Defender 55-D is my favorite print developer. It’s nicely active and gives beautiful, warm tones with Arista VCFB, my preferred paper. But you won’t find it pre-packaged in photography stores. You’ll have to mix it yourself.
(Let’s pretend that photography stores are still a thing. I’m trying to visualize an ideal world here, even though I haven’t lived in a town with a photo shop in a decade.)
If you do some digging, you will turn up a few recipes for Defender 55-D. I’m old-fashioned and trust books, so I’ve been using the recipe provided by Steve Anchell in The Darkroom Cookbook (4th ed.).
It works wonderfully.
But I’ve just learned there’s an error in it. Someone goofed when transcribing the recipe for the US market. At tray strength for printing, the recipe I’ve been using has 4.3g/L of potassium bromide, which is the chemical that acts as the restrainer. More restrainer gives more warmth. The correct recipe gives only 0.6g/L of bromide in the tray.
This week, I’ve been printing with the corrected Defender 55-D recipe. I still like how it works, except for one tiny detail, which could be the reason it fell out of favor (ignoring, of course, that Defender is out of business.)
As we would imagine, with less restrainer in the developer, my print tone was more neutral. It made a lovely grey. For the first few prints. And then the image tone shifted warmer.
This happens because as more prints are developed, more restrainer is left in the developer, byproducts of the development process. This added restrainer slows development and warms the image tone. My incorrect version of 55-D contained quite a bit of restrainer from the start so building up a bit more as I worked didn’t change much. It gave warm tones throughout the printing session.
I’m glad to know the correct formula for my favorite developer. But in the future I’ll go back to doing it wrong, because that’s what it takes to make the prints look the way I want them.
