FX55 Developer Two-Bath Part 1

hello and welcome to pictorial Planet my name's John Finch today we're diving deeper into fx55 and we're going to look at how to use it as a two bath it's a two-part Series today we're going to look at using it as a two bath and next week I'll hope to have more uh test results for you to see if it's working or not but we will have a glimpse today at whether we think that it's worth pursuing this method now that all sounds very strange doesn't it and that's because this method was actually promulgated by Jeffrey Crawley back in 2002 when fx50 was released by Patterson I don't have any fx50 instructions and if anybody out there does have fx50 instructions please can you contact me and send me a picture of them or a PDF of them if you've got them I would love to see them the information I'm using today comes from another source let's have a look at it Shutterbug magazine released a review of Patterson fx50 and this review was written by Roger Hicks now Patterson had just released fx50 developer onto the market in around 2002 and this article came out in September of 2002 so in this article Roger Hicks describes the new developer fx50 he talks about its qualities and he describes how to develop with it and one of the things he talks about is using it as a two bath developer he explains that in the instructions for fx50 it describes two methods of using this developer as a two bath it's one of those methods I'm going to be describing to you today now why would I be using a method for fx50 developer two bath for FX 55 well for the answer to that we have to talk about what happened to fx50 here is a timeline of Patterson developers and I'll give you a link to the this Below in the description to this video in fact the link will take you to this page and then you will be able to find and read the Shutterbug magazine article on fx50 for yourself now as we can see down in the bottom right hand corner we can see the timeline for fx50 developer and it starts in 2002 and they stopped uh production in 2007 one year later September 2008 is when Crawley released the formula for fx55 I believe that that formula is very similar to fx50 now I'm not saying it's exactly the same I'm sure there were U substantial differences for production however the basic concept the basic idea the basic chemistry is probably very similar so I believe that this two bath method for fx50 might work with fx55 and that's what we're going to do right now I've prepared everything for the two bath developer test I have 500 mlit of developer at 20° centigrade I have 250 ml of water at 35 Centigrade um I have the film ready in here I have my timer ready and I have a measuring jug to help me later on I'll need that but before I start let's back up a bit and see this from a high level view of what I'm going to do yes before I start to demonstrate this it's probably better to see it from 10,000 ft so on the left hand side of this chart here you'll see regular development and for me fx55 with fp4 plus is 7 minutes with ilford agitation on the right hand side is what I'm going to demonstrate here and that's my fx55 fp4 two bath system now Crawley said that you should develop as normal for half the development time so that would be 3 and 1 half minutes so in it goes 20 Cade I do my normal development for 3 and 1 half minutes at that point at the halfway point you empty out the developer into a graduate you then discard half of the developer then you add the same volume of water at 35° Centigrade now let's just back up a touch you've just discarded half the developer so if I've if I've got say 500 mil of developer that I've been using for the first half of development I just toss 250 mil that leaves me 250 mil of developer left in The Graduate I then add 250 mil of water at 35 Centigrade so I have half the dilution of the developer and I've also increased its temperature haven't I because this water was 35 Centigrade so now I've I've half this dilution with this um warmer developer and I return it straight back into the developing tank and I continue to develop the film for 34 of the development time now I think that means I don't have the fx50 instructions but I think what Roger Hicks was meaning was you add 3/4 of the development time now onto your development and continue so I would develop for 5 minutes and 15 seconds longer that's 3/4 of 7 minutes we're going to have a look at the results today of that and then I'm going to do some more testing this week and next week we're going to look again and see if I can decide if there's a different way of doing this because my interpretation might be incorrect maybe I should only be developing for a total of 3/4 of the development time okay that was the high level view you've got this on your screen you can pause the video write that down if you want let's jump back to my development now that you're more familiar with what's going to happen it should be helpful so everything's ready and I'm going to start my development so I get my 500 mlit of fx55 full strength and pour it in in she goes and I'm going to start the development and as I said I use ilford agitation which to me is agitate gently for the first 30 seconds like so this is to fully soak the film and really get that developer into the Emulsion and then after 30 seconds a couple of really good wraps on the uh the tabletop that gets any bubbles off the film and any that are inside the Reel will float to the surface and then on the minute I'm going to start my ilford 1 minute agitation here we go couple of wraps and then I'll agitate again on the next minute now I'll fast forward the video to the part where we're going to do our two bath we're at the 3 minute point now so I'm preparing now for my two bath