Dear Group,

I had a few moments this past summer to do some incremental film development experimentation, since I could not find any oil and gas contracts and, or the assigned contracts I secured in the Spring were trampled by the economy and subsequently cancelled, so I decided to take these new found moments in time to review my TMY and XTOL development procedure. I decided that my main objective would be to conduct a developer dilution and development time review, to see whether I could find a refined negative highlight density, that allowed me to scan a TMY negative developed in XTOL more effectively.

I wanted to find a development procedure that allowed me to control and dampen the TMY's highlights more effectively, and to determine whether I could introduce a compensating development procedure to TMY and XTOL. So, I spent the summer reviewing my process, and reviewing the results, where I believe I now have a refined development process that accommodates my flatbed scanner, and a refined process that makes my drum scanner operator smile.

To set the stage, I have a TMY and XTOL development procedure for the darkroom, but I periodically discovered that my darkroom negatives were too thick for the scanner, and although I could scan the TMY XTOL negative on a drum scanner, my flatbed scanner would take it upon itself to introduce annoying artifacts within the near saturated highlights for obvious reasons. My zone system procedure worked properly in the darkroom while using silver paper, but now my negatives continue to rest upon a totally different device, and the device subsequently choked on the input data. I am pleased with the results, and I welcome you to try my development times and new XTOL dilutions. I was not successful with Divided Development during this exercise, but I will review that specific process thoroughly during the winter months.

I discovered that TMY is very linear with XTOL, and I also discovered that my new method to reduce the film's highlights meant that my shadow details sank deeper into Zones that only a mother could love. This leads me to believe that I should change my TMY ISO rating for each reduction in processing time, which is not what I want to do manually now, so I shall save that review for a winter exercise. The dilutions and the times suit me well currently. As a side note, I also noticed that TMY has an unbelievable and extraordinary ability to retain detail within the weakest shadows that I could capture on a negative. Absolutely amazing…

Lastly, and for your convenience, I attached a PDF file containing my revised development times, and my revised dilutions regarding TMY and XTOL. I hope the PDF explains the development procedure well enough for everyone.

Please note that the development times have different dilutions…

Have fun if you decide to experiment with saturated highlights while using TMY and XTOL.

jim k