Film Development
510 Pyro & Pyrocat HD
510 Pyro And Pyrocat HD Test
Having just received a bottle of 510 Pyro developer, I was curious as to how it compared against my standard developer which Pyrocat HD.
This is my no means a scientific test, it was just more of a quick experiment to see how much of a difference there was between the two pyro based developers.
For the subject, I chose a very simple still life, no fancy lighting or props just a pair of mole grips and an egg.
The film was Fomapan 200 35mm rated at ISO 100 and the camera was a Pentax Spotmatic F with a Mirage telephoto lens.
I bulk loaded two rolls of film each having 7 frames on each and then exposed all 7 on one roll and then swapping out for the other roll and then developed one roll in 510 Pyro and the other roll in Pyrocat HD
The negatives were then scanned as Gamma 1.0 Linear scans using Vuescan as the software and then converted to a positive using ColorPerfect.
Apart from cropping the scan no further edits were done to either.
Looking at the egg, with the 100% crops, I think the Pyrocat has more micro-contrast. They both look equally sharp. There’s also a little more tonality with the Pyrocat. What do you think Ian?
I would tend to agree with you John on that one. I always find Pyro to excel with micro-contrast and I haven’t really got any explanation as to why that is
I find Pyrocat-HD excellent. I am finding with careful use 35that are a dream to print.mm is almost equal to MF when it comes to printing. After years of using every developer, looking for the “magic bullet” I have settled on this for sharp grainfree (almost) negatives
It’s subtle but there’s definitely a little something “extra” with the Pyrocat to my eyes