Rodinal - Reducing that Grain?

good morning and welcome to pictorial Planet one of my patrons recently sent me a formula for an additive for rodel the idea is that it might reduce the grain of rodel now some of us love the grain of rodel uh it's a particularly nice in medium format films but there's always that time that you might need to use your rodal with 35 mm or maybe a faster film with larger grain and you want to reduce that grain a little bit so I've come out here to Bro Castle to take a stream of photographs of the castle and then I'm going to test this little magic formula additive to see if it helps actually reduce that grain of rodol it's a useful thing to have on your dark room shelf if it works if it works I'll give you the formula if it doesn't we're going to move on and find something else that might work so let's crack on I'll get these photographs taken and here's our rodal and here is our grain reducer now just a bit more background about this um this Patron who sent me this information found this in a Cupboard and thought I'm going to try it just for fun anyway um it was kind of related to something I talk about in my book and so he tried it out and it worked he showed me examples and it looks like it works so hey you know what if somebody gives you a clue like that that something good might happen you should go and try it yourself I get a lot of people asking me hey John um could you try this for me could you try that for me well come on guys go out and try it yourself this is how you discover new things about photography about working in the dark room try it out yourself so I'm going to try out this rodal grain reducer so this is what I've done this is how I've developed the films today I used fp4 and I rated it at ISO 100 now I rated it at 100 because in regular rodinal that's what the rating is for me so I'm assuming it's going to be similar with the grain reducer but I haven't tested it so let's see what happens with 100 100 I developed at OnePlus 50 for 8 minutes using ilford agitation now that is the recommended the OnePlus 50 was the recommended dilution by the patron who sent me this information so I'm going to use the same dilution as him my 8 minutes is because that is the length of time that I like to develop at OnePlus 50 fp4 rated at 100 so that That's the basis of the experiment today I'm going to cut the film I'm going to develop half of it in regular straight 1plus 50 rodel and I'm going to develop the other part in 1plus 50 rodel with 10 Mill of this grain reducer added to 500 mL of diluted developer 10 mil to 500 mL that's what I'm going to going to do let's see how the negatives looked after development here are the negatives uh the top ones are the straight rodal 1l 50 8 minutes the bottom one is the rodal 1l 50 8 minutes with the addition of the grain reducer and straight away you can tell that the bottom negatives with the grain reducer have lower contrast they look less developed than these ones so definitely has affected the development of the film the next thing I need to do is scan these in so that I can see if there's being a change in the Grain and the grain structure now I'm not going to say if there's been an improvement in the grain because I like rodinal grain rodinal grain is a good thing but sometimes like we said in the introduction we might not want that grain if we're maybe using a hp5 with 35 mm we might want to reduce the the grain uh of our Rod not so it's going to be interesting we're going to scan these in have a look at the Grain and then I'm going to print and I'm going to print a regular 10x8 that I usually do to show you but I'm also going to print a part of a 12x 16 to see what it would be like if I blew up one of these negatives right up to 12x 16 in and that will see if it's possible to use FP 4 with rodel at such a large size some people would never do that because it's too grainy but I I've shown you in the past it's actually quite possible and this grain reducer might actually even help us so we'll have a look at that too let's crack on let's get over to the scans and have a look to see what they're like I've scanned in the negatives on the left hand side we can see the regular rodal and on the right hand side the rodel with grain reducer now I've tweaked the contrast slightly uh to balance the two pictures so um as we would if we scan something in um we would tweak the contrast and I've done that with these so that we can see a more similar picture uh of how we would we would really use this image of course there's a lot more I could do but I haven't done any more than that that's all I've done is just balance the contrast so I'm going to zoom in here and we'll have a look at the uh the two negatives so on the left the regular rodol is grainy of course it is it's always grainy and uh it's detailed sharp and grainy there's no doubt rodel has a nice look to it it always has a nice look to me it seems to Glow it seem the light bounces off things in a rodinal negative uh look at that the way it's bouncing off those windows if we compare that to the right hand side it doesn't look as bouncy as contrasty um as Sunny uh on the right as it does on the left and this is all to do with the shape of the curve uh of a developed negative in rodol um some films won't give you this but many many will and and I always have rodol on the Shelf because of that I like this developer so it's got a lovely glow to it there so what about the grain well immediately on the right hand side there's less grain I can see it's straight away it's not as grainy as this not at all let's move up to an area of the sky oh well I think you can see straight away there the difference is huge actually um I'm impressed this is the rotal Grain and this is um it looks more like a d76 grain um it's very reasonable um it's really reduced the grain at least in the scan that's impressive there is a difference in the the contrast of the negative it's a softer kind of look to it it looks sharp though it does look nice if you look at this tower on the left you can see there's a lot of contrast there you see that there's a darker side the dark on the shadow side it's quite