't survive wet printing somehow? Perhaps a high-MTF enlarger lens is required?

Alex Benjamin · Mar 7, 2023

I just posted this in another Rodinal thread, but I'll put it here also, as it's related to your questions. Bob Schwalberg's 1979 Rodinal article in Popular Photography.

1979 pop photo Rodinal article

1979 pop photo Rodinal article :: Film :: Home :: Darkroom

forum.mflenses.com

Pieter12 · Mar 7, 2023

I only develop with Rodinal, and I only wet-print with a condenser head. For me, Rodinal may look grainy but that is because the grain is very well-defined and sharp. I wouldn't have it any other way.

K-G · Mar 7, 2023

Alex Benjamin said:
I just posted this in another Rodinal thread, but I'll put it here also, as it's related to your questions. Bob Schwalberg's 1979 Rodinal article in Popular Photography.

1979 pop photo Rodinal article

1979 pop photo Rodinal article :: Film :: Home :: Darkroom

forum.mflenses.com

Thank you for posting the article. Rodinal is an excellent developer and can show so many different characteristics depending on dilution, developing time , agitation and temperature.

Karl-Gustaf

pentaxuser · Mar 7, 2023

When I see pics of scans of Rodinal negs/prints I can never see anything that looks like grain to me but that may be the problem with scanning i.e. you just can't trust it to reflect grain?

My other question stems from scans of Rodinal negs or what I think are scans from the equivalent of a big enlargement of a small part of the neg scan. Now that does show a greater grain than the same enlargement of say the same scene developed on other developers such as Xtol but what size of an enlargement does this represent in terms of a print?

pentaxuser

Alex Benjamin · Mar 7, 2023

K-G said:
Rodinal is an excellent developer and can show so many different characteristics depending on dilution, developing time , agitation and temperature.

Indeed. Rodinal has a sweet spot with many films but it takes more time and experimentation to find it, compared to a D-76 or XTOL.

Patrick Robert James · Mar 7, 2023

1- You are not actually seeing the grain with scans. That is a fallacy. 4000 dpi doesn't do it. In my experiments I've done over the years somewhere north of 12,000 dpi is needed before the grain is imaged.

2- Grain is more or less baked in these days. Emulsion layers are so thin that it isn't like in the past where a developer or the length of time of development made a huge difference on the old thick emulsion films. At the grain level you pretty much just get either sharp or fuzzy depending on the type of developer used. Developers with more sulfite are fuzzier. Less sulfite is sharper. I'm hugely simplifying but that is the general gist of it.

There are no real hard and fast rules really. Just what you like. If you like Rodinal then use it. I've been using it as my main developer more or less for 30 years now. I like seeing what other people do with other developers though. I've pretty much used everything at this point too. I suppose if I shot a lot of portraits I'd switch to something else.

Craig · Mar 7, 2023

pentaxuser said:
My other question stems from scans of Rodinal negs or what I think are scans from the equivalent of a big enlargement of a small part of the neg scan. Now that does show a greater grain than the same enlargement of say the same scene developed on other developers such as Xtol but what size of an enlargement does this represent in terms of a print?

Take a look at this website, he has done many comparisons of films in different developers, and you can have the two panels side by side to show the developers side by side. You can see a noticeable difference in the grain between Adonal ( Rodinal) and D76 for example. You can also see the speed loss on the curves below the enlargement.

Here is HP5: https://fotoimport.no/filmHP5

JerseyDoug · Mar 7, 2023

The grain size and its distribution are built into the particular film. No developer adds, moves or removes grain. Non-solvent developers like Rodinal clearly define the edges of the developed grain particles, making them obviously visible. People who prefer D-76 negatives call the Rodinal effect grainy. Solvent developers like D-76 (and just about all the others) partly dissolve the edges of the developed grain particles making them less obvious. People who prefer Rodinal negatives call the D-76 effect mushy.

