MCC 110 lith printing

[Niall Bell]

I've just used a pack of MCC110 FB paper doing mostly lith printing. I had a few failures where the print developed unevenly and was vaguely blotchy. I seemed to get around this by agitating the tray in two directions rather than just rocking back and forth.

Of the successful prints, the colours were much more muted than other lith-able papers (see attached) although I've not yet had a chance to tone these.

I was wondering how others have fared?

Hopefully I've not missed a thread on this already!

Niall.

[Trevor Crone]

Thanks for posting this Niall. I find the subtlety of your print quite pleasing. Nice change from the more obvious lith 'look' on papers such as Fomatone MG Classic.

A useful 'string to the bow' if I may say so

[Dave miller]

Looks like a good result to me, lith prints don’t have to be psychedelic to please.

[PaulG]

A good result indeed - thanks for posting. I've managed to get a couple of other Adox papers to lith (e.g fineprint vario), but without much colour, so it will be interesting to see how this compares.

[Steve O]

I put two sheets of this paper through my lith chemicals at the end of the last session and got a warm coffee brown. I did spoil them both by using my standard approach of judging snatch point with a headtorch covered by a safelight filter - both were badly fogged

Might try a couple more on Thursday night.

Steve

[Niall Bell]

Thanks for your comments.

Steve, I’m interested in your comment about MCC110 fogging: I had two sheets out of the 20 or so I printed that were fogged, which I found unusual. The fogged sheets were reminiscent of pepper-fogged paper.


Here’s a few more lith prints showing another on MCC110 with muted colours; one on Seagull VC also muted; and three of a mountain rescue team on graded Seagull –one muted and two with some colour. All are un-toned and as you can tell, un-spotted.

The subtle colours work reasonably well for some of the shots, however, I was trying to get strong gritty effect for the hill shots.

The MRT 1 & 2 pics were made from colour negatives. I could not get strong blacks on MRT 1 - no matter how hard I tried and I wasted a few sheets rying.

The child picture was developed in Rollei Vintage lith developer (33A, 33B in 600ml water) and the rest on Moersch’s SE5 (40A, 20B 6+ 800 water and 200ml OB).

I’m going on Tim Rudman’s advance lith workshop in April, perhaps I can get a steer towards getting stronger blacks. However, I’d welcome any suggestions for attaining blacks or general improvements!


These were scanned on our departmental photocopier/scanner which I’m told is of low resolution, so please excuse the obvious digital shortcomings, such as their being off-centre.


Thanks,
Niall

[michael71]

Hi Niall,
I have also found that MCC 110 gives fairly muted colours with "lith" this also seems to be the case with adox Vario Classic and Nuance. however the "Nuance" gives really dense blacks which is an effect i like a lot, Lith prints don't have to be overly colourful, (I prefer them not to be!)
Have you found that the rollei dev dies very quickly after only a couple of prints?

[Niall Bell]

Hi Michael,
Yes I found that with the Rollei developer. I just checked my note book and it says after print number 4- 'Dev Dead'.

On that occasion rather than make new developer for one more print I used the remaining OB I'd stored from previous session three days previously, but which had only a couple of prints through. It worked OK-ish.

Niall.

[Steve O]

Niall,

I like the tonality of those samples, particularly the one on Oriental. The only way I get a solid black with lith is to reduce expose a fair bit but you obviously have to watch out for lost highlights and burning in rarely seems as effective as conventional printing.

For really gritty prints I prefer Kentmere Fineprint Warmtone but it's no longer made and I've only got a couple of boxes left now

I had 10 sheets of the Variant 123 arrive today so I'll put a couple through the chemicals at the end of tomorrow nights session with Fomatone. From the samples I've seen so far it could well be a good half way house between Fomatone and the more subtle papers.

We could really do with threads dedicated to people posting samples of each paper type with supporting notes etc, not general comments. APUG have something similar and Wolfgang Moersch's site do too but the translations are poor.

Steve

[Dave miller]

Originally Posted by Steve O

Niall,
SNIP

We could really do with threads dedicated to people posting samples of each paper type with supporting notes etc, not general comments.

Steve

We can open a section for that if there is general support, although the viewed results will be as variable as our monitors are diverse.

What's the demand?