I’ve been taking a break from lith developers due to general frustration, but I haven’t been giving up on other new interesting paper developer formulas. EXI is a series of experiments with the aim of creating a very warmtone developer that works properly with modern papers. Every warmtone developer formula I’ve tried with modern papers either skews to green/olive, or can’t produce convincing blacks.. or in general looks minimally warmer than Liquidol etc. This developer is being formulated primarily with convincing warmtones on the paper I’ve had a ton of trouble with, Ilford Warmtone RC. There are a few ideas being tried. The theory behind a warmtone print is that the grain size of the prints is fairly small. Grain size correlates with color and from smallest to largest goes: yellow -> red -> green -> brown -> purple -> black… of course with some weirdness and exceptions on different emulsion designs.
The break through I found in keeping the color more toward brown, rather than the more typical black/purple/green spectrum is sodium oxalate (though potassium oxalate should work better). I don’t entirely understand how it works, but it seems to function as a unique restrainer and potential silver solvent. It helps to intensify blacks in some ways and in other ways makes shadows skip from olive green to sepia and brown colors. It seems to have minimal effect on highlight tonation.
Ilford Warmtone RC in “EXI4” prototype developer
The following is “EXI4”. Note that this is definitely a prototype developer that I’m still optimizing and eventually plan to make a stock solution version so that I don’t go insane
Part A:
10ml of Glycin-TEA 10% (can be substituted with 1g of glycin, and 10ml of triethanolamine, added last)
1ml of Phenidone-glycol 1% (can be substituted with 0.01g phenidone)
30ml of triethanolamine (clear 99% grade)
3.1g sodium oxalate (can be mixed into a % water solution, potassium oxalate should also work better as a substitute)
8g sodium sulfite
0.6g potassium bromide
to 500ml water
Part B:
hydroquinone-glycol or TEA 10% can be used (in the future an HQ metabisulfite solution can probably be formulated like Adam’s variant of Ansco 130)
Add up to 5ml of part B to the final solution for deeper blacks and more overall contrast. Without any part B blacks will be rather brown.
The solution lasts in a tray at least a few hours, and should have fairly “normal” tray life otherwise. Develop for 3-5 minutes, 4 minutes is typical. Imagine will come up fairly linearly, image should appear pretty much “done” at 2 minutes under safelight, but blacks will continue to intensify and pulling early can result in some streaking in blacks. Over expose print by 1-2 stops compared to most other developers.
Results are overall brownish warmtone, especially in the shadows. Works best with warmtone papers, but will also give subtle warm brown tones to some neutral papers.