(Admittedly, the above is somewhat simplified. There are second-order processes during development like physical development that can affect the appearance as well, but they are insignificant compared with the difference between solvent and non-solvent developers.)

My personal view is that I paid for the grain when I bought the film and I want to see it in the prints! YMMV

Craig · Mar 7, 2023

JerseyDoug said:
The grain size and its distribution are built into the particular film. No developer adds, moves or removes grain.

Take look at this side by side comparison of Tri-X. Developed in Tmax developer on the left, Adonal (Rodinal) on the right. I'd say the grain is different and highly altered by the developer.

Pieter12 · Mar 7, 2023

pentaxuser said:
When I see pics of scans of Rodinal negs/prints I can never see anything that looks like grain to me but that may be the problem with scanning i.e. you just can't trust it to reflect grain?

My other question stems from scans of Rodinal negs or what I think are scans from the equivalent of a big enlargement of a small part of the neg scan. Now that does show a greater grain than the same enlargement of say the same scene developed on other developers such as Xtol but what size of an enlargement does this represent in terms of a print?

pentaxuser

Here's a scan of an 8x10 print that was made from a cropped portion of a 2-1/4 negative. HP5+ at 200 in Rodinal 1+36. I believe you can see the grain.

reddesert · Mar 7, 2023

JerseyDoug said:
The grain size and its distribution are built into the particular film. No developer adds, moves or removes grain. Non-solvent developers like Rodinal clearly define the edges of the developed grain particles, making them obviously visible. People who prefer D-76 negatives call the Rodinal effect grainy. Solvent developers like D-76 (and just about all the others) partly dissolve the edges of the developed grain particles making them less obvious. People who prefer Rodinal negatives call the D-76 effect mushy.

(Admittedly, the above is somewhat simplified. There are second-order processes during development like physical development that can affect the appearance as well, but they are insignificant compared with the difference between solvent and non-solvent developers.)

My personal view is that I paid for the grain when I bought the film and I want to see it in the prints! YMMV

The individual halide crystals are much smaller than the visible "grains." In the developing process, a reaction is nucleated at the exposed halides and spreads, causing "grain particles" to clump together into what we see as the grains of metallic silver. I am not a film chemist, but virtually every reference book about developing describes the reaction this way. So although I think you're probably right that people are seeing differences between more-solvent and higher-acutance developers, I think describing the grain size distribution as built into the film and development as merely revealing it, is not an accurate way of visualizing what happens during the development process.

Steve@f8 · Mar 7, 2023

I’ve not yet tried it myself, but I’ve read that hot development (+30C) improves the visibility of the grain. Also underexposing and push developing is supposed to work. I guess combing the two would work wonders. but as far as I'm aware the massive development chart doesn’t have data for 30C.

BMbikerider · Mar 7, 2023

JerseyDoug said:
The grain size and its distribution are built into the particular film. No developer adds, moves or removes grain. Non-solvent developers like Rodinal clearly define the edges of the developed grain particles, making them obviously visible. People who prefer D-76 negatives call the Rodinal effect grainy. Solvent developers like D-76 (and just about all the others) partly dissolve the edges of the developed grain particles making them less obvious. People who prefer Rodinal negatives call the D-76 effect mushy.

(Admittedly, the above is somewhat simplified. There are second-order processes during development like physical development that can affect the appearance as well, but they are insignificant compared with the difference between solvent and non-solvent developers.)

My personal view is that I paid for the grain when I bought the film and I want to see it in the prints! YMMV

You are quite correct about Rodinal. Rodinal is NOT a solvent developer as rightly you mentioned. It is the exact opposite in fact Rodinal is was and always will be a high acutance developer where the edges are chemically sharpened in the development process.

How this works is that Rodinal as we know works best with a high degree of dilution where the adjacent objects are made to stand out from each other because the developer reaching the edges of a subject or even the individual grains themselves, with minimum agitation as recommended, becomes exhausted. So a fine clear line between the halide grains becomes more defined, which in turn gives the impression of sharpness. You can see this effect if you photograph the metal skeleton of power pylons against a blue sky when you are using a yellow filter at big enlargements you will be able to see a thin white line between the metal girders and the sky.

