Agitate › Stand development
Long, dilute, mostly still
Stand and Semi-Stand Development Timer
An hour in a highly dilute developer with one inversion in the middle of it. This is the run where a counting timer is most likely to let you down, and where an app is most likely to overstate where its numbers came from.
What the app actually schedules
Both methods are presets in Agitate, stored the same way as the manufacturer schemes so the timer can call them.
| Method | At the start | After that |
|---|---|---|
| Stand | 60 s of agitation | The tank is left alone for the rest of the bath |
| Semi-stand | 60 s of agitation | A single inversion every thirty minutes |
Both are flagged in the app as community practice, not manufacturer instruction.
Those are the presets, not a prescription. Stand practice varies widely from photographer to photographer, and if your cadence is a different one you write it as a recipe of your own, which is unlimited in the free version and behaves exactly like a built-in one.
An hour is where a counting timer fails
A three minute bath will usually survive a distracted phone. An hour will not. In sixty minutes the screen locks many times over, a call is likely, the system may reclaim memory from a backgrounded app, and a phone that started at fifteen percent will be flat.
Agitate stores the moment your bath ends rather than the seconds left in it. There is nothing counting, so there is nothing to freeze. Lock the phone, take the call, let the battery die and plug it back in: when you open the app it works out where you are from the clock. The countdown that appears on the lock screen and in the Dynamic Island is drawn by iOS itself rather than pushed by the app, so an hour long run costs a handful of updates rather than thousands.
The single inversion at the thirty minute mark arrives as a tap in your hand and as a time sensitive alert if the app is not in front. You do not have to sit with it.
Two rows, and an honest label
Of the 795 published development times bundled with the app, exactly two are on a stand or semi-stand cadence. That is not an oversight, it is what the datasheets contain: manufacturers publish agitated times, and stand development is something the community worked out. Agitate only ships a time it can point at a document for, so the stand table is two rows long and honest rather than long and invented.
What you do instead is what people already do. Take the time you trust, write it as your own recipe with the stand or semi-stand cadence attached, and the app times it with the same drain call, the same warnings and the same clock as a bundled row. The full list of agitation schemes.
The warnings that matter most on a dilute developer
Stand development lives at high dilutions, which is exactly where the minimum quantity of concentrate becomes a real risk rather than a theoretical one. Agitate checks the minimum per film rather than per tank, which is the check that catches a 500 ml tank holding two films and half the concentrate the maker requires. How the dilution check works.
Every chemistry warning is in the free version: minimum quantity, expiry, exhausted capacity, the surcharge for re-used developer and a temperature outside tolerance. A warning behind a paywall would make the free version dangerous, so none of them are behind one.
A timer that is still there an hour later
Stand and semi-stand as presets, your own cadence as a recipe, and a clock that a locked phone cannot stop.
Agitate for iPhone and iPad
Free, and every chemistry warning is in the free version.