Originally Posted by
Drew Wiley
What Roman Loranc did using the combination of 4X5 Tri-X and PMK pyro was to follow the old contact printing adage, despite enlarging onto MGWT, and both overexpose and overdevelop the film in order to boost the shadow values way up onto the straight line, and get good medium to high value tonal expansion. Then his habit was to try to split tone it with gold toner followed by Kodak Brown sulfide toner, which would bring an apricot-pink into the near-highest values, and make those uppermost value
interesting. That amounts to a bit of roll of the dice, and is never entirely predictable; and when it didn't go so well, and the stain didn't transpire, his highlights come out essentially blank and textureless, because these are in fact shouldered off.
Therefore, it has been the strategy of numerous practitioners of Tri-X to seriously overexpose it in order to get decent shadow gradation. With TMax films, you don't have that problem due to the longer straight line way down into the shadows. And in former days, Super-XX was preferred for the same reason in higher contrast scenes. But the same thing could be said about HP5, with its own medium toe characteristics. I simply avoided HP5 when it came to high-contrast situations, or else resorted to unsharp masking (via film) to appropriately alter the curve profile when printing.
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