Push and Pull Processing
Longer development time produces negatives with greater contrast.  By increasing your development time by 10-25% you can get a negative with more contrast and more pronounced grain. 

Pushing film can also be used to compensate for over-rating a film’s ASA.  For example, you can use a 400 ASA film and rate it to 800.  The camera exposes the film as though it is faster than it is, thus underexposing it, so to get a printable negative, you will have to develop it longer. 

The amount of over development varies between films and developers. Most people use a 25-50% rule per stop.

Example chart for 400 speed films (Horenstein pg. 154):

Push to 800 means underexposed one stop, so overdevelop by 35-50%
Push to 1600 means underexposed two stops, so overdevelop by 75-100%

From digitaltruth.com:
PUSH PROCESSING (B/W)

These are general guidelines when no published development times are available.

To use this chart multiply the published time at recommended ASA by the factor in parenthesis (ie. If Tri-X rated at 400ASA is normally developed for 6 mins in a standard soup, then when Tri-X is pushed three stops to 3200ASA development would be: 6 x 4.5 = 27 mins).

Please use these recommendations as starting points only. In many cases these times will prove excessive, but when all else fails they can be a good guideline. Please note separate data for Tmax films.

Standard Developer
1 stop push = (x1.5)
2 stop push = (x2.25)
3 stop push = (x4.5)

Compensating Developer
1 stop push = (x1.4)
2 stop push = (x1.85)
3 stop push = (x2.5)

TMax Films
1 stop push = no change
2 stop push = (x1.33)
3 stop push = (x1.66)
*Compensating developers include Microphen, TMax, and any other developers which are specifically formulated for push processing.
 
 

© 2007 Ryan Even, all rights reserved.