During a period of mixing my own developers, among my favorites were D23, for obvious reasons, but I also experimented with specialized formulas for push processing, high acutance, compensating and divided developers. Inspired by some articles in a Modern Photography (?) magazine column, I got immersed ;-) into divided D76 and several variants, much as those in Barry Thornton's web page.
Although I can vouch for the effectiveness of these developers, IMHO almost any film that needs developing can be dipped in off the shelf, packaged D76, with none the wiser (PQ developers for push processing, if you really, really have to). When properly exposed and processed, the differences in any category of measure are too small to matter. That doesn't mean there are no advantages to other developers, but those are usually in their economy or ease of use. One exception is Xtol and its relatives, but that's another thread.
Allen Zak
On Jul 24, 2007, at 10:51 AM, Petr Dvorak wrote:
Let me add my 2c to this interesting thread. My most favorite and almost exclusive developer for 120 and 4x5 films is Barry Thornton's 2 bath formula, a metol based compensating developer. Barry started with Stoeckler's and Ansel's D23 formulas and modified them slightly for modern emulsions. It is very cheap (I mix the solutions at home, the chemicals are cheap and easy to buy online), it lasts forever, it is not time and temperature sensitive; and produces very nice and even results with good details in shades without blowing out highlights. For those who don't mind using 2 bath developers, this is an interesting alternative to Diafine.
http://www.awh-imaging.co.uk/barrythornton/2bath.htm
Petr
On 7/24/07, Gene Johnson <genej2ster@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: My favorite developer is a homebrew that was developed by Patrick
Gainer and tweaked by a bunch of folks on a BW list I was on. My
particular iteration is a concentrate of Phenidone, Ascorbic acid, and
KBr (originally in propylene glycol, but I use car antifreeze!), that
is diluted at time of use with water, borax, and sodium carbonate.
oneThe working solution is one shot. Anyway, if anyone wants the
recipe I'll provide it, but I've had great luck with it for a long
time. The concentrate seems to last forever, and the results are Xtol
like.
