FX55 Developer Two-Bath Part 2 - Do Traditional Techniques Work?

hello and welcome to victorial Planet my name is John Finch last week We examined using fx55 as a two bath I have the two prints here after they've dried down and I think you can see there was a bit of an effect last week using the Crawley technique for two bath on the left is the regular print on the right is the two bath Crawley print and if you look in this area here particularly in this very light area of the two prints you can see there has been some compensation on the right hand side it's very slight but it's there and there's more detail in that white wall um it's very hard to tell though there's not a lot and it might be printed slightly darker if I'm looking at the roof and it's slightly darker on the right hand side isn't it so we're talking about I don't know a 12th of a stop or something difference there very little amount but there's definitely something looking like compensation going on but I wasn't convinced that this was the way forward I wasn't convinced that this was the best technique to use for two bath so this week I'm going to be investigating more traditional two bath techniques now traditional two bath techniques let's just talk about what they are so here we see three traditional two bath techniques we have the stoker the Heinrich stoker formula two bath the anel Adams two bath sometimes called divided d23 although it technically is not a divided developer it's a two bath and thon's highdefinition two bath one of my favorites an excellent two bath developer let's see what technique they're using to create this two bath so look at stoker he has something quite similar to d23 just slightly less metti and he uses that in the first bath and then he empties it out does not wash or stop the film and goes straight into pouring in bath B which in his case was a Borox solution a 1% Borox solution that's 10 G in in a liter is 1% now looking at Adams Adams to Bath he used standard d23 which was one of the developers he liked and in bath B he used a metaborate or codal as they used to call it 1% solution so similar to stoker although his uh bath B was slightly more alkaline and here here's Thornton's high definition two bath which is a more modern two bath and Thornton used something similar to d23 slightly less metl and definitely less sulfite and his bath B was his sodium metab borite 1.2% and He adjusted this amount depending on whether he wanted more or less contrast in the film and there's more information in my book about this developer I talk about it a little bit so interesting isn't it they're all using regular developers really as bath a and development will happen in bath a in these three cases if I was just to use bath a on a film and if I was to develop it long enough I would have a fully developed film but what we do is we reduce the time in bath a so it's not going to be fully developed and then we pour it out and we pour in bath B and we agitate as nor often I would recommend every minute a little agitation I give it one agitation every minute so that's our bath B how can we utilize this technique perhaps with our fx55 well we can and it works let's have a look so I'm preparing to demonstrate using this two bath technique with fx55 I have a graduate bath egg which is regular fx55 developer this is just a standard working developer that I would use for any film with fx55 and I have a bath B here and what I've done here is I've made a 1% solution of sodium metaborate now you may want to try this with Borox that would probably work as well and you may even get finer grain um so I've got loads of s metaborate so I've used that it used to be called codal and we've seen that uh a couple of the formulators we've seen earlier use this as their B bath so I think it's a a very good way of going forward so there we have our two ready bath A and B I've got my film ready here and I've got a stop and a regular fix ready now what I'm going to do is I'm going to try 5 minutes in a and 5 minutes in B and the reason is and I'll show you later I've tried 4 minutes in a and b previously and I find them to be a little bit thin and maybe not as good actually um as a two bath so I'm using five and five minutes now why five minutes where did I come up with that from well the idea was there's a traditional way of using any developer as a two bath now when I say any developer I'm talking about a phenidone or a metl hydroquinone developer one of those like d76 d23 and others like that and that is to do 34 of your development in the regular developer and then put it for the same length of time in a b bath uh at least 4 minutes in a b bath like this and that makes any developer into a two developer and it works quite well so you could try this with um DDX you could try this with extol it works well for all of these developers just make a 1% solution of sodium metaborate for a b bath and use this technique so I've got my film ready I'm not going to pre-rinse it I tend not to do that when I'm using two bath it probably would be okay but it's warm enough in the dark room and I don't like uh using it with two baths I don't know why it's just like a traditional thing in me um and when I use Barry Thornton's two bath I don't use it and I always get excellent excellent results so I'm very happy with that technique so I've got my timer ready yep she's ready to go I've got my a and my B and I'm going to do 5 minutes which is 3/4 of the development time of fp4 and then I'm going to do another 5 minutes in this solution let's get started in goes my regular FX 55 and I start my timer and I'm going to carry on and develop this for 5 minutes using absolutely standard technique of fx55 so that