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Just out of curiosity, what would happen if you mix different developers together

Pylon757

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Oct 24, 2009
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35mm
I know, very stupid question, but it got me a little thinking...
What would happen?
Anyone ever tried?
 
You will get something on the negative that will probably be printable. As for funny developers, who knows. Maybe something weird could happen and you will get unprintable negs.

I usually do one after the other, but just for fun I have mixed them on rolls I wanted to screw up. I believe HC-110 and D-19 was was my last mixture, and it worked nicely for a grainy, high contrast, stand development.
 
I've used the xtol-rodinal mixture. I think the development times listed there are a bit too long, though, as my negatives seem to be a bit thick when I use it at the listed times. Despite that, it works nicely.
 
10 Feb 2010

I have mixed developers for printing for some time. I find that a mixture of Ilford Multigrade and Ilford Coldtone developers give very nice grays and blacks on most papers I use.

I have not tried to mix developers for film processing because I am quite satisfied with my current process (D-76 and HC 110 at various dilutions)

Regards,
Darwin
 
There is no magic to this if you home brew. It just adds up to so many effective grams of hydroquinone, so many effective grams of metol/phenidone so many grams of other dev agents., then so many grams of accelertor, and at what effective pH.and how many grams of restrianers.

Few developers have more than two developing agents. So there is some mystery if the mix of two commercial formulations. Particularly if the developing agents are designed to be active at high pH (i.e Rodinal) and the mixed in other develper has the effect of lowering the pH. It could end up that some of the developing agents end up contributing very little to the ned effect when combined.
 

Agreed. In fact I've even considered dumping all of my used developer of *any* type into a single 5L container and once it's full using 500ml or so of it on a roll and seeing what I get.
 
I had a friend who did that once and he disappeared...really. He moved to Portland and I have not seen him in years.

Proceed with caution...

Bob
 
D076 / Dektol

THe cheap basterd in me causes me to add a little dektol (~50 - 100ml) to my d-76 tray (~500Ml 1:1) once I've got the negs all developed and drying so I can proceed to contact printing. The only thing I've seen is slower dev times for my polywarm tone than dektol alone (but faster than d-76) and a little lower contrast. Seems to die in the tray in a big dang hurry - Have to print in an hour or less.

Oh, and some yellow stains, but that could also have been from some very tired fixer.
 
been wondering this myself with HC-110 and 510 pyro.

got a sample from a fellow apuger and so far have really liked it! Did a pseudo "develop by inspection/water bath development" on a roll of 120 Efke 25 today.(510 pyro only though)

negs look great! Shadows have nice rich detail, and highlights are nice and bright, with plenty of detail!

I might have to scrounge up a roll of Arista Premium to test this out on, say 1ml of 510 to the standard dil-H measuring of HC-110.

who knows, it might become my standard?

-Dan
 
Hardening dev

I have had trouble with both x-ray film and efke 25... soft emulsion, scratches if you look at it wrong. So I added 1/4 tablet, ground up, of viagra to my Rodinal, worked like a charm, emulsion is hard as a rock.
 
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