L&Scape
28-Jun-2022, 10:19
I have long thought about making a more controlled test to see the effects of developer dilution. I normally process my FP4+ in Rodinal 1+50, but here I wanted to see all dilutions from 1:25 to 1:200.
I exposed 4 sheets of 8x10 on a sunny day with no clouds and no change in light. I metered with Minolta Autometer V and my exposure was 1/15 s f:22. It took max 2 min to expose all four sheets.
Back in the lab I used Jobo 3005 drum with CPP processor with continuous rotation at 20 degree Celsius. I mixed 500ml of developer for each bath and developed the 8x10 sheets as follows:
Dilution Devel. time
1:25 8 min
1:50 16 min
1:100 32 min
1:200 64 min
After drying I made contact prints of each negative using identical exposure and development. I used Multigrade paper with no filtering. The contact sheets were then scanned with flatbed scanner using Vuescan. As I am no expert with this software, the scans were all quite dull/gray/contrastless and did not resemble the contact prints. I used PS autocontrast which gave looks quite a similar to the original contact prints.
All four negatives are easy to print on #2 paper or with no filter on Multigrade paper. The 1:25 negative is slightly more dense than the others and has slightly higher contrast, but only marginally. I was surprised that even with 1:200 dilution the negative came out very similar to the others. My personal EI for all four developer dilution combinations is around EI 32, which gives dense enought negatives so that the unexposed negative border reaches maximum black.
I exposed 4 sheets of 8x10 on a sunny day with no clouds and no change in light. I metered with Minolta Autometer V and my exposure was 1/15 s f:22. It took max 2 min to expose all four sheets.
Back in the lab I used Jobo 3005 drum with CPP processor with continuous rotation at 20 degree Celsius. I mixed 500ml of developer for each bath and developed the 8x10 sheets as follows:
Dilution Devel. time
1:25 8 min
1:50 16 min
1:100 32 min
1:200 64 min
After drying I made contact prints of each negative using identical exposure and development. I used Multigrade paper with no filtering. The contact sheets were then scanned with flatbed scanner using Vuescan. As I am no expert with this software, the scans were all quite dull/gray/contrastless and did not resemble the contact prints. I used PS autocontrast which gave looks quite a similar to the original contact prints.
All four negatives are easy to print on #2 paper or with no filter on Multigrade paper. The 1:25 negative is slightly more dense than the others and has slightly higher contrast, but only marginally. I was surprised that even with 1:200 dilution the negative came out very similar to the others. My personal EI for all four developer dilution combinations is around EI 32, which gives dense enought negatives so that the unexposed negative border reaches maximum black.