Tri-X developed in Rodinal

[MattKing]

However I am hoping to get a reply from Lachlan. Taken at face value I felt his quote suggested that grain is unaffected by agitation.

I'm not Lachlan, but I would suggest that that suggestion is correct, as long as your agitation regime doesn't descend (word chosen carefully) into the realm of limited agitation procedures - semi-stand or stand.
5 seconds every 30 seconds, 10 seconds every minute, anything like crate the same amount of grain, if you develop to the same contrast. If you change the level of energy or frequency of agitation, it can affect the contrast, which will affect the appearance of the grain, but that is easily compensated for by adjusting time.
If you reduce the agitation significantly, and thusly start creating localized adjacency effects, then the appearance of graininess can also be affected.

 

[madNbad]

I'm not Lachlan, but I would suggest that that suggestion is correct, as long as your agitation regime doesn't descend (word chosen carefully) into the realm of limited agitation procedures - semi-stand or stand.
5 seconds every 30 seconds, 10 seconds every minute, anything like crate the same amount of grain, if you develop to the same contrast. If you change the level of energy or frequency of agitation, it can affect the contrast, which will affect the appearance of the grain, but that is easily compensated for by adjusting time.
If you reduce the agitation significantly, and thusly start creating localized adjacency effects, then the appearance of graininess can also be affected.

Thank you, Matt. Next roll, I'll try a 1:50 dilution with gentle and less frequent agitation. I'll wait a bit before trying the stand development dilutions.

 

[Lachlan Young]

So no scientific reason to avoid continuous rotary agitation as it makes no difference to the grain?

Correct - if you compensate for the difference in agitation and the effect it has on density.

but it sounds as if stand or semi stand development will not reduce grain either

Exactly. All the available evidence shows that above the level of agitation sufficient to deliver truly even development, any agitation adjustment will just alter the resultant density range. Most of the claims are coming from people whose process controls aren't hitting the simplest of baselines - or who used things like HC-110 which is not really optimised for high sharpness (D-76 is sharper for example).

I’ve been using the R09 at 1:25 for seven minutes, agitation is 15 seconds to start then five seconds after every thirty seconds. Any suggestions for adjusting time?

Taking off 10-15% is often a good starting point - but you will need to iterate within reasonable controls of temperature etc - and the type of tank you use, how you fill it etc. I would never compromise a negative for a substandard scanning setup BTW - if it's even moderately competent it'll have no problems with a normal B&W neg.

Once you see Xtol's sharpness and tones "especially with TriX and Tmax" it is hard to go to other.

I think people would be astonished at how much effort was put into trying to better D-76's granularity/ sharpness/ speed balance - Xtol was the eventual result of Kodak's research, DD-X and Ilfosol 3 from Ilford are also roughly aimed at the same end but in somewhat different ways.

produce startlingly different results with tiny negatives, as does gentle vs. vigorous agitation, especially with the higher speed emulsions.

You can produce all sorts of startlingly different effects via poor process control within which agitation variance is not controlled for in terms of final density. I was not saying anything other than that Rodinal cannot transmit as much information as something along the lines of D-76 because it generates higher granularity and no better meaningful sharpness at either high or low frequencies. Richard Henry's microdensitometry results show this - and I have seen the same phenomena very clearly with standard materials used in regular ways across a very large quantity of film.

 

[BAC1967]

Really lovely picture and contrast. How do you agitate?

Thanks. I gently agitate the first 30 seconds then 15 seconds per minute after that.