I wrote a long article for an British Photographic magazine about 35+ years ago describing the effects of Rodinal compared to the likes of D76/ID11 and illustrated the effect of the 'sharpening' between the different films using the metal pylons as an example. To partially counter that with the likes of ID11/D76 at the 1-3 dilution you will start to see the faint signs of the adjacency effect. ( but also accompanied by tonal compression)

In the original instructions for Rodinal, the agitation times were:- Constant agitation for 30 seconds then two inversions every 30 seconds until completion. If you try more agitation you will not get the adjacency effect I described with the cables and sky. It is many, many years since I used Rodinal even before Agfa stopped making it, because I now do all the film development in a JOBO rotary processor. Using that with the constant agitation, the adjacency effect cannot take place which will kill the intended sharpening stone dead.

The recommendation is still that the films developed in Rodinal should be slow and medium speed otherwise the grain will become obvious. When it was available I used to use a lot of Kodak Plus x which was rated at 160ISO (in those days it was ASA) but for a really good effect Pan F was King! Since the mid 1990's film technology has drastically improved so you would probably get away with using a 400iso film now

I did once develop a cassette of Kodak High Speed IR film in Rodinal at 1-25 dilution and you have never ever seen grain like it!

aparat · Mar 7, 2023

It's all a matter of taste, to me. I happen to like the look of film processed in Rodinal. I think a lot of different variables are involved in the apparent graininess of film, not the least of which is the scanner type, digital processing, etc. In the examples below, I do not find graininess to be objectionable or even excessive.

Ilford Delta 100 in Rollei R09 One Shot 1+25, processed in Jobo:

delta100_Rodinal100Scan by Nick Mazur, on Flickr

KODAK 400TX in Rollei R09 One Shot 1+25, processed in Jobo (16 min., i.e., overdeveloped):

Kodak_400TX_Rodinal_1+25_16_min by Nick Mazur, on Flickr

aparat · Mar 7, 2023

For those of you interested in how development time affects perceived graininess, here are two more 3600 dpi scans.

KODAK 400TX in Rollei R09 One Shot 1+25, processed in Jobo (8 min.):

Kodak_400TX_Rodinal_1+25_8_min by Nick Mazur, on Flickr

KODAK 400TX in Rollei R09 One Shot 1+25, processed in Jobo (4 min.):

Kodak_400TX_Rodinal_1+25_4_min by Nick Mazur, on Flickr

snusmumriken · Mar 7, 2023

aparat said:
For those of you interested in how development time affects perceived graininess, here are two more 3600 dpi scans.

KODAK 400TX in Rollei R09 One Shot 1+25, processed in Jobo (8 min.):

Kodak_400TX_Rodinal_1+25_8_min by Nick Mazur, on Flickr

KODAK 400TX in Rollei R09 One Shot 1+25, processed in Jobo (4 min.):

Kodak_400TX_Rodinal_1+25_4_min by Nick Mazur, on Flickr

In all likelihood I am being dumb and shall regret this question, but why is the negative with the shorter development apparently denser than the other?

aparat · Mar 7, 2023

snusmumriken said:
In all likelihood I am being dumb and shall regret this question, but why is the negative with the shorter development apparently denser than the other?

No, it's a very good question. It's simply a scanner and scanner software issue (VueScan). Even with all the settings at their default values, with sharpening off, Vuescan tries to make the best "Auto Levels" scan. This is probably a topic for a different thread. I'd hate to start a digital vs analog workflow conversation here.

