lithers: do I have the pepper?

So, after giving up on straight silver prints for this neg and going to lith, this print is just about where I want it, tonally, except... alas I seem to have a bad case of the pepper in my dark tones. Truly awful. This neg actually has tons of shadow detail and it comes out like TV screen fuzz (for those of you who remember life before cable).

The attached print was done with fotospeed LD20 lith kit and their lith paper. N.b. I wouldn't call my solution old brown per se, but it has been used for ~a half dozen 8x10s.

I have questions; you have answers...

Q1: is this indeed the pepper to which some people refer?

Q2: If so, will I be adding sodium sulfite, and is that going to eff up the colours (that I now have come to like)?

Q3: might I also snatch early and then do something to the print like tone it to achieve the deeper tones? Am I bringing the pepper upon myself unnecessarily by snatching too late? Am I asking for too much Dmax?

Q4: Will somebody please print this for me and put me out of my misery?

Keith, it is pepper fog, but not that a really bad a case of it. I think you have a nice image color, but could experiment with dev temp and dev concentration, and print exposure. These can give you infinite possibilities. First off, try less exposure, and more development time to see what that does... It should increase contrast a little, and can open up more color changes. you could try a small amount of sulfite to lower the fog if it occurs, but your dev times WILL increase by default. Increasing the dev temp to around 75 to 80 degrees can accelerate the process as well so you are not sitting in the dark for longer than about 6 minutes.

6 minutes/ sounds divine, this took ~20 mins :rolleyes:

What if I just bubble oxygen out of my developer with nitrogen, does anybody do that? I do that for work with pyro developer wd2d+.

Keith, what dilution are you using?

I'm sorry to disagree but this is not pepper fogging. This is quite typical infectious development in the emerging dark tones before they progress to black. Very few papers show real PF these days. If it were PF it would be all over as a fine sprinkle of tiny dots - including the sky area. Yours is only (as far as I can see on the screen) in the darker tones. Adding sulphite isn't going to help really and if you add too much could kill your blacks and give a flat print.
What to do? Well it depends on how you want to interpret the scene. The paper dev combo you are using is a good one and can give gritty lith or soft lith effects. If you snatch later these 'peppery' blacks will coalesce and block up. If you don't want that I would add another 50% water ('cos that suits my images ;-)) and bump the temp a bit (to speed it up) for a softer look and then snatch a bit earlier so the emerging blacks are not so widespread.
Remember too that different papers have different qualities and some will be gritter/grainier than this and others (eg Fomatone) softer and smoother.
Its horses for courses ;-)
Tim

Travis: 1+9 A and B, mixed. I think this is what I got from the fotospeed guidelines. Too high? Too low?

Tim, thanks very much for your alternative diagnosis; I was wondering if it was pepper at all, since it is confined only to certain darker tones.

Sounds like I have some more 'sperimenting to do. Myabe I will snatch before these dark tones set in. But then, will it be possible to tone such that the Dmax increases some more.. without infectious development causing this? or am I trying to make lith do something it can't do?

<sigh> I love what it's doing in the highlights...

I agree with Tim, it doesn't look like pepper fogging to me either. To me it looks like the print was snatched too soon, but then that's the balance between blocked up blacks and gritty shadows areas.

Your dilution is neither too strong, nor is it too weak, it's just a matter of personal preference. I personally prefer 1+19 A and B because I feel like I have more control over the print. Lith printing really does take some experimenting to find what works best for you.

keithwms said:

Travis: 1+9 A and B, mixed. I think this is what I got from the fotospeed guidelines. Too high? Too low?

Tim, thanks very much for your alternative diagnosis; I was wondering if it was pepper at all, since it is confined only to certain darker tones.

Sounds like I have some more 'sperimenting to do. Myabe I will snatch before these dark tones set in. But then, will it be possible to tone such that the Dmax increases some more.. without infectious development causing this? or am I trying to make lith do something it can't do?

<sigh> I love what it's doing in the highlights...

Click to expand...

You can snatch before any dark tones appear and this can look great for the right image, it all depends what you want. But you can't then tone for a high Dmax if you don't have a black to start with. If you have a near black you can boost it somewhat with selenium, but not a Dmax of course, but be aware that the lith print is very responsive to Se and if you only want a Dmax boost use it dilute and timed for a short time. At 1:20 this would be under a minute with your dev/paper combo, then there will be a reddish shift all over before the blacks turn brown.
Try again with 50% or 100% more water and see if you like what you get. Add some old brown from the previous session too.
Tim

You could try to burn the bird and/or dodge the trees and snatch the print as the bird starts to turn black. This will leave with apink background and one truely black focal point in your print....

Jaap Jan

Bedankt Jaap, that's a good suggestion.

With the LD20 it seems like I would never get anything interesting before 3 a.m., so I started with 1l old brown, 2l h20 and 50ml each of A and B, and higher temps as recommended. It is always instructive to me to drop a swatch of paper in the soup with the lights on, just to see how it reacts. I understand that paper you are using is expensive, but this really seems to help with titrating sulfite and bromide levels.