I just have a very brief comment to make inspired by something Pat said (and by the way, hello Pat! Glad to hear you're still tooting the old oboe--I miss our phone chats since I left the magazine). With all this stuff, before making ANY assumptions, try a controlled experiment.(posted 8168 days ago)I can't tell you how many times I've gotten carried away by one or another of the old pearls of received wisdom, only to find when I gt around to running an experiment with a control that it didn't really make a damned bit of difference. In all my years at _Photo Techniques_ I never saw a single article come over the transom that proved a compensating effect with current emulsions, yet there were plenty of times that I talked authors out of their enthusiasm for it by simply suggesting they do a controlled experiment.
Compensating effects, water-bath development, physical development, even the old saw about Rodinal being "high acutance" (D-76 1:1 has literally the same acutance as Rodinal), not to mention split-filter printing etc....it all WORKS, which combines with peoples' enthisasm to create phantom efects...until you simply do the experiment with a strict control. Phil Davis has even proved to my satisfaction that with exceedingly careful sensitometric matching and gradation control, he can make identical prints from D-76 negs and pyro negs. (I couldn't get him to write this up as an article only because he didn't want to take all sorts of shit from the potion-and-magick crowd!
) If Pat Gainer says that stand development makes a difference, by golly I'll try it (though I'd feel a lot more comfortable trying it with T-Max Developer or DDX than with D-76, I'll tell you that! All that bromide...
). But remember what Grant Haist said--I'm going on my faulty memory, but it was something like, the large number of development options only multiply the manner in which identical results can be achieved. (That always makes me smile.) (Haist was the author of perhaps the most comprehensive reference on B&W processing ever published, for those of you who may not know the name.)