Paul, all - Kodak, Ilford, etc. do not recommend a pre - soak in water prior to development. In fact Kodak strongly recommends that you do not pre-soak. All times, etc that they recommend are based upon dry film going into the developer. As for you developer volumn question - shoot a some rolls and run a few tests. Film and developer are cheap and anyone that has established their exposure/development times will tell you that it took many rolls and many tests to get to their proper times. If you screw up a few test rolls - so what. You retest and and go from there. Its how we all learn.(posted 8516 days ago)