No book is complete for that matter. You have to read original research reports written by scientists, patents written by product engineers and project managers, and analysis of products they actually make and sell. Patents are the lowest quality information source of these alone, but when combined with other sources, you'll get much clearer picture of what is being done in practice. Patents often list zillions of potentially useful compounds, millions of useful compounds, thousands of preferred compounds, hundreds of particularly preferred compounds, and they never tell you what they use, but if you use process of elimination from environmental regulations, occupational regulations, costs, synthesis methods of compounds in question, solubility, stability, etc., the obvious choices are limited and once the number gets cut down to dozen you can do tests and find out. Also, if you read LOTS of patents you'll get a vague picture of how their plants are set up, etc. and those fill in the very information that is kept blurry in the patents.
Anyway, after 1990s, more is written abotu photographic chemistry in Japanese language than any other language, and journal of the society of photographic science and technology of japan STILL publishes research reports and review articles on silver imaging system. They are written by real scientists and engineers at Fuji and Konica specializing in the very topic, not low-level plant engineers and technicians, and they are rich of insights. Of course they don't give away commercially relevant information but that is not an issue. They are scientists and they are proud of showing their achievements to the public. The president of that society is Tani, one of the most famous scientists in photographic sensitivity (a branch of emulsion chemistry), who is also one of the high ranks of Fuji labs. Are they going to discourage publication of scientifically significant knowledge because those ex-scientists are retiring and starting second life as university professors? At least as I read from the pages of the journal, the trend is opposite. (And if a half of high ranks of the corporation is ex-scientists and ex-engineers who dedicated their life to silver halide photography, are they going to wipe out the products they worked on, so easily and completely, when the other half of business experts say to get rid of them?)
In later half of the past century, those scientists gained access to equipment to analyze structure and other details of a single crystal in films and papers. Reverse engineering processing chemistry is also not that difficult. Trade secret approach is of not much use in this modern technological industry. Those Fuji researchers are publishing details of their achievements, including what methods they used to make emulsions, what they got, etc. with details of grain structures, performance analysis etc. Of course they always compared what they got against what Kodak got, so even if Kodak keeps it quiet, some info comes from the other end. More useful information is available today about certain things. If one firmly believes in silver curtain, a part of it resides in Rochester, and another part , his ignorance on existing literature.
gainer said:
It used to be that every photo shop had its trade secrets. Now there are few small shops where processing is done. "The Theory of The Photographic Process" is very incomplete because those who are most capable of completing it are bound to former employers to keep secrecy. One person with advanced degrees in chemistry and physics is at a tremendous disadvantage in trying to discover what the research departments of large companies have discovered and are keeping secret. Yet, when the photography industry yields to digital imaging, will those secrets be made known? It seems likely that if a company with secrets can no longer use those secrets to make a profit, the secrets will die. I'm not really paranoid, but I am dreadfully depressed.
