Adjacency Effects

I posted an example of adjacency effects in the technical gallery at

http://www.apug.org/site/main/portal.php.

 

The original negative was a 6.5" X 8.5" BPF 200 negative developed

with stand agitation, i.e. with initial agitation for about 1.5

minutes at the beginning of the development period and no agitation at

all thereafter. The negative was made several years ago so I don't

recall all of the exposure details but development was in Pyrocat-HD

1:1:400 for about four hours. The scene was one which strongly favors

the production of adjacency effects with minimal adjacency procedures

and on the original negative the visual impact of both border and

fringe effects is quite extreme, much too great for normal pictorial

values.

 

For the creation of the .jpeg image a 6.5" X 4.5" section of the

original negative was scanned with the Epson 4870 at 4800 ppi, and

then reduced to the size requirements of the apug.org gallery. The

current pixel size on screen reduces significantly the visual impact

of the adjacency effects when compared to the original negative,

without however completely eliminating them. The visual impact of

viewing the border and fringe effects of this negative with a

microscope at about 60X magnification is quite impressive.

 

The original negative was scanned with no sharpening, and none was

subsequently done in Photoshop.

 

Sandy King

Sandy I'd **really** like to see a better scan as the one you posted <a href="http://tinyurl.com/2tbzh">here</a> is very hard to decipher.<P>Could you repost it larger / clearer as this is a subject that really interests me...<P>tkx...j

I don't know how to post a larger file to the gallerys at apug.org. The limitation on posting to the site was 650 X 650 pixels. The original file was on the order of 90 mb and in order to have it accepted at apug.org I had to downsize it to the point of despair.

 

However, for anyone interested and who can handle a file of the original size let me know and I will be glad to send it your way.

 

Or perhaps there is some other method of posting a larger file to apug.org gallery? If so please excuse my ignorance as this is the first time I have tried to post an image there.

 

Sandy King

I can see what you're going for, but I agree a bigger image would help a lot.

How about a direct link? I didn't see any gallery entitled 'Technical'.

 

Maybe you can just post the image here?

I often post two scans in that situation--one to show what the whole image looks like and then a detail at or close to maximum resolution to show something that is particularly interesting.

Direct link to image at apug.org is http://www.apug.org/site/main/album_page.php?pic_id=3022

 

Sorry, tried to place the image in the in the gallery section at photo.net but it is not as user friendly as the gallery at apug.org.

 

Sandy King

I can't really tell anything from that image. Where do you see adjacency effects? I really think a microscope is going to help here...

 

I guess I'm looking for the practical use of this information.

Sandy, you can post the image directly within this thread. After clicking on the "Submit" button you'll have the option to attach a file to your comments.

 

In the little "Filename" box click on the "Browse" button, find the photo image file you want to upload from your hard drive, and click on that file.

 

Then give it a caption, click on "Confirm", etc., etc. Done.

 

If you want the image to appear within the thread it can't be more than 511 pixels wide. (Well, actually, it can be but it takes a little HTML savvy and I'm trying to keep this simple.) But make your image as large as you think reasonable, tho' no more than the typical 1024x768 rez size for the typical PC monitor, please, and try to keep the file size to less than 200KB.

 

The large image will be attached as a clickable link. No problemo.

 

However, I can see the adjancy effects even in the smallish jpeg on APUG. Thanks for starting this thread. We talk about this stuff often but few of us have photos that demonstrate the effect so clearly.

Sandy on your post you say 4 hours? On the APUG info you say 2 hours?

Enquiring minds what to know. }:^)

 

What I would like is a discussion on when to use this technique. Why would you want to increase adjacency? Or is it just a consequence of

"stand development"? When is "stand development" necessary? ect.

OK, I am going to post the file here. Hopefully it will be easier to see the effects than at the apug.org. site. However, this is one of those images where you don't need a miscroscope at all to see the border and fringe effects as they are very visible on the negative even to the naked eye.

 

Sandy<div></div>

I have cropped a small part of the above image that hopefully will make the effects easier to see.

Gary wrote:

 

�What I would like is a discussion on when to use this technique. Why would you want to increase adjacency? Or is it just a consequence of "stand development"? When is "stand development" necessary? ect.

 

 

Yes, that makes sense. Unfortunately every time someone mentions adjacency effects the thread is immediately diverted to the issue of whether or not they even exist, or if so what causes them. The matter is really very complicated as there are in use many developers and some are much better than others at producing the effects, and in fact some developers will produce fairly good adjacency effects even with constant agitation. Other developers won�t produce them at all, even with stand development.

 

 

But this is the mechanism, or theory for the production of maximum adjacency effects. When film is developed in certain high acutance developers, especially in conjunction with reduced agitation procedures, the developer exhausts quickly in areas of high density and releases by-products which prevent further development in this area. This produces what are know as adjacency effects at the boundary areas between areas of lower and higher density, resulting in greater apparent sharpness. The effect is called the border effect when it involves fresh developer diffusing from an area of low exposure to one of higher exposure and creating a region of higher density at the border. It is called fringe effect when the products of development diffuse from a region of high exposure to an adjacent area of lower exposure and create an area of lower density. Border and fringe effects are sometimes referred to jointly as Mackie lines.

 

Certain developers, including Pyrocat-HD and FX-2, as well as some metol-ascorbate and phenidone-ascorbate developers, are capable of producing adjacency effects even with constant agitation but the effects can be much more pronounced when these high acutance developers are used with minimal agitation procedures. Stand development is the most extreme kind of minimal agitation and tends to cause uneven development so I don�t recommend it for general pictorial work. However, a good compromise between stand and constant agitation is minimal agitation, in which one divides the total period of development into four periods, with agitation for about one minute at the beginning and for ten seconds at the beginning of each of the other three periods. This kind of patterns generally assures even development with the production of maximum adjacency effects. The result is often, though not always, an increase in apparent sharpness. It is important to note that this is "apparent sharpness" because adjacency effects do not give a real increase in resolution or in information.

