can you use water or vinegar as a stop for film processing

hi

i have been using vinegar as a stop bath for my prints and am wondering if i

can use the same for my film developing? if so can i reuse it several times or

should i only use it once? i would use fresh vinegar, not stuff from printing/.

 

also, how do i know when the vinegar is exhausted for photo printing?

thanks

 

Teresa

my recc- acedic acid, its not too expensive. dilute it really weak, 1:127, one oz. to make a

gallon of solution, a total of 128oz.. check it by putting your hand in dev and then stop, if

your hand doesnt feel slippery after stop then its good, if not its bad. sounds crazy but its

not.

Yes, both you can.

Vinagar 1,5-2% is OK.

 

Advantage for vinagar above just plain water:

More precise developing time (bandwith).

Just less base fog on most films.

Easy fool-proof development.

 

But vinagar stinks so citric acid is more comfortable, same 1,5-2% solution. Normally a stop is equipped with an indicator which will give a color when it's going out of order.

That's also your second question. You can also check that with a pH checker. Regular stop (fresh) is around 4-4,5. (pH).

 

Vinegar and citric acid are so cheap that it's hardly recommendable to take any risk for these kind of chemicals. But also fix is cheap but you can re-use it for some films. Also this you can check by the clearing time of a small piece of film (undevelopped) or the KI check:

http://shop.fotohuisrovo.nl/product_info.php?cPath=31_43&products_id=155

For developer we can recommend to use always a one shot version. If a developer is wrong you're in real trouble because you can not save the film anymore.

There are a lot of possibilities:

http://www.fotohuisrovo.nl/documentatie/filmontwikkelaars_en.pdf

 

Most of these developers are available in Europe and 90% also in the USA.

 

Best regards,

 

Robert

Just use water, works perfectly...don't complicate things.

NOT if you would like to prolong the condition of your fixer.

If you're going to use vinegar, make sure it's the colourless type (spirit vinegar). The colouring and impurities in malt vinegar can encourage bacteria and mould to grow on your negatives.

 

Almost any mild acid can be used as a stop bath. Sodium metabisulphite, citric or boric acid, for example. However, sodium metabisulphite or acetic acid (vinegar) are probably the best choice, for reasons of compatibility with the fixing bath.

 

I can buy sodium metabisulphite from a home-brew shop for 80 pence (about 1 dollar 50 cents US) a half-kilo. You only need a heaped teaspoonful to make a pint of stop bath, so it's very economical.

 

You need about 2% acetic acid solution for a stop bath, and since clear vinegar is only 5% acetic acid, you'll need to dilute it 2 parts vingar to 3 parts water. Now this may make using vinegar not as economical as buying proper photographic stop bath, which needs about a 25:1 dilution.

You can use the same solution for film processing, but you should not use the IDENTICAL solution, i.e. from the same bottle. Due to the open baths of print processing the solutions collect a lot of dust which might deposit on your films.

 

I am not sure whether diluted vinegar is very suitable. I make my stop bath from the concentrated vinegar available in Germany which is approx. 25 p.c. proof. A dilution of 1+9 results in 2.5 to 3.0 p.c. proof stop bath.

 

You can use the vinegar solution several times. Usually I use 1 liter (approx. 1/4 gallon) for 10 35mm or 120 films.

 

Since commercial stop bath uses the same base chemicals (an acid), you can use the indications of the manufacturers to calculate life time of a stop bath for prints.

Since I do not try to maximise use of my alkaline fix, I use nothing at all. Why go base-acid-base? Sounds like film abuse to me. Photographers Formulary TF4.

 

We are talking a few cents here, using fix `til it is dead will get you nothing but trouble eventually. A commercial lab is different.

I think you'll get a dozen different answers to this question...and they are probably all correct. My own habit is to use a water stop bath for film, and a normal stop bath for prints (although I use a double fixer step for prints). Chemicals made for film/paper development are pretty plentiful and except for a few instances, not expensive at all. I just don't see the advantage to using something not made and (hopefully) tested for photography work.

 

Having said that, yeah, I think it's nice to know what the alternatives are in case you forget to buy something and need to develop immediately.........or you're stuck out in the middle of nowhere on vacation/assignment and need to run a roll of film and some contact prints.........but, i really don't see the need to substitute as a normal process.

