# The TRI-X 'look'...



## Ivan Muller (Mar 6, 2014)

This year marks the 60th anniversary of Kodak's iconic Tri-X film, still being used by a number of famous photographers. Here is a couple of my images converted to the 'Tri-X' look.

More of my 'Tri-X' B&W images can be seen here at :http://thelazytravelphotographer.blogspot.com/2014/03/eos-6d-review-part-3-homage-to-tri-x.html


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## neuroanatomist (Mar 6, 2014)

I shot and developed many, many rolls of Tri-X 'back in the day'... 

Here's a shot I took at the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia:

_"Toward the Light"_



EOS 1D X, TS-E 24.0mm f/3.5L II, 3.2 s, f/14, ISO 100 (Processed as Tri-X with DxO FilmPack)


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## Drizzt321 (Mar 6, 2014)

I love me some Tri-X. Discovered it when I started shooting 120 film this past year. Don't have any handy, but if I remember I'll pull out some scans when I get home


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## slclick (Mar 6, 2014)

Then again, you could also post a photograph made with Tri-X....

Gilgal gardens,shot in the rain, Salt Lake City, UT. Canon Elan 7, Tri-X, Ilford Multigrade lV paper


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## mackguyver (Mar 6, 2014)

When I got married, I found a photographer who was willing to give me the film, which I had developed and then scanned myself. I had her shoot our whole wedding in Tri-X because I love the look, too, and like to use it in DxO Filmpack. If you're a big fan, check out Genesis by Sebastião Salgado - it's an amazing large format book of landscapes, wildlife, and portraits all shot on Tri-X or converted to Tri-X using Filmpack from 1Ds III files.


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## JPAZ (Mar 6, 2014)

The good old days, shooting Tri-X and doing my own processing in a friend's darkroom. I know DxO Filmpack has a Tri-X option but did you , Ivan Muller, use another way to get the look? Would you be willing to share that recipe?

Thanks.

JP


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## Ivan Muller (Mar 7, 2014)

Its quite simple really... In LR4 I reduce contrast a bit so to ensure my highlights are protected. Then open file in Nik silver efex2 and just click on the Tri-x option...if needed I will play around with the colour filters and structure and contrast sliders...and thats it. More fully discussed here with some samples : 
http://thelazytravelphotographer.blogspot.com/

I image DXO is pretty similar except it hasnt got a structure sliders, which can get abused sometimes...




JPAZ said:


> The good old days, shooting Tri-X and doing my own processing in a friend's darkroom. I know DxO Filmpack has a Tri-X option but did you , Ivan Muller, use another way to get the look? Would you be willing to share that recipe?
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> JP


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## JPAZ (Mar 7, 2014)

Ivan Muller said:


> Its quite simple really... In LR4......



Got it. Thanks. I'll try NIK (which I have)


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## Sporgon (Mar 7, 2014)

I tweak about in PS to get my B&Ws, but they always look more like 'Ilford HP5' rather than 'Kodak Tri-X'. The latter gave fantastic tones when exposed / processed / printed well.


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## dryanparker (Mar 7, 2014)

I once came across a parkour group in downtown Jacksonville. One of them was falling from the sky.

Mamiya RZ, 75mm Shift Lens, Tri-X 400


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## agierke (Mar 7, 2014)

Ah you guys are bringing me back! 

Tri-X 320 with D76 1:1 was my go to combo back in film days. I have actually gotten bit by the nostalgia bug recently and am dusting off a few film cameras. I ran a roll of film through a kodak stereo camera a couple of weeks ago (another recent fancy of mine) and processed for the first time in close to 8 years. It felt really good to get back to my roots!

Additionally, I have discovered that using my 100mm macro to photograph my negatives gives really phenomenal results over straight scanning. You actually retain the grain structure in the negative rather than the weird pixel/grain hybrid look you get from scanning.

Thx for this thread....I feel the stars aligning for me!


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## skullyspice (Mar 7, 2014)

Ive got a roll in my 1vHS right now, only 4 frames in so it may be in there a while since I dont use it everyday.