would be ORD agitation at 20° centigrade let's find fast forward this to the 5 minute point so we're coming up to the 4 minute point now and I'm giving its 4 minute agitation and I've got my bath be ready now the important thing to remember is that we don't wash or stop this film between bath A and B we just pour bath a out and we pour bath B in and we give it a couple of gentle agitations and then we leave it again for a minute and we go back to our agitations every minute I was going to say before I get to the five minute point that one developer that probably won't work with metaborate as a bath B would be pyro cat um or any of the Pyro catagen developers because they need a higher pH to to work well pyro gallal like d uh uh sorry like 510 pyro would probably work with this technique although I have never tried it so here we are we're at our 5 minutes but I pour out the fx55 developer and discarded and then I pour straight in my 500 mL of 1% metaborate give it a couple of gentle agitations and then we leave it and we'll go back to our one minute agitations now on the minute for a further 5 minutes and I'm using five minutes for bath B only because it matches bath a and it's a nice even number five and five 5 minutes is probably all you need to do for bath B so whatever the time for your bath a whatever your 3/4 of regular development time for bath a use 5 minutes for bath B okay so we're coming up now there we are on the minute just give it a couple of gentle agitations you don't want to over agitate this you want to gently agitate the reason it's working now is because there was developer in the film Emulsion from Bath a and bath B is accelerating that developer to work and in the highlights it's wasting quickly and stopping working so the highlights are being held down whereas the rest of the zones the lower zones are continuing to develop as normal so when it gets to 10 minutes I'm going to keep agitating every minute until 10 minutes and then I will stop and fix the film and we'll have a look at the negatives these are all the negatives we've been using so far in our tests so let me just explain them here are the regular fx55 development negatives fp4 and fx55 for 7 minutes down here we have the crawly two bath method that I showed last week here is the two bath technique we're showing today this is 5 minutes plus 5 minutes and this is 4 minutes plus 4 minutes and I did that test as well just to see just to have a comparison I've made prints of these so we can look at them together and compare them and as you can see the two top two are pretty similar in density uh which is interesting um and then these are a little thinner in density 5 + 5 is a little thinner than the regular and the two bath and 4 + 4 is a little thinner again but I've scanned all these and they all scan very well indeed something that's interesting is that as we've gone down this two bath path the grain has been getting smaller and smaller and yet the sharpness has been maintained so if it's ultra fine grain you're after we're looking at these techniques to get the finest grain you can with fx55 and it's very fine it's quite hard to focus under they enlarge of the grain is so fine so that's really interesting uh and we haven't lost any of the sharpness so the acutance is still there it's still keeping everything really lovely and sharp which is something I like about Crawley developers they're they're sharp developers they're lovely developers they don't ever get mushy and even this technique has kept them bold and sharp so this is great let's see what these are like print and see if we can see if there's been any more compensation because as you know you're going to use a two bath for two techniques probably or two reasons I should say one is because your film has multiple different um contrasts through the film lots of different contrasts on the negatives and you don't know which to develop for so you may use the two bath technique because it will develop all of those frames as best it can almost individually it does that it it's really kind of looking at every silver particle every uh silver haly that's been uh that's been exposed and it's developing it optimally as best it can a tu bath so it's sort of um anel Adams inside your developing tank doing each negative independently the other reason you might do this is to compensate you may have a very contrasty scene which this is is I mean this is a white walled house with the sun bouncing off it and yet some deep Shadow around it so there's a lot of contrast in these negatives and the two bath technique should take care of that contrast it should lower the high zones a little bit to to bring them under control and allow easy Printing and I add these print very easily so this is a good technique if that's what you're trying to do as well let's look at the scans first I've scanned in the negatives on the left hand side you can see I've got the straight fx55 7 Minute development and on the right hand side we're looking at the 5 minutes plus 5 minutes to Bath that I've just demonstrated they're very similar aren't they and this is the problem um of trying to compare things with scanned negatives because the software in the scanner it um just pulls all the data from that negative compiles it and puts it up like that and they look so similar don't they even though the right hand side um is done in the two bath let's zoom in and have a look here at the sharpness so looking at the sharpness they're very close but I think you'd agree the right hand side the two bath is slightly sharper than the left but it's so difficult because there's detail I think in this part of the chimney that isn't in this part just a very slight