Latest Film Developing Cookbook: Incorporating Barry Thornton/Jay de Fehr's Developers?

I was thrilled to find a new edition to the Cookbook. But given the authors' evident interest in innovative developers, and in the solving of classical chemistry problems, I was surprised to see Barry Thornton's work mentioned just in passing. DixActol is the only one of his several developers mentioned, and there is no evidence the authors' have actually tried it out. Just a tiny summary of its ingredients, and no mention of Precysol at all.

Jay has been publicizing innovative formulas for years. I still use his GSD developer for reduced agitation or stand development of t-grain films. There's an entire chapter devoted to staining developers in the cookbook, but no mention of 510 Pyro or Hypercat. But the Cookbook devotes ample discussion to historical developers of no particular distinction.

Just curious why those developers got left out.

Do you mean the new edition of the Darkroom Cookbook? The most recent Film Cookbook is 2nd edition from 2020.

Not that I’m a fan of the cookbooks (the opposite in fact) but I guess they can’t talk about literally everything - none of the Barry Thornton developers are special / different / innovative so that’s no loss. The other guy, his concoctions are nothing special and have no real objective data or science behind them so there’s no loss there either. Understand that throwing some things together that will develop film is almost trivial.

Milpool said:

Not that I’m a fan of the cookbooks (the opposite in fact) but I guess they can’t talk about literally everything - none of the Barry Thornton developers are special / different / innovative so that’s no loss. The other guy, his concoctions are nothing special and have no real objective data or science behind them so there’s no loss there either. Understand that throwing some things together that will develop film is almost trivial.

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I don't think either fellow, Jay or Barry, just threw things together and some of there developers are pretty darn good. 510 pyro has some very devote fans and Barry was always trying to get every last gran to be razor sharp. Both of these folks put an awful lot of thought into each of their concoctions and it shows in the end results.