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## funkboy (Mar 7, 2014)

Awesome thread.

I usually shot Ilford Delta 3200 for low-light club stuff in my T90 (which is most of what I shot with it), & HP5 and Superia 400 for outdoor work. It blows people's minds when I tell them I got into photography with digital in 1999 using a Powershot S20 and then switched to a fantastic manual-focus film SLR so that I could learn what the h*ll I was doing & get some good shots in music venues (which was basically impossible with the compact digitals of the day as anything over ISO100 was "boosted" & looked like cr*p).

Tri-X is lovely stuff though


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## zim (Mar 8, 2014)

agierke said:


> Additionally, I have discovered that using my 100mm macro to photograph my negatives gives really phenomenal results over straight scanning. You actually retain the grain structure in the negative rather than the weird pixel/grain hybrid look you get from scanning



Really??
That's very interesting, I'd love to know more about your setup for that please.
I considered getting an old FD slide duplicator (I already have an FD/eos adapter) but a quick Google put me off the idea at the time.

Regards


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## drmikeinpdx (Mar 8, 2014)

I always add some grain in Lightroom when I'm going for a Tri-X look.

You guys are making me rethink my vow to never go back in the darkroom! ;D


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## soldrinero (Mar 8, 2014)

I only found Tri-X well after I started with digital, but it has an amazing look. Here's one I took by streetlight, pushed two stops to 1600:


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## zim (Mar 8, 2014)

drmikeinpdx said:


> You guys are making me rethink my vow to never go back in the darkroom! ;D



Darkroom = kitchen+ blackout sheets 
There are times when I really miss my dads big old enlarger the smell of chemicals and the magic of an image developing.

Meh nostalgia, it was a pain in the ass setting it up ;D


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## neuroanatomist (Mar 8, 2014)

zim said:


> Meh nostalgia, it was a pain in the ass setting it up ;D



One nice thing about being in science is there's always a darkroom. Up through my grad school days, they were set up for printing - enlargers, automatic print developers, etc. Composite photos for scientific publications (and my dissertation) meant making small prints, labeling them with transfer lettering, mounting them on foam core, then photographing the composite and printing that. Takes ~5 minutes in Photoshop, now.  

We still have darkrooms, mainly for X-ray films and dipping emulsions used for autoradiography. If I really wanted to, I could bring in trays and chemicals for printing...but I'll pass, thanks.


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## agierke (Mar 8, 2014)

zim said:


> agierke said:
> 
> 
> > Additionally, I have discovered that using my 100mm macro to photograph my negatives gives really phenomenal results over straight scanning. You actually retain the grain structure in the negative rather than the weird pixel/grain hybrid look you get from scanning
> ...



It was actually a forehead slapping moment for me. 

It started with me acquiring a 1904 stereo viewer and the idea that I would like to produce my own stereocards. Picked up the kodak stereo camera soon after and shot the test roll. Then came the frustrations of trying to get decent scans out of my epson 3200 with the odd format of the stereo negatives. Back when I got the thing I felt that I got some decent results scanning 120 frames but with the slight curl of 35mm format coupled with the paired images being separated by three frames it was a complete nightmare getting anything remotely acceptable.

After a couple hours scouring the internet for different solutions, I ran across some guys blog expressing the same frustrations about direct scanning that I had and that his solution was to photograph his negatives with his macro lens. This was the forehead slap moment. Brilliance is often so simple...

Anyway, I use a simple light box (same one I used in art school for tracing stuff and viewing print files of negatives). I place the negative emulsion up and place a cleaned piece of glass over it. The guy from the blog suggested taking 4 sections of the negative and merging them in PS to maximize detail and resolution but as I was already shooting a smaller format and just doing a quick handheld shot I just did a single frame at the largest RAW setting.

Works brilliantly! I did have to do a perspective crop in PS as it was hand held my edges weren't perfectly straight and you do have to invert the image to get a positive but the results were CLEAN. Totally beats even the results I used to get scanning 4x5s on a Flex scanner.

