> 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....(posted 8168 days ago)You are mixing up different things. Water bath is water bath even if you get no effect and there is no question about it. A transistor radio is a transistor radio, an 8x10 is an 8x10 no matter how crappy it is. Physical development is a physical-chemical process that occurs in certain conditions, and it may or may not be good, and may or may not make visible difference in negative. Compensating effect is the one we are questioning here:
> 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...
There is compensating effect with current films. It's just that the effect is small and not worth bothering especially if it requires unrepeatably tricky agitation technique, etc. This is particularly so since we now get Delta 400.
Coming back to the first quote, about accutance effect, I would speak more carefully. There are some people who give strictly defined meanings to that term as well as "definition" "shartpness" etc., while some people say "high accutance" whenever they see sharp-looking (probably big) grains. Eastman Kodak Lab proposed a measurement method for accutance, but does that coincide with what we really perceive as accutance? We don't know. Sure, based on EKC method, Rodinal, D-76 1+1, etc., are within experimental error. But I wouldn't assume EKC method is THE accutance or anything. Same for granularity. Some say XTOL is grainer than D-76 and others say opposite. I think they are talking about different aspects of same grain. EKC's granularity measurement method gives you one way to measure, but very different kinds of grains can result in an identical number. I somehow think Phil Davis spoke more carefully - two prints with identical tonal reproduction curves are not necessarily identical prints. They may differ in other aspects, whether the difference is important or not.
If there is a way to do control experiment taking all these into account without making any assumption, I would very much love to know it!