I stopped buying B&W developers years ago. It’s not that I didn’t like what I could buy. It’s just that I liked to experiment – and still do. And the flexibility of mixing your own ‘soups’ comes in handy in that case. One of the formulas I’ve come to rely on is this general-purpose developer of Ilford pedigree, ID-62. I think it’s just great.
A shout out to Ian Grant who has built and maintains an impressive catalog of photographic formulae on http://www.lostlabours.co.uk/index.htm I keep coming back to his database, which is insanely useful as well as comprehensive.
I found the ID-62 formula there when I was looking for an alternative to ID-78, which I had been using before for prints. ID-78 is a warmtone developer and it’s beautiful in its own right – if only for the fact that it can be mixed as a concentrated stock which can be diluted before use into a working strength developer. The concentrate keeps very well, even in a partially full bottle.
I was looking for something that I could use in a similar way: as a concentrate, always ready to go, needing to be mixed from dry compounds only periodically. For me, this is the sweet spot. The dry components tend to have a long (often virtually indefinite) shelf life: they never go bad. But mixing from powders and the business of weighing them out is a little inconvenient if it needs to be done before every print or film development session. However, doing this periodically to make a stock concentrate is no trouble at all, in my view.
So I was looking for something along those lines, and in contrast to ID-78, I wanted a neutral tone developer. Something like good-old Kodak Dektol, basically. And something for which I had the ingredients on stock as well – so nothing too outlandish, involving Amidol or Glycin and other oddball compounds.
After a bit of rooting around, I hit upon the ID-62 formula on Ian’s website: http://www.lostlabours.co.uk/photography/formulae/developers/devID62.htm Conveniently, Ian provides both a working strength formula and a slightly modified concentrate. I use the latter, and generally mix it in 500ml batches – which I did just now, in fact.
People sometimes think that I must be going through massive amounts of chemistry, if I take the trouble of mixing them myself. Nothing could be further from the truth. I mix from dry powders because of the flexibility it gives me in experimentation, but also because I’m actually pretty darn frugal in my chemistry use.
This is the bottle of ID-62 concentrate that had run empty. Note the labels with the dates: I mixed a fresh batch back in March 2022, and then again in late March 2023. It’s now May 2024, and I’m running out again. It looks like I go through only 500ml of ID-62 concentrate in a year. Not all that much. How come?
Well, why waste a perfectly good thing? I mostly use ID-62 for prints, and most of my prints are fairly small – up to about 24x30cm. It takes about 500ml of working strength developer in a flat-bottom tray to develop these prints. And instead of dumping the developer at the end of a session, I simply top up the bottle and shelf it away. That’s it! I basically replenish and reuse – and I virtually never throw out the working strength. Every time I open the bottle, even if I’ve not printed for months, it’s right there, ready to go. It’s one (major!) reason why I like ID-62 so much. Treat it reasonably well, and it just lives on.
And not only does it work great for prints – I actually use it for film, too! Not all film, though. But it’s great for making high-density negatives for carbon transfer, I think. I’m currently using Fomapan 200 in 8×10″ mostly (and a little 4×5″) for carbon transfer, and after trying several things, I’m starting to settle on ID-62 1+2 for this.
Grain? The size of basketballs! But it doesn’t matter, because carbon transfer is a contact printing process and this renders the ‘coarse’ grain invisible since it’s not being enlarged. In fact, I think the pronounced grain even helps with the tonal threshold problems with DAS carbon transfer, by acting as a sort of halftone screen. On a freshly made carbon transfer on a temporary support, I can clearly see the individual grain ‘dots’ with a good loupe!
More importantly, ID-62 gives a gigantic tonal scale without taking ages to develop, without the need to intensify negatives (I still need to do a blog on that one!) and also without throwing down a layer of fog or overall stain (like pyro developers tend to do) that’s just a nuisance to print through. The other day, I was developing some 8×10’s in a tray of ID62 1+2 for 3 to 4 minutes, and obtained a perfectly usable tonal scale of around 2.5logD. Yes, that’s bulletproof and the highlight areas on these negatives are virtually impossible to see through unless you hold them against a very bright light source – but that’s just right for DAS carbon!
ID-62: magic stuff, if you ask me. Here’s the formula I use; it’s really copied from Ian’s website – I only scaled it to the various bottle sizes I use. But admittedly, I virtually only mix it in 500ml batches anyway.
| To make: | 1000ml | 500ml | 300ml | 200ml | 150ml |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sodium sulfite | 125 | 62.5 | 37.5 | 25 | 18.75 |
| Hydroquinone | 30 | 15 | 9 | 6 | 4.5 |
| Potassium carbonate | 95 | 47.5 | 28.5 | 19 | 14.25 |
| Sodium hydroxide | 5.3 | 2.65 | 1.59 | 1.06 | 0.795 |
| Phenidone | 1.25 | 0.625 | 0.375 | 0.25 | 0.188 |
| Potassium bromide | 5 | 2.5 | 1.5 | 1 | 0.75 |
| Benzotriazole 1% solution | 50 | 25 | 15 | 10 | 7.5 |
For 500ml, I start with 400ml of moderately warm tap water (40-50C or so) and then dissolve the ingredients in the order they’re listed in. Just that. Wait until one ingredient dissolves entirely before adding the next.
