The importance of grain structure and microcontrast

How important is the grain structure of a given film and developer combination to you ? Do you even connsider it important in the long chain of events between tripping the shutter and final image ? In my opinion, I like to see a regular well formed grain in my images. Not intrusive, but the all important building blocks that form the image that we see as a photo. If the grain is soft and mushy, how can it form a sharp image when viewed from "normal" viewing distance. The other quality I look for is the ability to render microcontrast in such as skin tones and fine details. I understand that so much in the work flow can affect the final result. I also accept that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and some like a smooth buttery image with no hint of grain. It will be interesting to hear your take on this subject.

Old Gregg said:

I love me some grain when an image contains texture. I suppose this is what you meant by "fine details" in your post. Here's an example and IIRC that's HP5+. But I am not a fan of grain when an image contains large segments of smooth surfaces, the most common one being the sky. I am glad I used Delta 100 for this shot, for example.

Click to expand...

Great examples. Smooth sky but if I'm honest I prefer the tones on the first one.
This is what floats my boat it can also do smooth tones but there is grain if you pixel peep. Also on HP5+

Daydreams by E.J. Bragg, on Flickr

I think a good quality of visual granularity matters immensely - but despite what people read on the internet and in various books that are wrong or grossly out of date etc, D-76 and the like are actually much crisper than people assume. A lack of basic process controls, poor focusing (and/ or lens choice) at the enlarging stage, or use of low performance scanners whose MTF performance and claimed resolutions diverge wildly, all contribute to deliver a completely misleading set of claims about film/ developer performance relationships. Pretty much any new developer that was launched by Kodak, Ilford etc will have been subjected to a battery of tests that don't just encompass sharpness/ granularity/ latitude etc - but also well controlled print-based tests to see if viewers preferred any particular prints from negs developed in a variety of candidate developers.

It depends on the photograph itself.

Sometimes the spaces between grains are imporant. Sometimes crisp, sharp, "perfect" image makes some photographs really boring and lifeless.

I _try_ to aim for a portayed feeling rather to technical purity myself. Use all means needed .. be that blurring or unfocused.

John Bragg said:

How important is the grain structure of a given film and developer combination to you ? Do you even connsider it important in the long chain of events between tripping the shutter and final image ? In my opinion, I like to see a regular well formed grain in my images. Not intrusive, but the all important building blocks that form the image that we see as a photo. If the grain is soft and mushy, how can it form a sharp image when viewed from "normal" viewing distance. The other quality I look for is the ability to render microcontrast in such as skin tones and fine details. I understand that so much in the work flow can affect the final result. I also accept that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and some like a smooth buttery image with no hint of grain. It will be interesting to hear your take on this subject.

Click to expand...

You sound like a man who uses a condenser enlarger.

Lachlan Young said:

I think a good quality of visual granularity matters immensely - but despite what people read on the internet and in various books that are wrong or grossly out of date etc, D-76 and the like are actually much crisper than people assume. A lack of basic process controls, poor focusing (and/ or lens choice) at the enlarging stage, or use of low performance scanners whose MTF performance and claimed resolutions diverge wildly, all contribute to deliver a completely misleading set of claims about film/ developer performance relationships. Pretty much any new developer that was launched by Kodak, Ilford etc will have been subjected to a battery of tests that don't just encompass sharpness/ granularity/ latitude etc - but also well controlled print-based tests to see if viewers preferred any particular prints from negs developed in a variety of candidate developers.

Click to expand...

I agree about D76 although I used to use it 1:1, not stock. I now use Ilfosol 3. I think that keeping detailed notes is as important now as it ever was. If something sucks you don't repeat that exact thing, but what you have learned may well be relevant farther down the line. I am applying techniques learned with HC- 110 to Ilfosol 3.

cliveh said:

You sound like a man who uses a condenser enlarger.

Click to expand...

Perceptive of you Clive. I have a Kaiser "Confuser" enlarger but now (last 10 years) I scan as I have no darkroom space in my rented home.

A confuser enlarger! Is this the first quantum enlarger?

I prefer small smooth grain, but as noted above courser grain is better for some photographs.

cliveh said:

A confuser enlarger! Is this the first quantum enlarger?

Click to expand...

Ha ha, it is my pet name for a combined condenser and diffuser.

Old Gregg said:

When I dislike grain I often think that it's not the size of grains but the shape of the patterns they form and how "loose" that shape feels. I often say that I like "tight grain" but I am not sure if people even understand what I mean because we don't have a shared vocabulary for this.

Click to expand...

It has been suggested that some of this may relate to situations in which more grains are more fully developed (potentially less visually pleasing, but possibly sharper) as opposed to more development centres, but with the grains each less fully developed - with both aimed to give the same overall density range, the latter would deliver lower visual granularity.

I would add that Delta 400 seems both intended to strongly maximise sharpness and to minimise differences in tone curve behaviour between developers (compared to many other materials that seem to offer more variance between developers). Some film/ dev combinations can also pretty harshly show up where scanning systems' MTF performance begins to fall off, rather than the film/ dev combination having specific granularity shortcomings in & of itself.

Lachlan Young said:

It has been suggested that some of this may relate to situations in which more grains are more fully developed (potentially less visually pleasing, but possibly sharper) as opposed to more development centres, but with the grains each less fully developed - with both aimed to give the same overall density range, the latter would deliver lower visual granularity.

I would add that Delta 400 seems both intended to strongly maximise sharpness and to minimise differences in tone curve behaviour between developers (compared to many other materials that seem to offer more variance between developers). Some film/ dev combinations can also pretty harshly show up where scanning systems' MTF performance begins to fall off, rather than the film/ dev combination having specific granularity shortcomings in & of itself.

Click to expand...

So if we follow Mortensen and develop to completion we could expect more clumpy grain perhaps ? Maybe that's why minimal agitation and reasonably short (compared to stand) dev times appeal to me ?

John Bragg said:

So if we follow Mortensen and develop to completion we could expect more clumpy grain perhaps ? Maybe that's why minimal agitation and reasonably short (compared to stand) dev times appeal to me ?

Click to expand...

I'd treat anything Mortensen said with great caution. Minimal agitation is largely not a good idea - at best all it does is adjust the overall contrast slightly (and has essentially no measurable impact on sharpness at anything other than nil agitation - which is a very bad idea) - if you really think you are getting differences between intermittent and continuous agitation, it's almost always going to be a process control issue (aka normalise processes to deliver matched contrast indexes). And I would treat the word clumpy with similar caution.

What does seem to be the case is that certain developing agents will develop fewer development centres more totally, which while delivering correct overall contrast measurements and very high sharpness via development inhibition (at a cost of very long developing times), gives visually noticeably poorer coverage - and thus a worse looking, much grainier image. It seems that adding an component to act as an inhibitor acceptor will drastically shorten development induction time and cause more development centres to develop to a lower individual density - which delivers dramatically better overall coverage for the same contrast index. And then there are the questions of pH, sulphite levels, development inhibiting byproducts given out by the film etc. In short, Phenidone (and derivatives) has some quite significant potential advantages over Metol (which being entirely reliant on exhaustion effects is not seemingly susceptible to the exploitation of the development inhibition behaviour outlined above) - and Ilfosol 3, DD-X, Xtol and TMax developers (and probably many others) all look a lot like they attempt to exploit this.

Thanks Lachlan for the scientific explanation. Phenidone was mentioned in an old Ilford book that I had for its ability to retain highlights. I think they used a wedding dress as an example.