David A. Goldfarb
Moderator
You might get a few general responses in this thread to that question, but your best bet is probably just to go to the "B&W: Film, Paper, Chemistry" forum and the "Chemistry Formulas" section and browse through the thread titles and see what catches your interest, since people are posting new threads all the time about their experiences with different formulas.
I think it's valuable to experiment with mixing your own just for the sake of learning about photo chemistry. You might decide to stick with some of the formulas you try or end up tweaking a commercial formula or just using something in a black and white bottle or a yellow bag, but you'll be making an informed choice. You also won't flip out when your favorite developer is discontinued or reformulated, because you'll have the ability to make it or something very much like it yourself.
I've experimented with all sorts of things, but the film developers I use regularly are ABC pyro (mostly for large format), RAF pyro-metol (mostly for large format when I want more speed), PMK pyro (mostly for smaller formats that I enlarge), and Acufine (for speed and convenience, because it's always there and mixed in my tank).
For papers, I tend to use Michael Smith's two amidol developer formulas and favor graded papers that work well in them.
As far as fixers go, I'm happy with TF-4 for everything (except albumen printing, where I use two-bath plain hypo). Since I can buy it off the shelf at B&H, I don't feel compelled to mix my own, but if I had to pay to ship liquid concentrates, I probably would mix my own.