To look at relative densities, a curve family is much more reliable than scans. Included are the 16, 8, and 4 minute curves that I scanned and posted above:

400TX_Rodinal25 by Nick Mazur, on Flickr

otto.f · Mar 8, 2023

It’s quite important whether we are talking about 35mm, 120, or LF here. I have hardly seen any post here specifying this. I have no problems with Rodinal on larger formats but since I don‘t like it at 35mm I rather prefer one developer for all my formats.

Steven Lee · Mar 8, 2023

Pieter12 said:
Here's a scan of an 8x10 print that was made from a cropped portion of a 2-1/4 negative.

Thank you for trying to answer my question! Sorry but I'm having trouble interpreting the quoted part. I do not know what 2-1/4 negative means and what portion of it was cropped. Let me ask this: how big is the negative area (in mm) the uploaded image maps to? Thanks.

snusmumriken · Mar 8, 2023

aparat said:
No, it's a very good question. It's simply a scanner and scanner software issue (VueScan).

Thanks. I thought it possible that the images might have gotten switched, so was just checking!

Ian Grant · Mar 8, 2023

Rodinal is capable of achieving remarkably fine grain, but it's far better with Tmax and similar films than older style emulsions. It was Agfa's recommended developer for AP25 & AP100, and later APX25 & APX100.

Modern Rodinal, by that I mean post the Agfa Gevaert 1963 merger, contains free Hydroxide and this can lead to slight emulsion softening, and temperature deviations can lead to incipient/micro reticulation, also called surface artefacts by Kodak, this markedly increases apparent graininess.

I used Rodinal for nearly 20 years with Tmax 100 & 400, and Agfa APX100 always with excellent results, that was 35mm through to 5x4.

Ian

Hassasin · Mar 8, 2023

I agree Rodinal works great with T-max, but have no complaints on any modern film. I use it exclusively, partly due to convenience, shelf longevity, and easy way to mess around with when mood right to move away from standard. Being a one-shot also makes me not guess what I have in the mixed formula, so if results did not match expectations, something else went wrong.

I never use it in stand development, probably because I have no patience for that.

Alan Johnson · Mar 8, 2023

Here is a comparison of Rodinal grain with Pyrocat, Neofin and Xtol:

Scans retain developer properties

Here I scanned some chart lines (the full 35mm frame is about 50x the width of the chart) made from Ilford Delta 100 developed in acutance developers Rodinal 1:50 and Neofin Blue, solvent developer Xtol, and pyro developer Pyrocat HD.Scans were made with a Plustek 8100 set at 7200dpi which...

www.photrio.com

aparat · Mar 8, 2023

I thought you might be interested in comparing Rodinal graininess to that of other developers. Here's 400TX in HC-110 (current variant). To my eye, the grain appearance is similar to that of Rodinal. Essentially, my experience with Rodinal's apparent graininess mirrors that of @Ian Grant , at least with modern/current films. I have dozens and dozens of negatives processed in various developers under controlled conditions, and, for the most part, with my scanner, my grain focusing tool, and my (aging) eyes, I see little difference. Yes, the differences are there, but, in my opinion, they are less pronounced than some people think. Again, this is just my opinion based on my own data. YMMV.

Kodak_400TX_HC110_1+100_20_min by Nick Mazur, on Flickr

What is more interesting and has more bearing on my work (e.g., in wet printing) is the fact that Rodinal tends to build contrast in the highlights really quickly, and if one is not careful with temperature and agitation, that contrast can run away from you. Moreover, I have found little evidence of the so-called compensating effect that some people believe Rodinal gives. If we understand the compensating effect as tonal compression in the highlights, as follows (Schaeffer, 1998, p. 90):

compensatingDevelopmentCurves by Nick Mazur, on Flickr

then, in my own testing, I commonly see the opposite effect with Rodinal, i.e., tonal expansion in the highlights. This can be seen as a good thing, because it produces high-contrast, "punchy" looking negatives and scans, but it can also be problematic. It's all a matter of taste, after all. Here's an example of that effect:

delta100_Rodinal100DensityRange by Nick Mazur, on Flickr

Rodinal grain

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