Photographers' Formulary #12 Developer for Black & White Film - Makes 2 Liters

Dev 12 - a not so subtle film developer

Developer Number 12 from Photographers' Formulary is a package with the same ingredients as the recipe of Edwal 12. The developer was designed for flat US Midwestern light, giving brilliant negatives - the opposite of compensating action. It works really well for portraiture, yielding very beautiful highlights, and is especially well suited for those that print in the darkroom. My own personal use of the developer is for low to normal contrast scenes, usually portraiture, where very fine grain and high sharpness is desirable. The developer gives almost full emulsion speed, yields finer grain than any commercial developer I know of, and is very sharp at the same time. How is this possible? Haven't we heard this before about so many developers? I don't believe in silver bullets, but consider technique to be infinitely more important than our materials, and that there is no single film developer that can solve a particular problem that technique and knowledge can't fix. But, this developer IS special. Dr. Edmund Lowe figured out that paraphenylenediamine (PPD) helps lower the pH of the developer to a level where the glycin becomes more active. This is the key to how it behaves with respect to having extremely fine grain, being very sharp, AND giving full emulsion speed at the same time. If you wish to tame its brilliant tonality it's easy to do by slowing down agitation while processing film. By agitating every three minutes or every five minutes, you can tame the brilliant highlights and produce negatives that suit your style of working. My own work is calibrated to Ilford Multigrade IV fiber paper and Ethol LPD developer. By doing exposure and film developing tests I have found how to best use Edwal 12 with Tri-X 400 film to perfectly suit the tonal scale of the paper, and can easily adapt to other papers as well. All in all, Developer 12 is a remarkable developer with qualities I have not found in other products. If anything is broken with your process, neither this or other developer has the power to fix it for you, but used properly and exploring its full potential some special results can be had. One word: PPD is a chemical which should be treated with respect. In powder form it is especially necessary to be careful. While it was once used in hair coloring chemicals, and probably wasn't healthy for either hair stylists or those getting styled, it's in its dry form that we must be careful not to breathe the dust.