Rotlicht
Good evening everyone,
I prepared some A49 a while ago but wasn’t able to use it all up. Now the developer has been sitting around, well sealed, for longer than the maximum recommended 4 weeks (about 10?), and it has gone slightly off. I obviously don’t want to conduct the development of a film with it anymore, but I’ve heard that old negative developer can actually be used for paper as well? That would be brilliant, of course, if I didn’t have to throw it away! Do you have any experience with this?
Best regards,
rotlicht
piu58
In bottles that are properly sealed – i.e. never opened – it can be kept for much longer. Even with regular use, it lasts longer than four weeks; there’s plenty of it.
Of course, you can use it to develop photographic paper. But the developer is far too mild – photographic paper requires a stronger chemical solution. In short: in principle, you can achieve a result, but it’s not recommended.
michael-kielgmxnet
Why not give the A49 a go on a test print? I successfully developed a print yesterday using a six-month-old batch; the stuff was already looking slightly brownish.
For paper, I’d only use this developer in special cases, e.g. for two-bath development following a heavy-duty primary developer.
Rotlicht
Hmm, AFTER a hard-working developer?
I gave it a go and bathed some Ilford paper with a fixed grade of 3 in A49 (about 2+ minutes) and then in ‘normal’ N113 developer (about 30 seconds until I was happy with the result). This was, of course, improvised, not reproducible and certainly not scientific etc., just a first attempt. But the results were amazing! I’d always found the paper far too hard (maybe a bit old? Does that matter?), but after two baths even the finest grey tones came out beautifully!
As I still have quite a bit of that fixed-grade paper left, I’ll give this a proper go. Is there anything I need to bear in mind? If you develop first in N113 and then in the old A49, nothing else should happen to the remaining chemicals thanks to the stop bath, right? Unlike my experiment, where I probably had a contaminant in the N113?
Best regards
jan
michael-kielgmxnet
Normally, the two-bath development is carried out by using a strong developer in the first bath (in your case, N113) and developing only the shadows in it. As soon as the shadows have sufficient detail, the print must be removed and placed in the second bath, where the highlights are then developed.
This works best if the first developer isn’t too fast-acting, so you have enough time to switch from the first to the second bath. I might perform dilution on the N113, but not to a great extent, otherwise the shadows won’t have enough definition.
Instead of N113, you could also try a strong solution of Lith developer.
