Advantages of Glycin based warm tone developers over ID-78 or similar?

[Tom Kershaw]

For warm tone work I've tended to use ID-78, sometimes very dilute before gold toning for blue-black results. Glycin does not seem to be terribly available in the UK but see that Silverprint offers 'Fomatol PW' which is Glycin based. Is this product likely to produce any advantage over a formulae I can mix easily (ID-78) or a more standard commercial product, e.g Harman WT, Adox Neutol WA, or Tetenal Variospeed W et al.?

Tom

 

[nworth]

I've tried both ID-78 and glycin based developers with warm tone papers, although not with gold toning. I'm not sure about the differences either. If you mix your own, keeping glycin fresh is a problem, and the results with glycin developers often depend a quite a bit on the glycin's freshness. Aside from that, different warm tone developers seem to have a fairly wide range of effects on warm tone papers. Moreover, the effects are not the same from paper to paper, and the papers themselves vary a lot. I guess that means you need to find some combination (or combinations) you like and stick with it. I kind of favor the ID-78 route, without any real reason.

 

[miha]

Fomatol PW is not glycin based any more. I got this info directly from Foma Bohemia a couple of years ago. Some vendors still list it as such.

 

[Tom Kershaw]

Fomatol PW is not glycin based any more. I got this info directly from Foma Bohemia a couple of years ago. Some vendors still list it as such.

The only recent reference to Glycin availability I've seen is from the Photographer's Formulary in Montana. Silverprint hasn't updated the listing then...

Tom

 

[DREW WILEY]

There are lot of us who brew up our own 130 from glycin. It's a wonderful developer.