The benzotriazole is added as a 1% solution because you use such a tiny amount of it. However, the solubility of benzotriazole in water is so limited, that even a 1% solution takes some time to entirely dissolve. I’ve started to do things a little differently; instead of using water, I use ethanol to make the benzotriazole solution – and I make a 5% solution instead of 1%, since benzotriazole dissolves quite readily in ethanol anyway. So instead of adding 25ml of a 1% water-based benzotriazole solution, I add 5ml of a 5% ethanol-based benzotriazole solution.
I store the concentrate in a glass bottle with a tightly fitting cap. I don’t use marbles, a blanketing gas, vacuum contraptions or anything else; the concentrate appears to keep quite well even in a partially full bottle. As said, it takes me about a year to go through 500ml, which means that most of the time, there’s plenty of air in the bottle. But there’s also plenty of sulfite in the concentrate to protect the developing agents.
For mixing, I prefer to use a magnetic stirrer – but a glass rod or even a stainless steel or plastic spoon will do just fine, too. For weighing out the ingredients, I use the little digital scale in the middle of the photo below. They are cheap as chips and easily available online. Mine touts an accuracy of 1mg at a scale of 50g. Take the accuracy with a grain of salt, but it doesn’t matter. It’s plenty precise enough for this kind of application!
Agree ID-62 is nice. Works, and with the right powder chemicals, always ready to prepare new stock as needed. Side remark: apart from metol -> phenidone, virtually identical to D-72. And I’m intrigued by the idea of replenishing with stock.
I am confused, however, by your dilutions.
“Conveniently, Ian provides both a working strength formula and a slightly modified concentrate. I use the latter”
The first formula in Ian’s site is a /stock/ solution, quite close to the /stock/ solution for D-72. Below that first solution, Ian writes:
“Dilute 1+ 3 (can be 1+2 or 1+1 for higher contrast)” amounting, relative to the regular stock; I use 1+2, identical to what is recommended for D-72, amounting to 0.33 relative to that standard stock.
The second formula is a concentrated (x2.5) stock solution. And you state:
“my working strength paper developer; it’s at a dilution of…I don’t know; something close to 1+3 I think”
Relative to standard stock that would be (1/4)x2.5=0.625, quite a lot more than the 0.33 I kept from D-72 habit, or the 0.25 (1+3) that is the primary recommendation of Ian Grant.
Would you care to comment on that choice? Is your working strength dilution tied to the (stronger) stock concentration via the replenishment rate?
Thanks for your comment and your question: “Would you care to comment on that choice?” My dilution of 1+2-ish (maybe a little less, who knows!) is indeed in relation to the concentrated stock. It’s indeed possible that this I use a much stronger/more concentrated working strength developer than what others do. Since this is a paper developer, my approach to it is very pragmatic. If it’s too slow to my taste, I add concentrate. That’s all. Since standing around waiting for a print to develop is not something I value much, I try to keep development times reasonably short; ~1 minute. Indeed, the 1+2-ish dilution develops an RC print to completion in 25-40 seconds or thereabouts. It’s hard to tell under red light and I develop for 1 minute to keep a safety margin.
Whenever I doubt the strength/activity of my developer, I develop a test strip for a time that I suspect should be liberally long enough for the development to go to completion (e.g. 2 minutes). I then develop another strip at the time I think/hope will be sufficient in practice (e.g. 1 minute). If the density of the blacks and the hue of the shadow tones is different between these strips, I know my developer isn’t as active as I want it to be, so I add some concentrate.
The net result of the above after working with this developer a couple of years is that I arrived at a 1+2 (or thereabouts) dilution that always seems to get the job done, and quickly, too. I could reduce the dilution and increase development time and obtain virtually the same result (purists will object and I understand their concerns, but I’m a pragmatist and reject the relevance these minutiae*). The main difference this would make is that I would save a few pennies in exchange for 50-100% more waiting time.
So the TL;DR is that I use a working stock that’s concentrated enough to get the job done in 60-90sec. Whether that’s 0.33, 0.625 or 0.5891264 – in all honesty, I don’t really care. The 1+2 based on the concentrate is a ballpark figure and just to give a general impression of the magnitude. Don’t attribute too much value to the number. I find in practice it’s not very relevant.
(* The puritan minutiae generally involve very subtle differences in curve toe and shoulder behavior of the paper and image tone. Concerning the former: I manipulate contrast through choice of gradation and burning/dodging, and on very rare occasions flashing. These techniques have a vastly stronger effect than the subtle effect of dilution or ‘not-quite-complete’ development. In terms of image tone, I prefer to tone with sepia and/or selenium for the most part, and again, the effects of this vastly outstrip the very subtle effects of altering image tone through developer strength. Taking an analogy from construction: when renovating a house and adding a set of patio doors to it, some people seem to prefer to take a chisel and very gradually create an opening that a person can just pass through; the sides will be perfectly nice and smooth. My approach is to take the biggest sledge hammer I can yield and break away a good sized chunk of wall to let a serious amount of light in. One approach isn’t better than the other, but I think it’s pretty clear where my preference lies.)
Thank you for your detailed reply. Indeed, waiting less for prints, and even more, for test strips, to develop is attractive. I’ll do my own experimenting. And, agree, leave the minutiae to puritans.