a lot different from the right hand side it's very contrasty even the the tiles are showing a lot of contrast on the right hand side it's softer it's less Sunny is a good way of putting it I suppose but it's quite nice it's not um the it's quite pictorial actually someone asked me the other day in a question what did I mean by pictorial tonality and I said it is full tonality from Rich blacks right up to whites and everything in between no compression lovely wide tones so there's a lot of space in the tones uh and things move more gradually through your image in the tonality there's less hard contrast and this is more pictorial than than this uh you can see this is harder it's a harder image and this is a more picturesque image more of a painterly almost image it's very nice the details there you can see all the pebble Dash in the wall here this is more pronounced but then of course there's more grain and grain pronounces these things more um it also sharpens things grain so uh higher grain films tend to be sharper and so this is a bit softer in the sharpness because of the smaller grain but you know it's quite nice let's move along here if you looked at this one on the right having just come out of the developing tank you'd be very pleased with that that's a very nice a very nice picture if you hadn't seen the rodinal one on the left which is Punchy isn't it it's quite Punchy and hard contrast but this one is quite pictorial I would imagine some of you would prefer this I know um it looks more like an fx55 more like a d76 sort of image doesn't it yeah how interesting that the grain reducer does this all right enough of looking at the negative all blown up like this on the computer I'm not one for sitting in front of a computer all day I'd much rather be out taking photographs so let's go over to the print and have a look to see what that looks like first of all we are looking at the Rodin all straight and it's a lovely image I really like that print uh it's got that rodal glow which I like a lot um note the sky um it's picked up the cloud in the sky very well um it's a nice nice nice developer and what I like is that at 8 minutes you are you're not burning out the Highlight so um I think that the rodal times uh given in some places are way too high uh and so I um encourage you to experiment with rodol and bring the timing down and this would remind you is 8 minutes at one plus 50 and this here is the rodnor with the reducer the grain reducer and it looks lovely too doesn't it not much wrong with that now it's one grade higher so this is grade three and the straight rodel was grade two um but when we look at them together compare those like this we can see they're very similar with that gray difference I think there's more tonality actually in the rodol with the grain reducer I think you'll see that there's long ER tones in it it's not quite as contrasty um look for instance at the tower at the top there and you'll see what I mean that there's more tonality in the left in the grain reducer than there is in the other one now I'm looking at the Grain and I think the Rodell has a little more grain but we're going to see in a moment the difference I'm just going to let you have a good look at this print with the the grain reducer have a good look at that that's a nice print fp4 EI 100 8 minutes I think it could probably do with 9 minutes I would probably extend it to 9 minutes because that would bring that um gray down from 3 to 2 and A2 towards more towards two now let's look look at the blow up so I did these enlargements as though I was going to print at 12 by 16 now from a 35 mm negative that's a huge enlargement and here is the straight rodal so let's have a look at the grain of a 12x 16 print and then I'm going to bring in the one behind it and this is the grain with the reducer and I think there's quite a lot less grain which is very interesting look at that Grain on the right compared to the Grain on the left the grain seems softer on the left on the grain reduced one it seems a sharper Grain on the right more more distinct and it's softer on the left a little bit like a sulfite developer just a little bit it's obviously not a sulfite developer but it looks a little bit that way but there's quite different if we look at the flag area and look at that grain there and then I'll bring the other one in and there the grain there they're both lovely pictures I kind of like the paintly look of the rodn now I know I mentioned earlier that um long gradation long tonality is a a pain pictorial look but there's something also about this kind of charcoal painting effect that rodol has which is very attractive I really quite like it it is one of my favorite developers look at that beautiful and that's the grain reduced one and I think that's more tonal less hard very nice I'm impressed tell me what you think tell me what you think about these two pictures do you think that that grain has been reduced or do you think it just looks different do you think that the tonality is different and which do you prefer do you prefer the grain reduced version or do you prefer the rodal version straight rodel let me know in the comments below I'd be really interested for your feedback on these two pictures and thanks very much for watching it was a bit of fun this week just to try this thing out and I I thank you for bearing with me and watching through this I will put up the formula now of how you can make your own grain reducer and you can try it yourself at home and I encourage you everything I do on my Channel Try It Yourself try it out have a go see how it is for you you'll come up with ideas that I haven't thought of and I love that and I help you share them with me and we can share them with the world so thanks very much for watching thank you for my patrons for supporting me to do this work and thank you for all of you who buy my book I really appreciate that and I will see you for a tip on Friday bye for now [Music]

Channel: Pictorial Planet

Views: 3,557

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Id: nXPw0xm8xUQ

Length: 16min 53sec (1013 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 17 2024