enhancement of detail in the regular development and what we're seeing here is just how good fx55 regular development is it's such a well balanced formula that it creates beautiful negatives and it's just so well balanced we're not being able to see much difference even when we're playing around trying these different techniques because it developed that negative so well with the regular formula that it didn't need a two bath but on the right hand side it's may be very slightly sharper I don't think you'd ever no notice it if you didn't put the two together I'm going down here and in the scan I see the regular development on the left here at the drain pipe is slightly lighter than the one on the right now if I didn't think the scanner was doing any kind of manipulation at all to the exposure of this slide I would say that we had a better film speed with the regular development than the two bath so basically the two bath is um slowing the film down a tad but don't believe a word because this is a scan and I can't tell I can't know for sure that the scanner hasn't done that itself I scanned both of these very flat so I didn't do any tweaking to the contrast at all in the scan moving along here they're both so similar and seeing the same details in the harling the white harling the door here the door handle is slightly sharper on the right but again it could be something in the scan I used um a really um my negative carrier in my scanner is uh glass so it holds the negative absolutely flat so it's not that one was bowed and one wasn't they're both absolutely flat so similar very similar indeed so hard to tell as a scanner if I would use the two bath I can't see really much difference the cloud here is very faint you probably can't see it on your screen it's there it's very faint and it's not really much different um in the two bath so let's see if I can just pull up the um 4 + 4 there's the 4 + 4 on the right now so we were looking at the 5 + 5 and now we're looking on the right at the 4 minutes plus 4 minutes and I tried this just to see if there would be much difference but again in the scan it's difficult to actually say there's a great difference there's maybe more contrast on the right hand side which is surprising because it should be less contrast so I think it's the scanner playing with um maybe the density um sorry the exposure slightly again it's bit darker here on the drain pipe both these photographs were taken at exactly the same time I ran the film through at high speed um on that one shot so they're both identical so it just looks like the right hand side is very slightly darker has has slightly more contrast in the scan probably nothing in the negative so the best thing for us to do of course is to have a look at a print a real print from an enlarger to see what the difference is there here is the original 7 Minute developed fx55 and it's a very nice print and very sharp it's a lovely print and here is today's two bath and it's a 5 plus 5 minute I'm showing you first just like I did with the scans and there is a difference it has definitely compensated now if you look to the right hand side of the door well in fact even the door it's very slightly darker we're talking a small amount but it is darker and I've got these prints as close as I can in exposure but it shows me that I believe this compensation technique has worked it's not a great deal but I think it's worked let's Zoom right in here and we'll have a look at that end wall of the house so I get the best lighting I can on this there we are the end wall of the house and then we'll have a look at this one and I think you'll agree there's more detail in the harling now I've printed many of these now and I definitely am convinced there's more detail in the harling so it's brought down that high zone of the white wall it's brought it down here's the regular again look at this harling here look at this area here and then I'll bring in the other one and look how much more detail there is so it has worked the two bath has worked now let's have a look at the 4 minutes and 4 minutes one same thing metaborate 1% but this time only 4 minutes there is more detail that's the 4 plus4 and here is the regular development I mean they're both very good aren't they there's no doubt this is a great developer but there is more detail out there so if it's compensation you want I would recommend this technique of using this 1% metab bore rate and try 1% Borox I haven't got Borox in so I can't try that but I think it's worked let me pull the 5 minute one my favorite is the 5 minutes there see all that detail that's coming come out in fact there's more stuff on that wall than I can see when I go outside I mean it sounds funny that but I hadn't noticed it until I looked at this Photograph and then I went out and had a look at the wall and sure enough that's what it looks like so very interesting there's the original again I'm holding it as still as I can for you so you've got a a good you can have a good look at that and then bring this in for you there 5 minutes plus 5 minutes this time and that is my combination so if I want to do compensation with fx55 that's how I'm going to do it it's a nice picture it's sharp look at that look at that chimney it's lovely looks like I've got some spotting to do next Monday we're going to look at fx55 diluted I'll see you then give me a thumbs up up subscribe to my channel why not become a patron and support these videos thank you very much for watching Everybody 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Channel: Pictorial Planet

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Id: jf1-1SiNTKA

Length: 24min 20sec (1460 seconds)

Published: Mon May 06 2024