Digital BW, The Print

Brian Ellis wrote:

> "I used pyro on a couple of films a while back and while I was
> impressed with the lack of grain in areas of continuous tone (sky
> etc.) I found the grain quite exagerated in other areas compared to
> some other developers"
>
> I performed extensive testing comparing pyro to D76 several years ago. 
> My basic procedure was to make duplicate negatives of various scenes, 
> develop one in pyro (PMK) and one in D76 1-1 using lford HP5+ film, 
> then making prints from both. I found no advantage  to the pyro prints 
> in the sense that identical prints could be made from either set of 
> negatives. I concluded that even if there happens to be some scene 
> somewhere that could be photographed and better processed in pyro, for 
> the vast majority of scenes pyro just wasn't worth screwing around with.

I came to the same conclusion -- that pyro just isn't worth it. Not by 
doing the experiments myself, but by hearing results from you and a 
bunch of others who had done the experiments.

I ended up using XTOL at 1:3 with Tri-X. I compared it extensively to 
HC-110 and exchanged some email the inventors of XTOL and Steve Anchell. 
My conclusion was that you didn't really start to see differences 
between film developers in prints until you got up to around 15x 
enlargements. Since I'm shooting 5x4, I never make prints with anything 
like that much enlargement.

I ended up with XTOL because it gives a nice clean sharp image with 
decent grain (not too big, nicely formed), and nice even tonality. That, 
and it gives me 2/3 stop more real film speed, and it's way more 
environmentally friendly than the others, especially the pyro family.

And I should note that Tri-X with XTOL is really easy to scan well. It 
scans well on a cheap flatbed like an old Epson 2450, and it scan really 
well on my drum scanner. And because the negative isn't colored like a 
pyro negative is, I can easily scan it with just the green channel which 
saves me a bunch of disk space and workflow time.

So the closest I got to pyro was to buy the nitrile gloves. People who 
use pyro swear by it though, so clearly YMMV.
--
Bruce Watson