8x10 shooters, can HP5 come close to Tri-X 320?

[Drew Wiley]

Prior to the TMax revolution, it seems every Kodak b&w sheet film I tried had a decent retouching tooth. Just the newcomers like Tech Pan were slick. HP5 went through at least three reiterations, only one of them officially indicated - the shift from HP5 to HP5-plus; it had a sorta tooth to it.

I really don't like a spray-on retouch surface. Nasty stuff. I'd rather do any retouching on a registered sheet of frosted mylar. I don't do much film retouching anyway, at least in relation to general black and white work. In relation to color film masking, I did quite a bit of it.

Red creosin dye works well on a larger range of sheet film base than pencil smudge.

[tokyo_blues]

Fomapan 200 is astounding.

Expose and develop according to the guidelines in the leaflets - they don't lie. In my workflow it's a 160EI film in Adox XT-3 (Xtol) and gamma=.58 and it's much better than the price would suggest. So much better value than TriX, very similar spectral response. I also love it in 35mm.

[Drew Wiley]

Foma "200" is the only "straight line" film still on the market, although TMax films at least come close to that designation as well. So one can get distinctly better shadow gradation out of Foma 200 than Tri-X 320, provided its sufficiently exposed according to a realistic film speed.

[bob carnie]

I have been processing and printing 8 x10 HP5 in PMK for a long time now and I love the combination. A lot of extreme lighting conditions and when rating the film at 1/2 box speed then two dev bath PMK I feel it cannot get much better for me at least in my darkroom.

[interneg]

There's some really garbled nonsense on here. Almost all 'general purpose' films (i.e. Tmax's 100 & 400, HP5+, FP4+, Delta 100, Super-XX 4142) will deliver the 'straight line' characteristic people like to apply to 4142. Especially if you develop them with proper process controls in the developers they were designed for (D-76!) and expose them correctly (the real variable that lots of people are in massive denial about, whether from ignorance of flare effects, effective shadow speed variance between different manufacturers' interpretations of end-users' perceptual relationships with a particular product - and/ or the manufacturers' marketing-driven need to deliver a higher effective shadow speed than the market leader, or plain old shutter inaccuracy). 4142 seems to have been quite resistant to gross user cack-handedness in ways that more sophisticated and qualitatively consistent newer products were much more sensitive to. It's also very much the case that in the past, before Tmax, 4142 was the main 'general purpose' Kodak sheet film product, with all the other materials delivering specific purpose curve shapes (with a few exceptions in specified developers).

[Drew Wiley]

Here you go again, Interneg, making a claim utterly contradictory to not only how film manufacturers made different films with distinctly different curve structures for a reason, but also contradictory to what has been recognized in real world practice over and over and over again for decades. Film choice matters. And I pity anyone who doesn't know how to control bellow flare.

It was no more realistic to try to turn Triassic X or Plussed-X Pan into a mimic for Super-XX than it is to turn lead into gold. I thought deceptive advertising was banned on this forum. Yes, someone today could drag a sheet of film into the Photoshop Inquisition chamber and torture it into curve submission; but that still isn't quite the same thing, and at that point you can't directly optically print it anyway.

I've seen what happens when people try to force Tri-X into behaving in a straight line manner. They have to place their shadow values belly button high, and then heavily develop the film old "thick negative" style; and therefore the highlights curve off and become hell to reproduce well.
That mantra might have been appropriate back in Azo contact paper days, or with alt UV media; but it sure as heck isn't very efficient with silver projection papers.

Good luck with that D76 advice. It's counterproductive to a long straight line, and extends the toe. I'll believe my densitometer any day of the week before that malarky. It even puts a sag in the curves of TMax films.

And there are other significant reasons why some of us prefer to soup our HP5 in staining PMK pyro instead, because it really does render a different look to the microtonality, grain, and edge effect.

[interneg]

You clearly haven't done the baseline work Drew and that's the end of it. We don't need yet another lecture on how to cut off the branch you are sitting on.

Facts of the matter are that the 3 Ilford general purpose panchromatic films in sheet formats (Delta 100, FP4+, HP5+) are able to deliver the short toed, straight line characteristic curve that plots very, very closely to 4142's general purpose characteristic curve. And they do it in ID-11. Of course PMK will deliver a different result, it's muddled variant of Beutler (a formula which has been very very carefully studied by the big manufacturers and the useful effects found to be effectively replicable by PQ - with the ability to fine tune those effects), but it isn't going to deliver the totality of the material's potential performance - especially as HP5+ is capable of delivering good sharp granularity character in the mainstream developers it was designed for. As I said upthread, if you want to get an upsweep effect through the highlights, PQ Universal is worth exploring. The more interesting/ worthwhile differences are in colour sensitivity, granularity characteristics etc.

[Drew Wiley]

Don't argue with me. That's the easy part. Try convincing the film instead.

[Andrew O'Neill]

I think it would be very easy to make HP5 behave like Tri-X 400, but a little trickier with 320. Their toes (and curves) are so different. I would probably start by underexposing HP5 by a couple of stops to compress the shadows, then develop in a developer that would give more contrast with little effort, like D-19. I tested a developer over 20 years ago with HP5, and I was shocked at how much the curve resembled TX 320. Long toe, up swept curve. Perhaps I should have a look to see if I still have those curves stashed away...

[Mark J]

but it isn't going to deliver the totality of the material's potential performance - especially as HP5+ is capable of delivering good sharp granularity character in the mainstream developers it was designed for

I'm with Drew on this.
I don't think you've done the baseline work on what HP5+ is capable of in staining developers.