Of course I failed to notice before printing with it that the above new curve had added a touch of tone to the left edge which should be zero or clear film. I couldn’t figure out how to avoid it though, so I manually went thru the quad and zeroed out the 3 or 4 channels that had a value at that spot. Then just for good measure I put in back into the PPE2 starting curve sheet and ran an extra smoothing cycle on it. A quick read of step 20 (next to Dmax) shows a 2.88 density value. I’ll read the whole thing after it has more dry time, but this looks promising.
Speaking of dry time, I started a test yesterday at about 5pm with a fresh target negative that I have read about 10 minutes after printing and at intervals of 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 15, and soon 24 hours. Much to my surprise, other than between the first and second reads which had a small difference throughout, there has been no change other than a few points of 0.01 fluctuation back and forth. I intend to continue the series daily for the rest of this week then weekly for the rest of the month. I would love to know if anyone else has done something like this and how your results compare to mine.