18 stop Subject Brightness Range on Tmax400

[BetterSense]

Cool.

[jim kitchen]

Dear Steve,

Merci...

Excellent portfolio, and excellent information regarding your TMY-2 testing, where I will exercise your procedure against my TMY-2, when it arrives.

jim k

[Gary Nylander]

Steve, Thanks for your very informative SBR data in regards to Tmax 400 film, I'm sure many here will find your research very useful, I have been using the new film for the past year or so and really like it.

Gary

[Steve Gledhill]

Thanks everyone for your responses and kind words.

Thinking back on why I posted this, what I really want to conclude is reflected in Tyler's comment affirming the hybrid workflow. Film such as TMY-2 is an amazingly capable medium for information capture. Coupled with digital manipulation available through tools like Photoshop really do give us the opportunity to create images that are at least very difficult if not actually impossible to achieve with an entirely darkroom approach. The hybrid approach is definitely for me. Please don't take this as me trying to whip up conflict of the digital vs darkroom type - I'm not. I'm speaking just from my own personal experience which led me after 25 years of producing prints in the darkroom to give it up. I was personally unable to carry out darkroom work to my satisfaction. I did manage a few good prints along the way, but not many in proportion to the effort I expended. But soon after stopping darkroom work I found that I could scan my negatives and work on them with Photoshop. So about 8 years ago my enthusiasm was rekindled by this hybrid workflow and I've not looked back since. It has been a long learning curve but satisfying and rewarding at every stage.

[BetterSense]

...Photoshop really do give us the opportunity to create images that are at least very difficult if not actually impossible to achieve with an entirely darkroom approach.

You are absolutely correct, a hybrid approach is a very different tool and can do things that are fundamentally impossible to achieve with physical tools. The flip side is that the 'entirely darkroom' approach itself can produce objects that are fundamentally impossible to achieve with digital. There is no news here. That there exists some thing that a medium cannot do, is not an automatic demerit, else nobody would use any media at all; all media have things they cannot do. Media are media and their qualities are their own.

[Ken Lee]

Archival inkjet prints ?

Inkjet prints free of metamerism ?

Inkjet prints free of out-gassing ?

[Oren Grad]

Diafine is a good two bath developer for LF. It is a true two-bath formula in that no development at all takes place in Solution A. The stock solutions are also very long-lived.

With apologies if this is going off on a tangent - what is your agitation procedure for sheet film in Diafine to achieve even development?

[Vaughn]

Just thought I'd toss this in the mix.

My Pentax digital spot meter read 13 stops -- 0 in the darkest, 13 in the brightest...but since it read 0 in the darkest areas, I don't know how far below 0 it actually was (I exposed it at 2). So I under-exposed the shadows probably. The scan of the print show less detail up there than the print has, but the neg is clear in some of those areas up there.

On Tri-X (the older stuff, 5x7), developed for the "normal" time in HC-110. Straight print -- but it is a carbon print. One of the reasons I like carbon printing is its ability to reproduce that sort of SBR.

Vaughn

[sanking]

With apologies if this is going off on a tangent - what is your agitation procedure for sheet film in Diafine to achieve even development?

Oren,

I prefer to develop sheet film in Diafine with rotary agitation in tubes or Jobo. If you read the Diafine instructions you might be led to believe that constant agitation will not work, but I found that it works very well. I dilute both A and B solutions 1:1 to compensate for the greater agitation and develop for the same amount of time. In practice I find that this gives the the same contrast as developing with the full strength solution with intermittent agitation for the same time.

One of the things I like a lot of about Diafine is that gives a very long and straight toe, even with films that typically are not very linear, TRI-X 320 for example. S in addition to being able to capture a very long subject brightness range two bath development with Diafine also gives very linear results from the shadows to the highlights.


Sandy

[Oren Grad]

Sandy - thanks, that's very helpful. Yes, because of how the instructions are worded I've wondered how Diafine would fare in rotary development. Sounds like it's worth a try.