Neopan Acros in Rodinal too contrasty: what am I doing wrong?

[r-brian]

I don't understand the stand developing at 1+100 dilution. When I first heard of stand developing, the dilution was 1+200 for an hour. I've done it this way a couple of times with fine results.

For Acros, my standard developing is 1+100 for 18 minutes @68*F with extended agitation times towards the end. The only dilution and time I know by heart, everything else I have to look up.

[Ronald Moravec]

Too much contrast is too long a time in developer. That simple. I would expose 6 frames , 12" of film", of a full tone range subject and start with 30 min and work up or down from there.

Further no film manufacturer recommends stand. You get streaking and sooner or later you will spoil your best shot. Work out a time with 10 sec per min agitation.

The best way to reduce contrast is more exposure and less development. 20% reduction for each stop of exposure over.

You can also double scan, one for highlights and once for shadows and combine in photoshop.

It is also possible to do HDR with film

[ParkerSmithPhoto]

However, when I scan them, they end up way too contrasty. The midtones are outweighed by the highlights and shadows, and everything looks like I shot it under an arc lamp.

If you want to go the scanning route, you should consider Diafine. Sandy King wrote an extensive article about Diafine for a scanning workflow and called it the "silver bullet." If you look at my fine art site, most of that work was done with Diafine. It's great stuff, and lasts forever.

[L Gebhardt]

Further no film manufacturer recommends stand. You get streaking and sooner or later you will spoil your best shot. Work out a time with 10 sec per min agitation.

That is great advice. I played with semi-stand development and found that it really did give incredible sharpness. But I couldn't keep the development even across the whole sheet of film (4x5). This was ok if there were no smooth areas like the sky in the shot. Unfortunately I did ruin a few good shots since I thought I had it worked out (why do the test sheets never show the problems?).

I now won't go with less than 10sec/min of agitation, and I have mostly gone back to the Jobo with continuous agitation for all films.I may try stand again, but only if I have taken a backup sheet of film.

[Gerald C Koch]

Stand development is useful in certain high contrast siluations but it was never intended to be a general purpose development method. This has been discussed many times before.

[Bertil]

I think I get nice Acros 120 film negatives, both for scan and enlarger, e.i. 50-100 iso, with Rodinal 1+50 (18-20° C) some 7-10 minutes, agitation first minute and 10-20 second each second and third minute (or 3-4 good agitations during the total developing time).
Scanning in 16 bits and expanding (perhaps narrow) indata to max utdata: 0-255, will handle also very contrasty highlights, according to my experience at least.
/Bertil