In the darkroom - Lith printing

This is something I've wanted to try for a long while - I've had the kit for about 15 months and not got around to it until this week's college evening!

Lith printing is a printing technique in which an image is overexposed by about 2 stops onto a fibre-based photographic paper.  The resulting image is then developed in a special 'lith' developer, based on Hydroquinone in a very alkaline solution.  The development process is 'infectious' which means that development starts first in the shadow areas, and as these darker tones start to emerge they develop even faster - the process causes the dark areas to become coarse and grainy whilst the highlight areas have only just started development and remain soft and fine-grained.  The resulting lith print is hard in the shadows and soft in the highlights, exhibiting colour effects caused by the fine division of the grain particles in the paper, so that the highlights appear tinted in shades of yellow, orange and brown.

The key to contrast and colour in developing a lith print is deciding when to snatch the print from the developer and stop the development of the shadows.  When the print is lifted from the developer the shadows stop developing almost immediately as the developer soltution in the paper is exhausted very quickly.  the highlights continue to develop until the process is stopped in the acid bath.  This makes the duplication of a print very difficult as the precise moment of snatching and stopping the print can lead to quite significant differences in tonal range and density.

This is a print that was developed for about 5.5 minutes and snatched and stopped as soon as the picture looked recognisable under the safe light.

Too soft

The next try was between 5.5 and 6 minutes, also snatched and stopped immediately - see how explosive the development is  - when it finally starts!

Too hard

Finally, I managed to get the tonal range I was looking for, only to find that I'd contaminated the paper with fixer from my gloves.  That's what caused the featureless finger prints all over the bottom right of the frame...

Just right - but I've broken it!

Now I've managed to get viewable results, I'll be much more confident at the next try.  I'll try a range of exposure times and then try pulling the prints early and late to see what colour effects I can get.