Intitial Prescysol Impressions

I had a chance to run a few types of emulsions through Peter Hogan's

Prescysol this weekend. I broke with my usual initial testing and

simply shot some 120/6X7 film (Neo 400, HP5+ and FP4+). It was a

mixed bag of some soccer game shots and some grab shots of my son and

friends as they went off to Fall Formal. Part of why I'm posting such

limited info is that I found nothing when I went looking and thought

this might spur some others' experiences, too.

Quick observations:

Nice, tight grain (relatively fine) pattern.

Good highlight control and easily printed midtones. Beautiful skin tones.

I inadvertently overexposed one roll by 1 stop (late day fill flash)

and found that these frames were easier to dial in and print. The

info with the developer speaks of getting full, stated film speed but

my limited little episode tells me I'm likely not getting that with my

equipment and techniques. On the other hand, I had left my normal

meter at home and was using the camera meter (P67, which is okay, but

I'm an incident guy and think/see in incident mode).

I'll do some more formal testing and plot some curves, both straight

and color channel when I get a chance. I found that it printed better

on cold tone papers than warm and also needed a hit in the selenium to

bring the "sparkle" into the prints. I like its simplicity and used

the 10.5 minute, partial stand, single bath method in the supplied

instructions. I used TF-4 as he suggests, keeping the process

alkaline and the films cleared nicely with an extended time

soak/dumping, followed by a gentle water flow.

One quirk noted was that the emulsion swelling seemed more pronounced

while the film was drying than I am accustomed to but when dry,

everything had stabilized nicely again. It was alarming to see this

after the film had been hanging for 1.5 hours. I was interrupted

during the presoak, so there is a chance that this was the cause, too.