part I have an empty uh jug here which I'm going to pour all the developer into I'll pour half of the developer into this developing jug so 50 mil and then I'll add this water which is 250 mil at 35 CRA so here we are halfway point here we are that's the first part in there's 250 mil here goes my 250 mil of hot water 35 centigrade and straight back into the developing tank I'm going to restart the clock and I'm going to give it a good agitation now just to make sure that that developer is all mixed up thoroughly there and I will now continue to agitate on the minute for around about three uh AG ation around about 7 or 8 seconds that takes me and I'm going to continue until 5 minutes and 15 seconds and at 5 minutes and 15 seconds I will uh stop the film and I will fix the film let's have a look what those negatives look like here are the negatives on the light table and the ones on the bottom are straight fx55 development for 7 minutes and the ones on the top here are the two bath development they look so similar there's not a great deal of difference it's very hard to tell on the video I think but I'm looking at them here I think that these two bath ones are slightly less contrasty which I would expect if there's been some compensation from the two bath development but there's not a great deal of difference so it's going to be really interesting to print these to see how it looks now this is my house and the walls are bright white and so that's going to be really interesting if we can see any difference with prints of the wall there's also a very faint cloud in the sky above the house in both of these and so it's going to be interesting to see if it shows up more with the compensated two bath development method this is a really interesting experiment so I'm going to crack on now and scan these in show you the scans and then let's make a print together of each here are the two negatives on the left hand side is the fx55 regular development on the right hand side is the two bath development let's zoom in and just have a look at the difference is so straight away the two bath is sharper look at that tree it's very sharp indeed it's slightly less sharp in that for sure there's a marked increase in sharpness with two bath development and that is a surprise for me looking here again it's sharper with two bath than not now let's get this in context this left hand side this regular fx55 is very sharp I mean it's not wanting for sharpness at all it's an acutance developer and it's sharp but the right hand side two bath is slightly sharper ah and look at the cloud here you can definitely see the cloud more on the right hand side with the two bath development there's it's more obvious there's a cloud there definitely left obvious with regular development so it has compensated we can see that these were taken within seconds of each other so that cloud didn't move this is actually something we can see of a difference with the compensation it's not a great deal though is it it's surprisingly little for what we've done it does look slightly less contrasty with the two bath than regular but the regular is very good fascinating I'm now going to go and print these and see what it's like in prints will we see a difference on paper let's have a look and here are the prints the first one we'll look at is a regular print of the regular development so this is just the straight 7 Minutes in fx55 it's printing at grade two uh which is very nice I'm getting detail in the highlights which is nice the sun was bouncing off that white so it's done very well has the fx55 indeed and looking up here we have some Cloud here a little bit and actually you can see in the print you can see a little bit of that cloud above the house there that I talked about it's a nice print and this is a wonderful development for developer for skies look at that Sky there's no filter uh there's no manipulation of this print at all it's a straight print on the enlarger at grade two I haven't dodged or burned anything so it's a nice print it's a lovely developer let's have a look at the compensation in the two bath if there is any so doesn't it look similar oh the cloud is maybe a little bit more visible we'll compare the two in a moment and there you can see but it doesn't look a lot does it it's not particularly different I would expected a little more if I had had a successful two bath compensation so I don't think we're getting everything we might want in this two bath nice detail in those highlights straight gray two print no dodging no burning yeah there's definitely a little bit more cloud in that Sky let's just put the two together uh if I can get the two Skies there let's try that there have a look can you see the one above is the two bath the one below is the straight print and I think you can see the sky is a bit darker with the two baths so there's been an element of compensation but not a lot I don't know I'm not sold on this method yet but maybe I'm doing it wrong if you have the instructions for fx50 anywhere could you please send me a copy photograph it so I can read it or PDF it or send it through the post I'd be very grateful and this week I'm going to do more experiments around this and next Monday we'll be looking at more two bath goodness with f PEX 55 thanks for watching everybody please give me a thumbs up subscribe to the channel and thank you to all the people who buy my book and all my patrons it's you guys that bring this channel to everybody every single week so thank you all so much for that goodbye for now [Music]

Channel: Pictorial Planet

Views: 1,464

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Id: O9_5jrn1THw

Length: 17min 23sec (1043 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 29 2024