Fomatone white dots

Can snowballs on a lith print present as white dots rather than cloudy looking white areas? I’m struggling with this white dot problem on all my fomatone tone papers. I thought it might be contamination from fixer so I cleaned everything really well to make sure it could not happen, and I still get the dots. I had a session last evening with some old Russian paper and I got zero dots causing me to think something is going on with my fomatone paper. The dots are in random locations not just in clear sky’s for example. Is anyone else having issues with current batches of fomatone?
I’m considering a quick soak in 3% hydrogen peroxide to see if that may help.
Thanks
D

Devorobin said:

Is anyone else having issues with current batches of fomatone?

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No, not at the moment.

In the past I had some issues with uneven development and dots as well. My remedy was to do a 2 minute pre-developer wash in plain water at more or less the same temperature as the developer and, second, use oversized developer trays to ease developer flow. These two solved my problems. Your milage may vary of course.

Please post back on the hydrogen peroxide solution.

Good luck!

MrclSchprs said:

No, not at the moment.

In the past I had some issues with uneven development and dots as well. My remedy was to do a 2 minute pre-developer wash in plain water at more or less the same temperature as the developer and, second, use oversized developer trays to ease developer flow. These two solved my problems. Your milage may vary of course.

Please post back on the hydrogen peroxide solution.

Good luck!

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I tried your pre wash last evening and it didn’t seem to work so I guess I’ll give the peroxide a shot next….

MrclSchprs said:

No, not at the moment.

In the past I had some issues with uneven development and dots as well. My remedy was to do a 2 minute pre-developer wash in plain water at more or less the same temperature as the developer and, second, use oversized developer trays to ease developer flow. These two solved my problems. Your milage may vary of course.

Please post back on the hydrogen peroxide solution.

Good luck!

Click to expand...

The peroxide bath did nothing to help the problem. I had not previously done a straight print with fomatone paper so I did last night and the paper performed perfectly with no spots. The dev was Ilford multigrade. So it appears to be a lith problem only. I’m using arista dev because I can’t seem to get any Moersch because everyone is out of stock. When I do manage to get some I’ll be able to test the problem with that dev.

Devorobin said:

So it appears to be a lith problem only.

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That is reassuring! Have you ever considered mixing your own lith developers from scratch?

MrclSchprs said:

That is reassuring! Have you ever considered mixing your own lith developers from scratch?

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If you have a pretty simple lith formula, feel free to share it with us. Usually, I find them a little too complex for my taste. The only one I mix from scratch is Ansco 70 but IMO it is not really lith and it exhausts VERY quickly.

Dali said:

The only one I mix from scratch is Ansco 70 but IMO it is not really lith and it exhausts VERY quickly.

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I agree on ANSCO 70, it depletes very quickly. I have fairly good results with ANSCO 79B. It is listed, among others, here: https://unblinkingeye.com/Articles/LithDev/lithdev.html

I know this page... I would prefer a formula without formaldehyde, espcially because my "lab" is not well ventilated at alll...

MrclSchprs said:

That is reassuring! Have you ever considered mixing your own lith developers from scratch?

Click to expand...

At the rate things are going I may be forced to do that one day. I actually found a pack of Kodalith today on eBay so when that arrives I’ll give it a try and see if it helps with my problem. Assuming it’s still good that is. I’ve used ancient bags of d76 plenty of times with no problems so I’m hoping kodalith will hold up the same…

I finally got a new developer, Kodalith super rt, and it almost completely cured the white dot problem. First of all this developer is fantastic, I made about ten prints last night and pretty much all of them are good. I did replenish the dev once in the session but it didn’t exhaust anywhere near as quickly as any other dev I’ve used before. I’m getting a nice brown tone with it that I like. Interestingly the matt version of fomatone, 131 I think, was giving me snowballs and 133 not at all. You would think the emulsion would perform the same but it doesn’t. I would get snowballs with 131 then the very next print 133 and same exposure would not have them and would have much more color to boot. In addition the the white dots I have been getting straight lines that show up in some prints as of late with the arista I have been using. I still got faint evidence of that last night in one of the prints making me think that there is something wrong with my current boxes of fomatone, only the Kodalith developer copes with it way better. I probably got about 4-5 faint white dots last night which I can fix. With arista every print had 40-50 spots…

I did now where to begin with the dilution since the stock is a whopping 2 gallons, I was expecting 1:2 or 1:3 but I decided to try 1+1+12 first and it worked. Really fast actually. The developer was heated so that speeds things up also but the average dev time was 6 min. Next time I will try a more dilute mix and see what it does to the colors.

This photo shows what I’ve been getting with arista on fomatone…..