Hello people, I’m back!
The blog has been a bit on hold due to me having a lot of other stuff on my mind, we bought a house and moved to a beautiful place in the country. But now I have a much better darkroom set up in the basement, spring is here and the house is no longer freezing and we have some sunlight.
Something I have been working on for a long time and thinking about is how to reduce color when doing lith prints. A lot of people are all about the color, and want to get as much of it as possible. But a majority of the paper I have, gives that light brown sandstone type of tone, and it really gets boring after a while. There are a lot of subjects that just don’t lend well to that tone. Winter scenes or urban landscapes often need a cooler tone. This is something I have been looking for in my regular printing too, as can be seen in my experimentation of using restrainers to cool down images.
This time, the end goal is similar and so is the method of achieving that. Can restrainers be used when lith printing? Or will it kill the infections development? And what variables can I easily adjust to get the tones I am looking for?
My experimentation is yet at an early stage, but here are my findings so far reduced to a number of bullet points.
Less color when not using any Old Brown (lith developer from previous session)
Less color when using a stronger mix (I usually do 1+1+40)
Less color when more part B than A with EasyLith. This is a good way to adjust it on the fly, make a print, then add some part B if you didn’t like the tone
More color with a hot (40C) developer, but short development time. Also more color when developer getting close to capacity, due to long development time (40min snatch point)
Selenium toning gives a more neutral eggplant/pinkish hue instead of sandstone yellow
Gold toning is fantastic, but too expensive for me at current prices
Moersch Finisher Blue seems to be too strong of a restrainer for lith printing, I couldn’t get anything on paper after adding a few ml
Benzotriazole WORKS, it will give you a much more neutral black/white tone. But it also reduces your highlights a lot, so add 0.5-1 stops of exposure time. Add very little, already at 1ml of 1% solution to 1l of developer will have an impact. Make a slightly stronger solution that you would normally use, snatch times got veeerry long after already 2 prints. I think it was around 40 minutes.
BZT added and then selenium toned is getting very close to what I am looking for!
Here you can see several prints of the same negative, with the same paper (Ilford Ilfospeed 4). The first very yellow one is when the tray was still quite hot, the second one is a similar looking print selenium toned. The last 4 are with BZT added.