Additionally, I used to have to do dupes when I worked at the lab and I always was surprised how much was lost in that process. I would say this process beats those results by a long shot as well.

If you have the 100mm L you should give it a try. I doubt you'd be disappointed. I'm sure the non L would yield superior results as well.


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## brianboru (Mar 8, 2014)

Real Tri-X from a 1989 trip to the Canadian Rockies. (Maybe not profound shots but they do give the feel.) Scanned with a Plustek Optifilm 7400.


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## dhachey77 (Mar 8, 2014)

neuroanatomist said:


> zim said:
> 
> 
> > Meh nostalgia, it was a pain in the ass setting it up ;D
> ...



I haven't used a chemical darkroom in 30 yrs, even though I've always had one within steps of my office/labs, but I remember with great fondness my grad school days (actually nights) spent making my own developers. I briefly taught photographic chemistry to the local camera club, but gave up when people's eyes glazed over. Not everyone was meant to be a chemist, sigh. Here are a couple of recent B&W images from a trip to Myanmar last March. They still have that Tri-X look, including the grain.


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## funkboy (Mar 8, 2014)

dhachey77 said:


> I haven't used a chemical darkroom in 30 yrs, even though I've always had one within steps of my office/labs, but I remember with great fondness my grad school days (actually nights) spent making my own developers. I briefly taught photographic chemistry to the local camera club, but gave up when people's eyes glazed over. Not everyone was meant to be a chemist, sigh. Here are a couple of recent B&W images from a trip to Myanmar last March. They still have that Tri-X look, including the grain.



Awesome shots dhachey. This thread rocks 

Bringing the whole thing together, something that I almost dove into back when I first got a good DSLR but was still shooting film occasionally is making gelatin silver prints from digital files. I first learned about it from LensWork magazine, which is a lovely find in and of itself.

In a nutshell, we finally have a use case for the insanely high resolution that the inkjet printer companies have been using as a marketing gimmick forever. The printheads of even the now-12-year-old Epson 2200 are capable of small enough dots to print a negative with resolution surpassing film when used with the right transparency medium & inks, which can then be used to make a print with a traditional darkroom enlarger.

The process is laborious but I've seen the results in a gallery and the gelatin silver prints from an FF DSLR source file are every bit as stunning as medium format film.


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## dhachey77 (Mar 8, 2014)

funkboy said:


> dhachey77 said:
> 
> 
> > I haven't used a chemical darkroom in 30 yrs, even though I've always had one within steps of my office/labs, but I remember with great fondness my grad school days (actually nights) spent making my own developers. I briefly taught photographic chemistry to the local camera club, but gave up when people's eyes glazed over. Not everyone was meant to be a chemist, sigh. Here are a couple of recent B&W images from a trip to Myanmar last March. They still have that Tri-X look, including the grain.
> ...



I looked into the links you posted about gelatin/silver prints using an internegative process. Do you know of any print shops that perform this service? I gave up printing my own images a few years ago. I got tired of dealing with clogged printheads, etc. I use Costco for most printing, except the fine art prints I do on occasion. I just sent the two images shown above to Costco. You can't beat the longevity of silver based images, though. I just looked at some work I printed more than 45 years ago, still as good as the day they came out of the fixer (but not as good as I could do today).


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## Sporgon (Mar 9, 2014)

My attempt at being more Tri-X like. Not sure I succeeded but at lest the lens was genuinely Tri-X era - it was a 20-35 L f2.8 from 1988.


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## funkboy (Mar 10, 2014)

dhachey77 said:


> I looked into the links you posted about gelatin/silver prints using an internegative process. Do you know of any print shops that perform this service? I gave up printing my own images a few years ago. I got tired of dealing with clogged printheads, etc. I use Costco for most printing, except the fine art prints I do on occasion. I just sent the two images shown above to Costco. You can't beat the longevity of silver based images, though. I just looked at some work I printed more than 45 years ago, still as good as the day they came out of the fixer (but not as good as I could do today).



