Results from changing one component or another are subjective. One person's contrasty or soft is another's not contrasty enough or soft enough. There is no substitute for trying it yourself.
At least on this side of the pond, it's generally been not far off the price of Classic or Cooltone - for a while you could buy Galerie from Harman Express for about the same as MG Classic from a dealer - which is not bad for what Ilford seemed to regard as their premium paper in the pre-MGWT era.
What sort of dilution level are we talking about here compared to the usual stock solution?
Absolutely, though have increasingly taken to making a quick USM which I find almost faster to do & more consistent. Of course at that point, gr.1 becomes less of an issue, but there are times when you don't want to/ can't mask the negative & it would be handy (definitely not necessary) to have.
I Use a variation of GP-1 about 1/8 the concentration of the standard formula, mixed with just enough water to allow the print to be evenly covered when the tray is gently tilted back and forth. You can't reuse it on a later date, so just mix enough per session. The only other variable is the time in the solution per print, which can vary anywhere from 30 sec to 7 min, depending on the coolness of tone or degree of intensification. It can also precede selenium and/or sulfide toners for more complex results on some papers.
Can't comment on AZO, but with Lodima LPD give prints with a bluish cast. Amidol, using Michael Smith's formula, gives normal looking silver prints with better DMAX and tonality. I'd recommend Amidol over LPD. That said, LPD is really super with Ilford MG Warmtome.
The earlier point in the thread of Brett Weston using LPD, I heard the same but I doubt it was contact printing with silver chloride papers. I'd guess he was using LPD for enlarging with multigrade papers.
As long as the gold is present, the concentration and temp don't seem to matter much with this particular formula. But if you're aiming for a conspicuous split tone with sulfide, I recommend four or five min in gold for warm VC papers, or even certain discontinued graded papers which some of us might have stockpiled. Developers like 130 work well.
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