Grainy Vision

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September 20, 2026

This exists again

September 20, 2026

February 8, 2022

Research in progress (February 2022)

February 8, 2022

January 11, 2022

Happy New Year! - A newsletter from Grainy Vision

January 11, 2022

Hi everyone and happy new year! The last email was… (checks notes) almost 2 years ago, but I figured it’s time to break the silence on the newsletter front. There’s been a great number of things done and written about since the previous email, so I’ll only cover the most interesting and the most recent.

January 11, 2022

December 16, 2021

GVL1 - Long Lasting Warmtone PQ Print Developer

December 16, 2021

Today I’m introducing an unexpectedly successful developer. I mixed this up just kind of guessing at ratios and just wanting to see what a dilute PQ print developer could do. The actual end result is a formula somewhat reminiscent of ID-78, a warmtone print developer formula created by Ilford, but with notable differences. The end result is a developer with a surprisingly good shelf life, tray life and contrast consistency across its life span. It also is a fairly unique developer producing warmtones which are resistant to going olive colored, instead it will go toward brown tones.

December 16, 2021

December 15, 2021

GVM1 - A unique film developer for pushing, portraits, and landscapes

December 15, 2021

Lately I’ve been doing more regular darkroom printing and this has left me in a bit of a slump. Although I love many of the developer formulations I’ve made, they’ve often not been designed explicitly for darkroom printing. EXG1/GVG1 would produce excellent negatives with increased speed, fine grain, etc… but in the darkroom it was often very difficult to get everything on the negative onto the paper without resorting to lith printing. This problem was only slightly improved with GVK1. GVK6 (yet to be published) has significantly improved this problem, but these developers also reflected the time in my life at which they were formulated. I was doing almost exclusively lith printing and with early ModernLith formulations I needed extended scale and moderately high contrast negatives… So GVK1 specifically was formulated with this aim. EXG1 was formulated when my main priority was getting the best scannable negative, which also benefits from a long density range. And now, I’m doing regular darkroom printing a lot, so it calls for a developer with a new aim.

GVM1 is recommended for:

Extremely smoothed portraits of light skinned people in controlled light
High contrast landscape scenes
Pushing film to use it at increased speed without greatly increasing contrast
Taming the contrast of very high contrast materials
Getting all of the image detail onto a print in the darkroom without great difficulty

December 15, 2021

November 2, 2021

Lith Printing Densitometry Placeholder

November 2, 2021

October 31, 2021

BasicLith, a dead simple lith developer formula for modern papers

October 31, 2021

October 2, 2021

Intermission is done

October 2, 2021