Some pages from "The Book of Pyro" about developing with Pyro.

[Bernice Loui]

Prompted by this discussion:
https://www.largeformatphotography.i...st-Impressions

Some pages from The Book of Pyro. Pyro based developers are not a magic elixir, it is another tool in the tool box to achieve a print goal result. As with any tool there are good and not so good aspect of the given tool.

Yes, this stuff is toxic. Proper precautions required..








Bernice

[Bernice Loui]

Notes on processing:








Bernice

[Bernice Loui]

Sheet film processing.










Bernice

[Bernice Loui]

Sheet film processing continued.










Bernice

[coolbreeze1983]

Great read!!!!

Thanks for all your reasearch. Will be well absorbed and filed for use later on.

[Drew Wiley]

A number of the popular brews like PMK are now commercially available as A&B liquid concentrates, alleviating the risk of working with the powder yourself. And when developing, I wear nitrile gloves regardless of the developer.

[Steve Sherman]

It basically comes down to being responsible and respectful of the hazards of the Droom and all that comes with it. The benefits of a Pyro developer far out distance what all the naysayers might suggest. The one exception might be T-Max with T-Max developers, but then you would have to bring yourself to in someway support the Great Yellow shame artist.

[Drew Wiley]

As far a T-Max goes, I use PMK pyro for the TMY 400-speed product. Tonality-wise, that works great for TMX 100 too. But the problem with TMX 100 is its poor edge acutance; so due to that, I switched to 1:3 Perceptol for that one film only. That gives me the sweet spot, even in 120 roll film requiring a fair amount of enlargement. A whole different effect than Perceptol 1:1 or even 1:2. It allows just enough extra grain growth to accentuate the edge effect to the degree I like, without making the film look grainy per se (and so far, this is the ONLY film I like that particular strategy with). Otherwise, PMK is my "go to" standard developer for everything else - whether tray-development of sheets or hand-inversion tanks for roll film; all conventional taking films (excluding Tech Pan, lith etc). But there are better pyro choices for rotary development.

TMax RS developer (the kind needed for sheets) is out of production, and was relatively expensive anyway. It could yield a little straighter"straight line" than the alternative for those application where that was important (like color separations negatives), but not enough to make it really worth the fuss compared to tweaks of HC-110 for example. But those are lab rather than generally shooting applications.