What do underdeveloped negatives look like

After a lot of experience making contact prints, you should eventually be able to tell improperly exposed negative film from just looking at it.

But the contact print is still the better tool. Aside from snapshots, I never did a lot of color negative film so don't know if the process would be different. But drugstore prints from underexposed color negative film tend to be low contrast and grainy if memory serves me correctly. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams?

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This is an excellent answer: thoughtful, clear, and comprehensive. Just a note: A negative that is visibly thin or visibly blocked will tell you when the neg is severely out-of-range.

Being just a little off shows up in contrast. Since the deep shadow areas develop as far as they're going to develop very quickly, the time in the bath mostly affects the highlights.

Your idea of agitation is different than mine. Do you start the timer when you first start pouring the developer in, or when you are done pouring, do you include the luring out time? The charts are only a starting point. Every single person's times will be different. The other thing is that if you are going to suggest a different developer, why not suggest a better one.

HC and D are very mediocre developers. To go up in quality, try some XTol or some Pyro variation. I agitate continuously for the first minute, 5 sec every 30 sec for 5 minutes, and continuously for the last minute. CoryAmmerman , May 18, I do the same thing as Cory and it works well for me as well.

Your agitation regime is, to my mind, a little over-enthusiastic so that isn't the problem. If anything, that would give you more density and contrast. Is your TMax developer concentrate fresh - or has it gone off with age? Is your dilution correct? Is your thermometer accurate? Another way is if one has two thermometers that read different develop film for the manufacturers starting point time at a given temperature with each thermometer.

Similar exposures will be necessary on both test films to evaluate the results easily. It does not matter if they are. I think you're method is reasonable, however, if one's sample size is only three, its statistically quite possible that two of them could be the ones that are wrong Also, I would say that I would never suggest developing film at the manufacturer's recommendation.

I wouldn't take their word for it. One might do the first roll at what they recommend, then see how the film comes out If the highlights are too dense, then the time was too long. And vice versa, of course. The results run horizontally with a row of underexposed, correctly exposed and over exposed negatives. Looking down the columns you'll underdeveloped, correctly developed and overdeveloped. The ideal result is the one in the middle. When a film is underexposed the negative will have a pale see through appearance.

These transparent areas will appear black on the print, but the brightest highlight areas will still have detail. A correctly exposed film will have detail in all but the brightest and darkest areas of the negative, while a overexposed negative has a dense grey look with lots of black areas producing a washed out print.

An underdeveloped film can easily be confused with an underexposed negative because both are thin, but the underdeveloped version will still have some detail in shadow areas. A correctly developed film will produce negatives with plenty of tonal range and punchy prints. An overdeveloped film produces rich black negatives that print with too much contrast and increased grain. Visit our Competitions Forum, where you'll find our monthly competition and other external competitions to enter.

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