Raghu Kuvempunagar
Member
The more I learn about this the more I want to know about the chemistry. Some reading is necessary and will ultimately help me get the best out of my ‘wet‘ photography.
Chapter 4 of "Modern Photographic Processing" Vol 2 by Grant Haist is a great read on monobath in case you want to learn more. A google search will lead you to downloadable copies. BTW monobath developing has been around at least since 1889. It is supposed to give very fine grain as may be expected from a solvent developer. But as Barry Thornton noted "unfortunately, for ordinary use, the weak shadow areas are fixed out before the developer can work and are largely lost". So additional exposure than normal is necessary to get best shadow detail. To get best results, the chemistry of a monobath needs to be tuned for each film (which neither Cinestill's nor Quall's monobath does BTW). Quoting from Haist: "The most commonly recurrent problem in formulating monobaths is the necessary precision of balance between developing and fixing reactions existing for various emulsion speeds to obtain optimum performance for any particular monobath. This ratio has been found to be a function of both the physical and chemical properties of the emulsion to be processed. For example, variations of emulsion thickness and grain size require different ratios. Silver chloride fixes faster than silver bromide, and even the presence of small amounts of silver iodide has an enormous retarding effect upon the fixing process." Further, single use monobaths are relatively expensive and reusable monobaths become inconsistent with use. These are some reasons why monobath developers went out of fashion.
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