Soft working paper developers

[bvy]

I have a liter of Centrabrom S in my possession. It's marketed as a "soft working paper developer" that "develops fixed-grade paper at around one grade softer than it is rated." I bought it to develop lith film, which it does a nice job with. I'm curious if there's any advantage to using this with multigrade paper. Obviously if I want one grade softer, I just use a different filter. Does anyone have any experience with this or another soft working developer, and if so, how are you using it? What does it give you that a traditional paper developer doesn't? I want to do some homework before deciding if I want to experiment. It's recommended 1+4 for RC paper, which will eat into my stock supply, and I don't want to waste if it's not going to give me anything...

Thanks.

 

[Thomas Bertilsson]

If you just tune your negatives to suit the soft working developer, it doesn't actually matter. To me the whole system of photography is not built up of individual pieces only, but we must see it as a whole. If you want a certain contrast and tonality from your prints, your printing paper and paper developer determine what your negatives need to look like. That's true for all developers, and why it's so important to print negatives when we tune out negative development.

One advantage could be if you were printing with graded papers. With VC papers it's kind of a moot point.

 

[bvy]

Right. Thanks. It also seems to come up a lot in conversations about two bath development...

 

[nworth]

I'm not acquainted with this specific developer, but most soft developers also change the tone and general gradation a bit. Kodak Selectol-Soft used to be pretty much a standard. You may like the effect. As Tom said, you can tune the negative to get the right contrast, or (less effectively) you can just print at a higher grade. One thing to watch - soft developers usually have a shorter life than the ordinary kind, and they don't always show it by changing color. Be sure to use a new batch when developing times start to lengthen.

Agfa 105 soft working paper developer
Water (52C) 750 ml
Metol 3 g
Sodium sulfite (anh) 15 g
Sodium carbonate (mono) 15 g
Potassium bromide 400 mg
WTM 1 l
Use undiluted. Develop 1-1/2 minutes.

 

[Rudeofus]

In my early days some store sold me Dektol and Centabrom S as "hard working" and "soft working" developers to fine tune gradation with Ilford MGIV. When different development regimes showed no difference in tonality, I went for the full test: two prints from same neg, enlarged with exact same setup. One print developed in Centabrom S, the other one in Dektol. Three of us could not see any difference between these prints.

Modern papers, and especially multigrade ones, have builtin contrast, and it almost doesn't matter which developer you throw at them. I once developed a test print in Michael R. 1974's low contrast film developer, and the result still looked mostly the same after development was complete. The difference I did see may have come from my impatience (removed from dev too soon), and I would have seen more difference with less than half a grade difference in filtration.