washing negs in cold water

Is the temperature of my wash water important? If I wash my film

(after complete develop/stop/fix) in cold tap-temperature water

(about 15-18C) will it have a detrimental effect on my negs?

It won't hurt. I did my film washing that way for years before I switched to the Ilford method. Check the Ilford site for an easier way.

Colder water will probably be less able to remove the residual hypo (fix) in the emulsion. But water that is too warm may "melt" the emulsion off the base. When using water <i>that</i> cold I would be sure to use a hypo clearing agent and extend the wash times. Just to be sure, you may want to get one of the special chemicals to check the effiency of washing. <p> Todd Schoenbaum

Use the Ilford method. then just a washing up bowl of the right temp water will wash your negs to archival standards in a few minutes (the 5 mins stands you hear about are not needed). Colder water washes less effectively.

Just try to avoid "shocking" your negatives by taking them from warm fixer to cold wash water.

 

This isn't too far fetched for some of us. In Texas during the past couple of summers it was difficult to get my darkroom area cooler than 80F. However our rural well water was much cooler, closer to 60F.

 

Reticulation can occur, tho' many films are surprisingly resistant to this.

While it's best to keep the temperature constant from pre-soak, if used, right through to wetting agent, if that's not possible or practical getting cooler is much less harmful than getting warmer. Soft emulsion films like Efke and J&C Pro 100 really, really need to be developed at 68 F and no warmer, and any warmer solutions can cause problems with emulsion defects that wouldn't show without the warmer water softening the already soft emulsion.

 

As above, colder water washes slower -- it has less solution capacity and will reduce gelatin swelling. Ideally, your wash water should be between about 65F and 70F, preferably at the lower end of that range. Wash water at cold tap temperatures (down to around 50F or colder in the norther states in winter) won't hurt the film -- but it won't wash adequately in the normal time.

 

My suggestion: use the Ilford water conserving wash method, with distilled water stored at the same room temperature as your developer. Use this water to mix the dev, too. I can mix dev, water stop, wash, and PhotoFlo two rolls of 120 in a single tank with just about a gallon of water that costs 99 cents -- that is, the water costs more than the other chemicals -- but I know I don't have anything causing problems, chemically, and everything starts at the same temperature.

 

Of course, with spring advancing and the long, hot North Carolina summer ahead (when tap water temperature may climb as high as 75F, making that water useless as a tempering bath for colder temps), I may have to start refrigerating my chemicals and water to get them down to working temperature. Either that, or I might have to get the ice maker in the fridge hooked up...

I try to keep the wash water close to the same temperature but I do not worry if it is off by a few degrees. So far, I have not seen any problems with the minor temperature variations.

 

As for Ivan's comments on the 5 minute stand when washing with the Ilford method, I tend to follow the recommendation of Anchell and Troop in 'The Film Developing Cookbook' where they state the 5 minute stand is required (pg. 108).

 

- Randy

Randall, have you ever asked yourself why you let it stand for 5mins? The first lot of water you put in and invert five times, will quickly get equilibrium in amount of fixer between emulsion and water (about 10 secs), so letting it stand for 5 minutes can't remove further fixer, just wastes your time. I can see the point of letting it stand when you're onto the last water change, but keeping the time the same for each change makes no sense at all, as the time to equilibrium will get longer and longer with each water change. Just a time saving thought.

Don't know if people do this any longer but one method of pushing film in development was to use heated developer (up to 40 degrees Celcius).

 

In that case using cold water for the wash would cause the emulsion to crackelate.

 

Ideally all chemicals and the wash should have the same temperature.

Sorry, Ivan, I did not mean to imply that you did not know what you were talking about or anything like that. I never did the 5-minute stand either until I read the "Film Cookbook" and I figured that if a photographic chemist thought it was a good idea, it was worth a shot.

 

I know what you mean about saving time but since many of my dev times are long (up to 20 minutes for some!), long wash times do not seem overly problematic. If I were running many films, I would likely try washing them all at the same time in a running wash to save time.

 

- Randy

Randall, please don't apologise, no offence given or taken. I just find this an interesting area where you'd think the chemists would make sense. Apparently the original Ilford work didn't involve a 5 minute stand. I was interested enough to develop two films identically, fix then wash one with no stand and one with 4x 5min stands. I then stuck one negative from each to a south facing window for 6 months with half covered in black card. the degree of fade (which was considerable) was identical on both. This implies that the level of archival washing was fine in both. By the way I was using an all alkaline process for both films. Hope this is of interest :-)

quote

 

"I never did the 5-minute stand either until I read the "Film Cookbook" and I figured that if a photographic chemist thought it was a good idea, it was worth a shot."

 

Certainly there would be no harm in using the five minute stand method. What strikes me as odd here is that more credence is given here to "photographic chemists" who wrote a book, than to the photographic chemists that actually researched, developed and manufactured the film itself.

I use a variation on the Ilford method, giving 5,10, 20 and 40 inversions of the tank. I start with the water at 20 c and as I draw water from the stock for each stage of the wash I top the stock up with cold water, thus the temperature of the stock of wash water drops at each stage finishing of at about 15 C. Some darkroom workers assert that the total 'wet time' of the film should be kept to under 20 minutes but I find that with double fixing I can't do that so I reduce the temperautre of the wash gradually to reduce any softening of the emulsion.

I tend to believe that there is a modest amount of time required for the chemicals in the film emulsion to equilibrate with the wash water, and due to obvious physical diffusion issues, this will be much greater when there is no agitation, when there is a large volume of water, or if the water is colder that 20C/68F. Having both a reasonable amount of agitation and a large volume of water at the proper temperature will aid in pulling all of the hypo out of the film emulsion-- but there is obviously a happy medium in between.

 

I aim for at least 5 full changes of water, often in the tank I used for developing and fixing (usually by dumping it out and refilling it each time)-- letting it soak for a minute or two in between changes, and the use of hypo eliminator followed by an abbreviated rinse cycle. I keep my rinse water within a few degrees of the developer-- and that is a range of 65-70F. Too high a temperature is far more dangerous than too low, and rapid changes in temperature-- especially going from very hot to even a bit too cold-- are the kiss of death for film!

In short the answer is no, and definately no if you are within 5 degrees C of your dev temp.

 

I guess I over wash. I do a brief Ilford method. Empty the tank, put some water in, then 2 inversions, empty, another 2 inversions, then continue but with 4 inversions, then 8 inversions.

 

Then I wash in running water for 20 mins. If the temperature is down under 10 degrees, I'll let the film soak for a couple of minutes in say water at 12 degrees. The water temp at times can slip down to and under 5 degrees round here. I finnish off with two or three rinses in distilled water.

Oh I process at 20 degrees C.

Never had any problems. I have heard of film cracking if you go from warm to very cold but it's pretty rare.