Pictorial Planet
Barry Thornton’s
Exactol LuxTM Long Life Developer
Check out: Choosing your developer
A new long life developer!
Available from my shop here.
Exactol Lux™ was Barry Thornton's last formulation and perhaps his best. It incorporates all the experience he had formulating pyro developers. Dixactol gets all the headlines but this is Thornton's hidden gem. It became the developer he used most for his later work including the work he was doing to transition to digital scanning. I can't praise this developer enough.
Exactol Lux™ Long Life, is a unique developer originally formulated by the late Barry Thornton. It has been updated by Pictorial Planet to have greatly extended shelf life, even in partly used bottles. It maintains exactly the same characteristics as Barry’s original and is ideal for artists and photographers wishing to produce monochrome fine prints of the highest quality. From the same stable as Thornton’s diXactol Ultra™, Exactol Lux™ Long Life has been designed to compliment any type of film and been carefully formulated to achieve these highly desirable developing characteristics:
- The fullest palette of richly graduated tones, especially in the holding of translucent and delicately drawn highlights.
- Clean working with excellent low fog levels, even with older technology films.
- Particularly resistant to ‘blocking up’ at high exposure levels.
- Shadow detail and separation nursed up to unusual levels.
- Printing is likely to need significantly less burning in, in landscape skies, for instance, and graduation is likely to be markedly superior in these burned-in areas.
Discriminating workers appreciating fine separation of tones should find this a fulfilling developer. Exactol Lux™ Long Life is carefully balanced to give finer grain and is ideal for 35 mm, medium format, and large format where fine grain and superior sharpness, acutance, and tonality is desired.