Various restrainers were tried for reducing the tendency of fogging in hot developer. Both potassium iodide and sodium chloride. Although iodide works well, it requires a rather huge amount to completely prevent and has a lot of undesirable effects. Some papers really exhibit some weird problems such as mottling and uneven development with very much iodide. This amount of iodide being present also affects the fixer. Specifically, it requires at least double the amount of fixing time and exhausts the fixer significantly faster. It is still something worthwhile to play with as it can produce some interesting tonality and color, but should only be used in tiny amounts and not as a complete fog prevention solution.

Chloride was something I really tried out not with the intention of fixing anything, but rather with the goal of producing deep red tones like is possible on the famous Polywarmtone paper. It didn’t produce that, but was interesting regardless. The primary advantage of chloride is that it seems to very weakly affect most RC papers and maybe even accelerates development on RC papers, but also acts to significantly decrease the amount of snowballing on FB papers, making them reasonable to use with room temperature developer. I believe the chloride stands in as a 90% neutral salt that just helps the developer to penetrate more evenly into the FB emulsions, and maybe to penetrate more quickly into RC emulsions. I believe this is why I had fewer problems when I was using massive (and expensive) quantities of oxalate. The actual effects on tonality with chloride are fairly minor, tending to produce more golden and yellow tones rather than peach and making the famously neutral tone Foma emulsions pick up a hint of warmth in the highlights. Chloride wouldn’t be included with any ModernLithC1 kit, as it’s so easy to find locally (literally just kosher salt etc) and the absolutely massive amounts required. For instance, in most tests I start with ~80g per liter of developer. The exact amount is far from critical for chloride due to it’s very weak restraining effect in this type of developer.

ModernLithC1 v10 prototype formulation

Part A, developer:

Add 100g of hydroquinone to 800ml of heated propylene glycol. Temperature needed is ~140F. Do not boil the glycol and be careful of flammable vapors!

Top to 1L with glycol

Part B, activator:

Start with 800ml of room temperature (not hot) water

Add 350g of anhydrous potassium carbonate. Solution will heat up significantly

Add 10g of potassium bromide

Add 25g of potassium oxalate (determined to be optional, but may increase tray life slightly)

Add 25g of sodium sulfite (use 30g for longer tray life when using old brown)

Top to 1L with water

Part C, stabilizer:

Add 40g of ascorbic acid to 400ml of heated propylene glycol. Temperature needed is ~160F and significant stirring is needed. Do not boil the glycol and be careful of flammable vapors!

Before all the powder is dissolved completely, top to 500ml with heated glycol (solution is very close to solubility limit so the extra glycol makes things go faster)

Part D, bonus:

Start with 800ml of hot water

Add 200g of sodium chloride (anything non-iodized such as kosher salt or pickling salt)

Top to 1L with water

Part C can be substituted with simply adding some ascorbic acid to water to make a % solution. However, the solution will not be stable and will decay within a matter of hours, so only a small amount should be made at a time.

Usage: Start with a dilution of 10ml + 40ml + 10ml per liter for RC papers and 10ml + 40ml + 5ml per liter for FB papers. Stabilizer is optional, but excluding it will cause shorter tray life and poor reactions in some papers. Additional stabilizer tends to slow down infectious development and in some papers trend toward colder brown tones of lower overall contrast. For FB papers especially, add 200ml of part D per liter of developer. This will prevent snowballing and may increase overall development speed. It will also cause some cold and neutral tone papers to give peach highlights and some peachy warmtone papers to give yellow and golden highlights.