So I’m sure everyone following this place has had that thought. “But earlz, I want to do lith printing on modern RC papers and NOT acquire a huge stockpile of chemicals like you”. Well, some simple tests with EasyLith seems to say that this is definitely possible. The key lies in just getting one extra chemical along with the EasyLith developer kit, some simple sodium hydroxide, or lye.
I ended up adding 25ml of a 10% solution of lye (ie, ~2.5g) to a mixture of 20+20+1000 EasyLith. The early results matched the early results I got from adding lye to an unpublished ModernLith prototype recipe, but the big difference is how the enriched EasyLith progresses and ages. Instead of just suddenly going poof and it’s 90% dead, the developer instead gives a quite significant decrease in contrast due to a significant increase in highlight development. This is actually pretty interesting. Unless you’re remixing the developer every 30 minutes I wouldn’t say it’s the best for that gritty high contrast lith look, but for the gentle highlights and ability to get colder darker blacks that many lith printers love, it’s actually much nicer than ModernLith. I’ve only done a single test run. I have no idea if this would work with other lith developers. I suspect that the formaldehyde content of most lith developers would cause significantly different results (formaldehyde goes acidic as the developer ages, unlike anything else in a lith developer).
For chemical notes, I didn’t use any old brown because I didn’t have any stored from EasyLith. I expect a restricted amount of old brown would be a good addition to this developer for reducing contrast further and getting more color, though would also likely slow things down quite a bit. I initially added just 10ml of the 10% solution but this didn’t seem to “break the buffer” likely to be built into EasyLith. It seemed to print just slightly faster and with slightly better black level that EasyLith on it’s own would do. I suspect adding more lye could increase black levels much more than here, though this comes at the cost of highlight detail and color. The developer also is expected to have a compromised tray life compared to non-enriched. I started getting very slow development times after 1h30m, starting from slightly warm developer. Notably though, the papers that typically give pepper fog with developer aging gave none here.
It also still isn’t exactly perfect, depending on the results you’re wanting, for every modern paper tested. But, lets go through a simple set of test prints.
Ilford MGIV RC, f/8, 30s
Ilford MGIV RC was the first paper tried. I didn’t have time to repeat the print after the developer was good and aged, so take this with a grain of salt. This print required a ton of exposure to get some detail on the flower highlights of the print. Overall there is very little grain (this is from a cropped 6x4.5 negative, so a tiny bit of grain is from the negative) and blacks are a weaker green. Still usable for lower contrast subjects, but not that cold-warm split that I tend to prefer.
Ilford MGFB, f/11, 5s
Ilford MGFB continues to be a very difficult paper to force into lith printing, though I think here there is some promise. The problem is that you need to treat the paper as being extremely fast, and basically expose for exactly the highlight and midtone detail you want as if you were using a normal developer. Once you have that, then you have to really over develop it to get the black level where you want it. This print probably took about 10-15m to develop. Initially it developed into a sheet of grey. However, as it progressed in the developer, eventually the blacks started to actually turn black and the highlights seemed to actually get slightly lighter. It still turned out quite dark and low contrast, but I believe there is some promise here. As-is though I’d still call MGFB only “semi-lithable” in this process. There is also a strange “white pepper fog” effect. Rather than getting random black spots, some tests with this paper got random white spots. The spots were definitely not on the negative also, they changed position with each print.
Fomaspeed RC f/8 5s
Fomaspeed RC is where I started to notice the significant increase in highlight development. As with MGFB, at least at this point of developer age, you need to treat it as a quite fast paper. Initially it will appear to be a somewhat low contrast image with some darker areas. Don’t be fooled here! It needs quite a bit more development. This initial image will also develop somewhat unevenly so you need to develop to completion for this part. If the highlights are too dark when the low contrast image seems complete, then you over exposed. After this part is complete, then infectious development will begin quite quickly. The end result I really enjoy, especially for this subject that works well with more subtle and cooler tones.
Ilford MGV RC, f/8, 7s
Ilford MGV RC is the final paper I tried. It typically behaves very similar to MGIV RC, so I expect that developer age is the primary reason why there is so much difference between them here. The developer appeared to be nearly dead and with a light red film on the developer afterwards (tell tale sign of deadness). Regardless, this print came out eventually and though it was over exposed, it reminds me of what a true lithable paper can do when treated right. This took quite some time to develop, but definitely has good and striking dark blacks, unlike the MGIV test. There also was no pepper fogging at all like what I’d expect from ModernLith tests like this.
Closing Thoughts
Even though I still believe there is much better and consistent results waiting for me behind the ModernLith formulation maze, this is definitely a promising way to get ModernLith-like results (well, actually better heh) using commercial developers available today. My personal hypothesis for how the chemistry behind this works out is that the lye breaks the buffer effect and slightly increases the pH, enough to make it work fast enough to ignore the otherwise “too high” amount of bromide. However, the developer also ages much more quickly and so there is a lot of sulfite used up and hydroquinone converted to hydroquinonemonosulfonate, which I believe is primarily responsible for the colorful highlight development. With less hydroquinone the overall speed of the developer slows down though, and with less sulfite (or a better sulfite:pH ratio) it becomes something capable of working with difficult modern papers.
Also, I hate to say it, but this is kind of a set back for ModernLith. Not because another developer works for modern papers, but rather because this opens up so many new formulation options. Even with this I’m unhappy that there isn’t really a good open formaldehyde-free lith developer out there. The only ones I know of aren’t “true” lith developers for lith printing purposes, or they have a tray life similar to current ModernLith formulas (and much worse shelf life). With this discovery it basically means that I can take control of the HQMS conversion process and use a lot more sulfite and restrainer and still get a usable result on modern papers. I expect it’ll now involve a 3 part kit instead of 2 though, “developer”, “stabilizer”, and “accelerator”.
A (cropped) DSLR scan of the 6x4.5 FP4+ negative. The actual negative was maybe a half stop under exposed so it was somewhat thin