MCC 110 -- Test Print (selenium)

Ian, I confess to some surprise at your description
of LPD as a cold-tone developer -- I've printed MCC
in LPD for years and have always liked the slight
warmth it gives. Not pronounced, but subtle. For
my use, I've not tried to kill the warmth with LPD.
I've evoked the degree of warmth I want with it.

As for the selenium, I don't want or need a color
shift. I use it for archival purposes -- I like it
that I can nuke the paper in a 1:3 selenium bath
and it doesn't budge. I've just started to explore
the crazy world of sepia toning, so I'm not sure
what I want or expect from the selenium as an
adjunct to the sepia but that's another story.

The company - Ethol - describes LPD dev as Cold tone, but then used with a warm tone paper it'll depend on the exact formula as to exactly how cold.

MCC is an emulsion that is very bendable in developers/toners, but it takes time to really master. Back in the 80's I went on a workshop with Peter Goldfield, he did an very useful demonstration. He tore a sheet of MCC into strips, each strip was exposed for a different time, then torn gain into squares, quite random and meaningless. Then all went into Neutol WA developer together - it has to be a warm-tone developer.

After about 30 seconds he'd pull out 4 or 5 squares of similar density, then repeat this every 15 seconds or so and fix them, Once well rinsed he put them all on a sheet of paper and matched the densities, the differences in colour were amazing and a real eye-opener.

The point being that a paper like MCC is extremely flexible controllable, over exposure and short dev times gives far greater warmth, with rich warm brown blacks, these are the tones that really shift with selenium, they tend to be greenish in yinge and KRST moves them back to a redder/brown hue.

In a thread I said look at how Olivia Parker & Thomas Joshua Cooper use this shift in Selenium.

These comments are valid for all warm tone papers, particularly Polywarmtone or Foma 111.

Ian

Ian Grant said:

...

The point being that a paper like MCC is extremely flexible controllable, over exposure and short dev times gives far greater warmth, with rich warm brown blacks, these are the tones that really shift with selenium, they tend to be greenish in tinge and KRST moves them back to a redder/brown hue.

Click to expand...

Ian, it would never have occurred to me to overexpose
and pull the print from the fixer early -- I've always
worried that I would lose tonality by not letting the
paper develop out to completion. Interesting.

Sanders, that's a fundamental difference with warm tone Chloro-bromide papers, it can't be done with Bromide papers which would just gi muddy. It works well with MCC and you then use Selenium to improve the Dmax. Unfortunately the effects are not as extreme as was possible with the old Record Rapid and Portriga papers before Agfa removed the Cadmium, that would develop directly to a deep red/brown tone with heave over-exposure and a very dilute warm tone developer, usually with a high bromide contentvery .

If you look in older Ilford, Agfa, Kodak manuals they all recommended these techniques with their warm-tone papers.

Ian