I never used old brown. Instead I just added more restrainer; both potassium bromide and sodium chloride work well. Sodium chloride gave me more brownish/pinkish hues on Fomatone; bromide leaned more towards tan and yellow. I used a highly dilute and simple developer (just hydroquinone and a tiny amount of sulfite), used it one shot, and added restrainer to taste.
You can also add a little sulfite to your developer to slow it down; this will make things more colorful up to a certain point. If you add too much sulfite, you no longer get infectious development, so it's a little tricky. I preferred adding bromide and/or chloride.
What also boosts color is if you develop partly in a neutral pH metol-only developer (which is really slow and will grown very tiny silver crystals) and then boost the shadows in a normal lith developer.
Moersch sells whatever you need in convenient bottles with clear instructions. DIY mixing also works quite well, but is of course more complicated.
I tried some modern Ilford MG fiber based papers in Moersch Easylith dilution 1:25 just because I was curious but it turns out this paper is not lithable. Snowball effect on every paper I developed.
Have you tried second pass lith? Overexpose print, develop in normal paper developer, then bleach back with a rehalogenating bleach and then redevelop in your favorite lith developer. Many papers can be successfully lith-ed that way, even if they don't work in the normal fashion.
Have you tried second pass lith? Overexpose print, develop in normal paper developer, then bleach back with a rehalogenating bleach and then redevelop in your favorite lith developer. Many papers can be successfully lith-ed that way, even if they don't work in the normal fashion.
I have not tried that but i am planing to try with Ilford MG RC. I really would like to find a modern RC-paper suitable for lith prints.
My favorite old and discontinued paper so far is Kodak Polymax II RC. This paper give consistent results in Easylith and is easy to print for me as a lith noob and learning the lith process.
This is a print from yesterday on Kodak Polymax II RC. For the first time I tried some ”selective” development. Developed the whole paper and put it in stop bath. Then back in the lith developer again for selective developing of some details of the print. Just experimenting and having fun in the darkroom.
I would expect stopping would be problematic, since the paper is so porous. You'd probably need a more concentrated stop - and possibly pull the print frojm developer a little sooner than you'd expect. But I think the emulsion is the same as normal MGWT.
Nice looking print and image! Great candidate for the process. Another way you can "Season" your developer instead of OB is to place a sheet, or maybe half sheet of some paper you don't care about (assuming you have any) in your mixed dev with the lights on. Rock it in the tray till it turns jet black. This will take the place of the first less interesting lith print everyone talks about.