Anybody using Pyrocat-HD or MC as a Compensating Developer?

[Ken Lee]

240mm APO Nikor, 4x5 TMY, Sinar P

Here's a test shot made under more normal lighting conditions - except for the rose petal lit by direct sunlight.

Divided Pyrocat HD development has limited the high values as promised. Without it, the sun-lit rose petal would have been unprintable: it fell on Zone XI. As if by magic, it now has plenty of texture, and the adjacent petals maintain their subtle shading at the same time.

After decades of struggling with challenging light, this is really impressive. It makes you want to go out and shoot all kinds of scenes that we learned long ago, to avoid.

I shuffled 6 sheets continuously, which resulted in even development.

[David Karp]

After decades of struggling with challenging light, this is really impressive. It makes you want to go out and shoot all kinds of scenes that we learned long ago, to avoid.

Absolutely. When I was tray processing, I stopped marking negatives for N- or N+. If I was in an N-1 situation, I would just go ahead and make a negative. More often than not, it would work out. For N+1, if things were just too flat, I would intensify the negative in selenium 1:1 for 5 minutes.

The other cool thing about two baths is that you don't have to worry quite so much about time in the developer. I used to stress out about making sure that the film was not in the developer too long. With two baths, I don't stress at all. A little extra time in A or B does not make so much difference. With Diafine, the temperature (within a broad range) makes little or no difference! For me, developing film is more fun this way.

As noted above, it seems that rotary processing with a D-23 variant requires a bit more segregation of negatives and more concern about development time. I think some of these concerns will disappear when using Pyrocat or Diafine.

I think 2 bath development is as close as we can come to having a true magic bullet.

Glad this worked out for you.

P.S. Just ordered my Pyrocat MC. Can't wait to try it out!

[Bob McCarthy]

Well I'll be a monkey's uncle !

TMY at ISO 250, Divided Pyrocat HD, 5 min, 75 degrees, 1:10.

I placed the wood on the chair on Zone II - III, and let the rest go where it may. The inside walls fell on Zone V, the grass in the yard outside fell on Zone XI ! The clouds in the sky fell on Zone... XIV !

All of these negatives scanned so easily, I had to increase contrast to make them feel like light. The amazing thing to me, is that there was no need for stand, semi-stand, flash, dilution, HDR merging, blending, multiple exposures... no incantations or rituals of any kind !

Watching the development process with an Infra Red monocular, this process looks like Pt/Pd: the images just pop out when you place the film into bath B. I haven't had this much (photographic) fun in a long time !

Next time, I will give more continuous agitation: these negatives have a slightly mottled look. Five minutes isn't a lot of time, especially when you tray-develop a lot of sheets at the same time as I do. I will increase the dilution to 1:20, and lengthen the time a bit in each developer.

Thanks so much for sharing this technique ! It's been around for a long time, but it took me until now to pick it up.

Ken, something to concider. Sometimes long scale doesn't look natural. Much like the overdone HDR is digital capture color

This is where photoshop can come in handy. With careful masking you can separate the scene into the ways our eye's see it. ie two different scenes with there own contrast ranges.

BRB. Let me make a quick and dirty example

bob

[Bob McCarthy]

Ken, something to concider. Sometimes long scale doesn't look natural. Much like the overdone HDR in digital capture color

This is where photoshop can come in handy. With careful masking you can separate the scene into the ways our eye's see it. ie two different scenes with there own contrast ranges.

BRB. Let me make a quick and dirty example

bob

this is more how I expect it to appear to me

[Ken Lee]

Thanks Bob - You are certainly right.

What I posted was more of a Eureka moment, upon my first encounter with the technique. I just set up the camera and shot out the window, at what would have been an impossible shot.

Your version feels like real light - It's poetic- and as you point out, there really are two different scenes, each with its own feel.

[sanking]

Ken,

Your negative, and Bob's comment and modification of the curve of the print, is an excellent example of why two-bath development is such a a practical alternative for photographers who develop their negatives to scan and then adjust tonal values in Photoshop. In practice there would have been other ways to capture the long subject brightness range of that scene, but none of them would have been as simple as plain two-bath development.

One of the comments I hear a lot in discussing two-bath developers is that they don't work well with modern films. I don't know how that idea got started but my testing of both modern T-grain films and traditional grain films with several different two-bath formulas found that both types worked fine with two-bath development.

Sandy King

Thanks Bob - You are certainly right.

What I posted was more of a Eureka moment, upon my first encounter with the technique. I just set up the camera and shot out the window, at what would have been an impossible shot.

Your version feels like real light - It's poetic- and as you point out, there really are two different scenes, each with its own feel.

[Ken Lee]

This "automatic" supression of extreme values reminds me of a story about a construction engineer, assigned to build a hotel on a remote tropical island.

His local guide and translator was struck by the fact that the engineer carried hot tea in the cool of the morning, and iced tea in the heat of the day. "It's a thermos bottle", the engineer told the native. "It keeps hot things hot, and cool things cool".

"Yes", said the guide. "There's just one thing I don't understand: How do it know ?"

[Ken Lee]

Speaking of old film and misconceptions, this also reminds me of something from the medical field, not a joke.

Researchers have long known about the placebo effect, where patients will sometimes get the same healing effect from an empty pill as they might get from a carefully investigated remedy. It never occurred to them to investigate how someone can automatically cure themselves of a disorder, based merely on the "power of suggestion".

Spontaneous healing through "suggestion" can be far more interesting, promising, and economical than elaborate and dangerous approaches. But having a rather focused concept of "research", they overlooked it.

You might say that this method, considered for special cases only, is actually more interesting than contraction and expansion.

[David Karp]

Ken,

Another thing to remember about 2 bath developers (implicit in one of Sandy's posts above) is that you can regularly use them with roll films. The scene to scene variations are automatically handled by the 2 bath. Where we might have had to develop the entire roll for one scene we felt was "special" we can now just drop them into a 2 bath and have an entire roll developed scene by scene.

Divided D76 works well with 35mm and 120. Thornton's works well on 120, never tried it on 35mm. I'll bet Divided Pyrocat works very well with 120.

[sanking]

Ken,

Another thing to remember about 2 bath developers (implicit in one of Sandy's posts above) is that you can regularly use them with roll films. The scene to scene variations are automatically handled by the 2 bath. Where we might have had to develop the entire roll for one scene we felt was "special" we can now just drop them into a 2 bath and have an entire roll developed scene by scene.

Divided D76 works well with 35mm and 120. Thornton's works well on 120, never tried it on 35mm. I'll bet Divided Pyrocat works very well with 120.

Two-bath Pyrocat-HD works very well with 120 film. I have been using MF as back-up gear for LF, and in some travel it is my main format. In another thread on this subject I attached a scan from an actual print of 44"X60" size that a friend made for me from one of my Acros negatives developed in two-bath Pyrocat-HD. See http://www .largeformatphotography.info/forum/showthread.php?t=50674&page=11. The original negative has very high acutance and the print is tack sharp and almost grain free even from close viewing distance.

Sandy King