Pulling Ilford HP5 Plus 400 ISO film to 12 ISO. Possible?

Hi
By mistake I exposed Ilford HP5 Plus 400 as ISO 12 :-(

Do you have any idea how to rescue that film? It means how develop it.

greetings

JW

You might try Perceptol stock. The time for EI 200 is 11 mins. You've managed 4 stops less than 200 so you might try, say 30% less than 11 mins

I'd cut off the first few negs and develop them as above and then go from there.

Just curiosity on my part but how did you manage to dial in 5 stops less than the box speed?

pentaxuser

Yeah I've pulled film more than that, you just need to settle on a time and dilution, which means a test roll.

If it's critical stuff, shoot a different roll at that rate, test on that.

Why not go Rodinal or HC110 at a 1:100 dilution and let it stand for 30 minutes? IMO, this is a minimum risk dilution/time.

Just develop it about 30%-50% less than you usually do and get ready for a dense negative. You will have some grain but with multicontrast paper it should print fine.

I have overexposed Tri-X by 9 stops (f/2 @ 1/30th in broad daylight) and still got pretty crunchy, but still recognizable, negative.

As you know you can't alter the exposure already given to the negatives during the development stage. You will find when you print these negatives it will be similar to printing very underexposed negatives. The typical under exposed negative, when printed so the middle values are correct, will have no blacks. Likewise when printing your overexposed negatives for a correct middle value there will be no whites. The whites will be gray. Similarly if you print the whites as white, they middle values will be way too light.

The same way you can't really push film to any great degree, you can't pull it to any great degree. If you simply underdevelop a lot you will lose too much contrast. A speed decreasing developer might give you about a stop less speed, but I would not use Perceptol to do this because you're going to have a grainy negative in any case, and Perceptol will just make it mushy grain.

Whatever developer you use, you might try reversing the procedures we normally when we try to maximize speed and reduce contrast. Dilution of the developer and intermittent agitation with a longer development time helps maximize speed for a given contrast level. So reversing this logic, you might consider a more concentrated dilution, with a shorter development time and continuous agitation. Testing would be required to find the right time so if this roll is really important do some testing on spare rolls first.

In any case you'll still end up with a dense negative. The goal here is to try to get fairly normal contrast, and hopefully highlight detail assuming the highlights were not exposed beyond the scale of the film.

A couple of years ago i exposed a couple of sheets of HP5+, while my meter was still set to the 25 iso needed for the P55n in used in the previous shoot. After considering the alternatives - the drop in contrast because of a reduced development or a dense negative - i decided on a 10% shorter development time and accept the dense negative. It took some effort to print them, but i was still able to get decent results, with very good shadow detail indeed.

I forgot to mention that it was film Ilford film 13x18cm in my LF camera. I just swapped cassettes by mistake. That's all