 

When to use procedures that maximize production of adjacency effects? One situation would be where there is a lot of surface texture and images with lots of juxtaposition of areas of shadows and highlights. When not to use these procedures? Not recommended for scenes with broad areas of even tones, such as skies with clouds, white buildings against the sky, etc. In these circumstances the development by products may cause uneven development as they flow across the surface of the film.

 

I would also add that adjacency effects are desirably primarily wehn one plans to print directly from the negative, either by contact or projection. In my opinion there is really no reason to maximize adjacency effects (since they really do not improve resolution or provide more information) if you plan to scan your negatives and print from a digital file. In this case you can just bump the apparent sharpness of the print using the unship mask in Photoshop.

 

Sandy King

I notice your image is quite soft, could the halo be an out-of-focus lens effect or motion blur?

Actually the image is very sharp when printed at contact print size, i.e. 6 1/2 X 8 1/2. As I mentioned I did not use any sharpening at all in scanning the negative or in adjusting it in Photoshop. The small cropped area that shows the adjacency effects is in fact only about 1/2 of an inch in width, and it is slightly out of focus since that part of the leaf twists backward with reference to the rest.

Sandy wrote, "Not recommended for scenes with broad areas of even tones, such as skies with clouds, white buildings against the sky, etc. In these circumstances the development by products may cause uneven development as they flow across the surface of the film."

 

What you really mean to say is "Development by-products may cause uneven development, when agitation is minimal, as they flow across the surface of the film and when used with subjects which have areas of even tones, the uneven development may be appearant."

 

The development of any film/subject may be uneven with minimal agitation, but it may not be noticed in subjects that don't have areas of even tone.

 

Sandy, is the mottled backgound of this photo showing uneven development, or is the background textured?

 

Kirk

Kirk,

 

The negative is very evenely developed, especially for pure stand development, so any irreglarities in the background are due to light reflections and surface texture on the background itself.

 

Other than the Mackie lines I don't see any development artificats on the negative that would suggest stand develpment.

 

Sandy

I have been standing my film in pyrocat-HD for about 6 months (No that's not my development time!) for all kinds of subjects and situations. I use 8x10 HP5+ in a BTZS tube. When compared to a negative that received non-stand development, the stand negative literally pops off of its base! The same goes with the print. I find that if there is a lot of texture and detail in the scene, this is where stand development can be utilized. If I have a large amount of sky or even tones in the scene I have found that by slightly decreasing the time between agitations, and by pulling the film out of the tube, inverting it and slipping it back in, these areas develop evenly. My 'normal' development time is 55 minutes with constant agitation for the first minute (tube, not cap is full of developer 5ml + 5ml + 1200ml distilled water) then 15 seconds at the halfway point. So, by slightly decreasing the time between agitition cycles I mean, 15 seconds every 20 minutes. This never worked for me in trays. I always had serious mottling or bromide drag or whatever it's called.

 

Sandy, perhaps it would have been better to show two prints of the same scene where one negative received stand and the other didn't. The difference would have been very clear.

Andrew,

 

Thanks for your comments.

 

Another procedure you could consider to counter uneven development with stand development with film in the tubes is to reverse the orientation of the tubes when you agitate. I recently developed some twenty sheets of 7X17" (also HP5+) film with extreme minimal agitation (one agitation period for one minute at the beginning, and then for ten seconds at the 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 points of development) using this procedure and they all developed evenly, even in the sky areas. I used a 1:1:150 dilution of Pyrocat-HD and developed for 45 minutes. (Bear in mind that I develop for a high CI for alternative printing so my dilution and development time would probably give too much contrast for your needs, assuming you are developing for normal silver printing). I developed three sheets at a time, each placed in its own 3" diameter PVC tube and all three of the tubes then placed in a Jobo 20X24" drum, used standing up of course. The drum contained enough solution to cover the top of the tubes. I just dropped the tubes into the drum and agitated each for a minute by lifting up and down in the solution, then I covered the drum and left them alone until the next agitation cycle, at which point I lifted the tubes out of the water and put them back in the opposite orientation. And same for the last two agitation cycles. This is really a very convenient way to develop because most of the time you can have the lights on and the total amount of time you have to tend to the film is very minimal.

 

This procedure works to counter the tendency of the film to develop to less density at the bottom of the tank/tube than at the top because the development by-products settle to the bottom and make the solution in this area slightly less active.

 

 

 

Sandy

A little tangential to the topic, stand development may present some risk of uneven development but not always.

 

Several times I've stand developed Tri-X in Rodinal at 1:200 for around two hours. There have been no problems with uneven dilution that are directly attributable to stand development.

 

However it is best to use stainless reels/tanks. The higher guide flanges of plastic reels can interfere with chemistry flow to the edges, producing uneven development at the edges - but confined to the edges. This is more a problem with medium format film, which has a very narrow strip of unexposed margin between the film edge and the exposed frame, and less a problem with 35mm film due to the wider unexposed margins over the sprocket holes.

 

I can't comment on true stand development with other developers - haven't tried 'em. I have frequently used prolonged intervals between agitations - up to three minutes between agitations - to enhance the compensation effect with Microphen. Again, no problems with uneven development, even with plastic reels.

Thanks Sandy!

 

I do take the film out of the tube and invert it but I never thought about changing the direction of spin.....I'll do that. I did notice the buildup of density on the bottom of the film. By pulling the film out, inverting and slipping back in solved that problem. Thanks for your advice and introducing me to pyrocat-HD!