Submitting new developing recipes?

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joncallas
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Submitting new developing recipes?

Post by joncallas »

I've been doing a lot of shooting and developing through the pandemic. One of the things that I have done is the I've become really fond of Eastman 5222 (Double-X). I bought one-hundred feet of it and have been rolling my own. It's been nice, but there's another thing -- I'm shooting with old cameras, max shutter of 1/1000, and I live in California. It's sunny here. It's really sunny here, and realize that if you want your aperture much under f8, you really want a max ISO on your film of 100. Based on recipes here, I started pulling it to ISO 100, developing in D76, and it's really nice!

I also have been pushing it 1600, doing that in D96, which I got from FPP. That also works quite nicely. FPP had a podcast on B&W developers and so I bought some XTOL and mixed up five liters of that. Then I ran out of D76 for my pull-processing.

I asked a lot of people about XTOL recipes that they might have and have not gotten answers, so I decided that I'd just go do them myself.

I've been doing XX at ISO 100, 1600 in XTOL. This weekend I've been doing some controlled experiments, as well, which I am going to scan as soon as I finish typing this.

I would love to hand over my results for others here. I even have my albums up on Flickr, for those who want to see what they look like.

What's the procedure for submitting recipes for the Massive Dev Chart?

Digitaltruth
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Re: Submitting new developing recipes?

Post by Digitaltruth »

Hi Jon,

You can just send the data by email, or use the Submit Data link via the online chart:

https://www.digitaltruth.com/devchart.php?doc=submit
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TyraNoah
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Re: Submitting new developing recipes?

Post by TyraNoah »

Are the submitted recipes publicly viewable or what is the essence of all that? I'd like to have a read, and borrow some ideas for personal non-commercial use!
Last edited by TyraNoah on Fri Oct 15, 2021 8:09 am, edited 1 time in total.

Digitaltruth
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Re: Submitting new developing recipes?

Post by Digitaltruth »

The submitted data is checked by our team and added to the chart periodically. It is not publicly available until it is added to the chart. Bear in mind that the amount of new recipes is very small compared to the entire database.
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joncallas
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Re: Submitting new developing recipes?

Post by joncallas »

My apologies for taking five months to get around to submit.

I forgot to put this in the notes of my submissions, I have test rolls for all of my submissions on Flickr, which should help your evaluations.

ISO 1600, stock: <https://www.flickr.com/photos/joncallas ... 9146946647>, I now regularly do my ISO 1600 this way (25m @ 20C)
ISO 100, 1+2: <https://www.flickr.com/photos/joncallas ... 9191584174>, <https://www.flickr.com/photos/joncallas ... 9089212013>, my usual 1+2 dilution here.
ISO 100, 1+3 and 18C (not 20): <https://www.flickr.com/photos/joncallas ... 9245079060>. I had fun with this experiment. For me, 18C is slightly inconvenient as a temperature. I did this for bracketing of my recipes, trying another adaptation to see how well it works. It was fine.

My goal is to come up with an ISO 800 recipe, too, I just haven't gotten around to it. Just to mutter it, and even allow someone to scoop me, my guess is XTOL stock at 12.5 to 13 mins. My intuition is to go with 12.5 first. This is based off of comparing other formulae of other developers, and also your multipliers in this. XTOL is a a kind-of compensating developer. It's not what we normally call a compensating developer, but Kodak's goals for it are similar to the goals of a compensating developer. If you consider it compensating, the number should be 12.5 mins, if standard 13. I think it's compensating enough to consider it compensating for these purposes.

Ornello
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Re: Submitting new developing recipes?

Post by Ornello »

I don't understand what you are trying to do. You cannot change the speed of film, no matter what developer you use. Some developers (Ilford Microphen, for example) bring out a tiny bit more shadow detail than others (maybe 1/4 stop) and others (Ilford Perceptol, Agfa Rodinal, though very different developers) yield less shadow detail. But in any case we are talking about nothing approaching what you are trying to do. 'Pushing' and 'pulling' are myths. Yes, you can under-expose your film and develop it longer, but all you are doing is changing the contrast: the film remains under-exposed. The same is true on the other side of the exposure scale. Why do you think they make films of different speeds? Slow films are extremely fine-grained. Medium-speed films are very fine-grained. Fast films are fine-grained. Super-fast films are grainier than fast films, but the latest generation of super-fast films (Ilford Delta 3200 and Kodak T-Max 3200) are much finer grained than anything ever offered before.

I'm sure that if a 40,000 ISO film were offered, someone would try to push it!

joncallas
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Re: Submitting new developing recipes?

Post by joncallas »

Sorry I didn't reply right away, Ornello. I didn't see the reply.

You have a very good point, Ornello, and I agree. It's definitely true that the more you push a film, the more contrasty it gets, and the more you pull it, the less contrasty it is. In a sense, there's no difference between playing with zone metering and pushing and pulling. The difference is, though is how you compensate for different exposures in development, both in time and what you pick for a developer.

There's a bit more to it than what you're saying. Lots of films have very wide exposure latitude. Lots of films work better for some jobs at a different speed than the box speed. You mentioned Ilford Delta 3200; it is a base ISO 1000 film that works really well at 3200. As a matter of fact, one of the selling points of Delta 3200 is that it has (allegedly) the widest exposure latitude on the planet. Ilford's development chart has listed development times from ISO 200 to ISO 12,500, which is indeed a huge latitude. (They also have on that chart times listed that come from the work of this site!)

Similarly, Kodak P3200 is base ISO of 800 in Kodak's own spec sheet and Just as Ilford says Delta 3200 can be pushed to 12,500 Kodak themselves say you can push it to ISO 25,000 provided that you use XTOL, T-MAX, or T-MAX RS developers. Obviously, if you push it that far, it's going to be really grainy and contrasty.

Double-X (Eastman 5222) also has a huge exposure latitude. It has a base ISO of 200/250 (tungsten/daylight), and lots of people have been doing a lot of work on playing it. Kodak themselves only recipes using D96. I shot a roll of Double-X at ISO 1600, developed it in D96 and was really pleased with the results. As you noted, pushing something three stops increases contrast and indeed I find that at 1600, it's a bit tetchy, but it's still good. Note that Double-X is a movie film, so therefore designed to be wide latitude and low contrast, and D96 is a wide-tonality and low contrast developer because it's a movie film developer. When you're watching a movie, you never see a single image, you see the assemblage your brain does of 24 images per second, and thus you want low contrast compared to a single image.

Given the nice results in D96, I wondered what XTOL would do, because XTOL is most modern developer, it's designed to be semi-compensating, and really good for bringing out detail. The results I listed above are mine for both pushing it to 1600 and pulling it to 100. And frankly, I think that Double-X developed in XTOL is better at 1600 than either Delta 3200 or P3200. My reason was that there's a lot of recipes for Double-X and there were practically none for developing in XTOL. Since I had a 100 foot spool of Double-X and five liters of XTOL, I thought I'd experiment. My results are above.

I just did some experiments using ISO 800 and Acufine and submitted those, too. My test rolls are up on Flickr, too.

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