need to retrieve underdeveloped negs

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I exposed a roll of T Max 400 as instructions and the negs are very low contrast. Is there anything i can now do as i thought this film was supposed to be naturally high contrast.

-- stephie d (stephie9000@hotmail.com), September 27, 2001

Answers

TMax films are not "high contrast" films, but normal contrast. They can achieve higher contrast with over development, but nothing like a true high-contrast film (litho film).

Possible remedies:

First, try high contrast papers/filtration. This may be good enough. Ansel Adams used Oriental Seagull Grade 4 for some of his "problem" negatives and said it gave him better prints than any other paper he'd used, so that's definitely worth a try. Besides, Seagull is a nice paper.

Another approach is to make a copy negative and develop that to a high contrast. Or make a normal copy negative and intensify it (see below).

Finally, if neither of those gets you what you want, you can intensify the negative. This is permanent, so definitely make a copy negative before you try it if the image is important, and you can only use one of the various intensifiers, as far as I know--that is, after you've done one you can't go back and do another. (You could make a normal copy contrast copy negative, and intensify it to see if that works.) For a slight contrast increase, selenium toner can be used. For greater contrast increase there are other intensifiers. Get Steve Anchell's Darkroom Cookbook for the formulas. Photographer's Formulary sells insensifier kits, if I remember right, if you don't want to do it from scratch.

-- Charlie Strack (charlie_strack@sti.com), September 27, 2001.


Note that TMY is NOT EI:400, but EI:320. Make development time tests.

-- Michael Fraser (mdfraser@earthlink.net), September 29, 2001.

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