Haven't used any personally but teg goog turns up several promising shops which you could probably research a little further before taking the plunge.

I like Keith Cooper's quote on the care & feeding of large-format printers:



> when recently looking into problems with our iPF8300, I talked to several people in the ‘large format business’, and lack of use was the number one cause of problems.
> 
> If I had to put a big sticky label on printers it would be:
> 
> ...


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## hgraf (Mar 10, 2014)

I'm not one for the "packs" that transform digital photos to something nostalgic. I've tried a few and always end up with: why am I doing is, if I want that look, I'll shoot with that product!

As for the concerns about setting up a darkroom: don't set one up. You don't need a darkroom if you're OK with a hybrid flow (not everybody is) and limiting yourself to roll film. A changing bag is the only dark you need to transfer the film to the tank. After that the only thing that needs to stay dark is your developing tank. Once the negatives are done you scan them in and go from there.

Yes, purists might lament the fact I'm not making prints the analog way, I'm personally OK with that.

I recently took the plunge and started shooting and developing B&W film. I couldn't believe HOW easy it is to get going, and how ADDICTIVE it is once you've got the infrastructure (less the $100).

My journey, so far:
http://www.herbgraf.com/2014/01/02/entering-the-analog-world-developing-your-own-film-part-1/
http://www.herbgraf.com/2014/01/08/entering-the-analog-world-developing-your-own-film-part-2/
http://www.herbgraf.com/2014/03/06/entering-the-analog-world-developing-your-own-film-part-3/

Have even gone the pinhole route, is this another form of GAS? 
http://www.herbgraf.com/2014/02/18/pinhole-heaven/

Back to Tri-X, here are a couple shot with Tri-X 400: 










Ironically I find my personal feel is more on the extreme ends. I love T-Max. Many say T-Max has a very "digital" look. I also LOVE Delta3200. It's raw graininess can make an OK shot really pop out. Plus shooting with film in VERY dark situations just feels different.

IMHO go for reel B&W film shooting, you won't regret it.


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## Ivan Muller (Mar 10, 2014)

Here is another 6D image converted to Tri-X in Nik Silver Efex. Nothing remarkable about these three old ladies walking towards the mosque on busy Longstreet, except that it was made at 20 000 ISO. No noise reduction applied plus a 100% cropto show grain and sharpness....quite remarkable I think.

More of my Tri-X images can be seen here at :
http://thelazytravelphotographer.blogspot.com/2014/03/eos-6d-review-part-3-homage-to-tri-x.html


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## zim (Mar 10, 2014)

agierke said:


> zim said:
> 
> 
> > agierke said:
> ...



Unfortunately don't have a macro but..... This is doubly brilliant for me because I now have three valid reasons to move my wish for a 100L up the list!! ;D

Really appreciate the info.

Regards


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## hgraf (Mar 10, 2014)

brianboru said:


> Real Tri-X from a 1989 trip to the Canadian Rockies. (Maybe not profound shots but they do give the feel.) Scanned with a Plustek Optifilm 7400.



Profound to me. Amazing shots!


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## hgraf (Mar 10, 2014)

Ivan Muller said:


> Here is another 6D image converted to Tri-X in Nik Silver Efex. Nothing remarkable about these three old ladies walking towards the mosque on busy Longstreet, except that it was made at 20 000 ISO. No noise reduction applied plus a 100% cropto show grain and sharpness....quite remarkable I think.



Very cool! In the digital world, I have had situations where I had to push the ISO so high that there was quite a bit of noise, too much for a colour image, but convert it to B&W and all of a sudden the image looked "good"! 

Even so, ISO20000? That's an amazingly non-obtrusive amount of noise. That 6D is mighty impressive!


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## jwilbern (Dec 2, 2014)

Heavy Snow by jwilbern, on Flickr

Processed in Perfect Photo Suite. I originally used the T-Max 100 preset, but after seeing this topic I tried Tri-X400 and like it better due to less contrast.


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## slclick (Dec 16, 2014)

Shopkeeper, Solvang, California


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