Yellow negatives and Purple developer! (ascorbate developer)

[albada]

I tried this twice to be sure I wasn't hallucinating. Here's the developer:

100 ml water; 0.5g sodium metaborate; 0.54g ascorbic acid; 0.015g phenidone

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BTW, this soup is similar to PCM by Michael Madio, but the proportions are very different.
Putting a short strip of TMY2 (Tmax-400) into this brew for 7.5 min at 20C gave me very thin sickly yellow negatives. Everything is yellow; not just the exposed area. And the developer turned a bright shade of purple that any drug would be proud of. The pH dropped from 8.2 to 8.0. And that was just two frames.

Any clue what happened?

Anyway, I'll try this again, but dev for maybe 20-30 minutes. I'm thinking that yellow cast might actually be the orange mask, and that I'm actually getting a color negative! You didn't know that TMY was color film, did you?

Mark Overton

 

[Kirk Keyes]

Halation dyes from the film have dissolved into the developer and turned it's color purple.

I think that if you add some acid to the spent developer and the color of the solution will change if you get the pH low enough.

 

[albada]

Halation dyes from the film have dissolved into the developer and turned it's color purple.

I'm wondering why this only occurs when metaborate is used as the alkali, and not TEA or sulfite. I tested all three.
I guess metaborate and T-Max don't get along for some reason.

Mark Overton

 

[Kirk Keyes]

Higher pH?

I used to get those colors with Xtol and old TMX.