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Response to Reason to change developers

from John Hicks (jbh@magicnet.net)
You're using developers for Delta 100 and 3200 widely considered to be among the best in overall characteristics for those films; for TP it's more a case of "whatever works."

If you're curious, by all means try other developers; otoh, using what works fine and getting intimately familiar with it will most likely give you far superior results compared to using new materials all the time.

Developer characteristics always involve tradeoffs. For example, Rodinal 1:50 may give higher acutance than FX-39 but will also give bigger grain, while ID-11 1:1 will give finer grain than FX-39 but lower acutance. So you see that if you want to emphasize one characteristic another developer may be a better choice, but you'll be giving up something else in exchange.

Specific to pyro, the stain gives a self-masking effect in the lighter tones when printing on VC paper because the yellow-green stain acts as a low-contrast filter and it's proportional to the silver density. One person's "delicate highlights" is another person's "grey muck."

The tradeoff is increased graininess and lower acutance. Whether that's of any importance depends on what format you're using; it may be of no consequence in 4x5 and be vitally important with 35mm.

As for divided developers, if part A is close to a neutral pH no development occurs and the emulsion just soaks up the developer. Part B contains the alkaline accelerators. The idea is that if appropriate developing agents and accelerators are used, the negs are developed just enough but cannot be overdeveloped, and since development is self-limiting it'll work at a wide temperature range with no time compensation.

My experience with divided developers is that they work wonderfully in limiting contrast, but otoh the contrast is usually lower than "normal" contrast, as is film speed. If a more powerful accelerator is used, say Kodalk rather than borax, "normal" contrast can be obtained but at the expense of increased graininess compared to a standard developer.

Also there's some speculation that divided developers often don't work as well as expected with modern thin-emulsion films as they did in the old days simply because the emulsion can't soak up as much developer.

At any rate, divided developers don't provide the "follow the instructions and all is wonderful" solution; some experimentation involving divided developer types and dilutions is needed in order to obtain good results.

So the important question is; do you like your results? If so, be happy and make real photos, not experiments.

(posted 8547 days ago)

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