Ronald is right. Ilford (and Kodak?) recommends an all-alkaline process for its films. Its

gentler to the film, and more archival. You don't need a hypo clearing agent with an

alkaline process. Unless your developing times are very short (not a good idea anyway) a

water "stop" bath works just fine. It should be followed by an alkaline fixer such as the

Formulary TF4 Ronald mentioned, which I also use.

 

I do all my processing in a Jobo so all my chemistry is one-shot. The Jobo is relatively

efficient so it only takes me about 170-200mL of each solution to process a roll of film. I

think for the most part reusing chemistry is a false economy. I could see reusing fixer a

few times, but it's senseless to push it to its absolute limit. I'd never reuse developer--it's

just too cheap to risk the time and effort you put into capturing the images to begin with.

You did put in time and effort, didn't you?

I use water as a stop for Film and I have never had a problem with thousands and thousands of rolls.With all the money I spend on Cameras , film, lenses, travel, its pound foolish to overuse chemicals that only cost a few dollars. I use my developer as a one-shot then toss it and fixer is never used till the end of its life.I have film going back 35 yrs that is just as it was, the day I developed it.

I use a water stop for film. 4 water changes in 1 miinute. No problems. Works every time.

Just drain out the developer 15 secs before the end of your dev to compensate - water works

a bit slower than acid stop. Water is cheap, clean working and environmentally friendly.

The thinner the film base and the longer the scheduled development time the less necessary it is to stop development quickly.

 

If your film dev time is only a 90 seconds or something then evenly and quickly stopping the development is important.

 

Remember development continues with some degree with water only, so repeatability of the strength and time fixer is started is important. In other words it is possible to get good process repeatability if fresh fixer is added at exactly the same time for each roll after a water bath of exactly the same time. (as is the drain speed and time.)

 

If you have done a 30 minute stand development in a dilute developer the difference is probably not even measurable, however.

 

Or if paper fibers have soaked in developer, it would seem important to neutralise it. But I've never experimented with not using stop bath for B&W non-RC prints.

I didn't mean film base thickness - I meant emulsion thickness, expecting that thicker emulsions have longer chemical diffusion times.

I use a water stop and alkali fix for all film and paper processing. As Ron mentiioned, there are good reasons for omitting acid compounds from the development process. In regards to stopping development in a split second, I find this to be of more academic importance than practical. Unless you are getting insanely short dev times under the 5 min mark I seriously doubt you would notice any difference of your times vary 10 sec or so either way (which is what some people will tell you using a water stop will cause.) Nevertheless, if you use a water stop bath in a standard, repeatable manner you will get standard repeatable results. For me this consists of draining the tank of developer 15 sec prior to the end of my determined dev time. I then fill the tank with water 5 times and agitate for 5 sec each time prior to fixing in TF-4.

Thankyou everyone, I do appreciate the time you have taken to answer my question. I am trying to reduce the amount of chemicals that I use...hence the question.

Thanks once again I really value this site

Teresa

I have a phototherm automatic film processor. It uses plain water for a stop bath.

I agree with what Ron said. But I would add the caveat that water does not arrest development as quickly as an acid-based Stop Bath. Ultimately, there's a little bit of imprecision built into using a water stop because you are relying on dilution of the developer working solution to arrest development rather than reduction of the PH.

 

But only a little. I use Pyrocat-MC a great deal and, as it's a staining developer, I basically have to use a water stop with it. I haven't had any problems using ordinary tap water.

 

TF-4 is hands down the best fix on the market that I have ever used with regard to shelf life, capacity, and clearing time. I wouldn't think of using anything else for film.

I don't really recommend using a water stop for prints. If you choose to do so you will either a) need to exchange the water constantly b) need to purchase a children's wading pool to hold your stop.

Al, when I first switched from acid stops and fixers to water stops and TF-4 I felt the same way at first. I found that keeping my stop tray next to the faucet alleviates those concerns to a great extent. When the water takes on a decidedly yellow tint, I discard and refill with fresh water. This takes all of about 60 seconds to do. I figure I do this every 5 prints or so on average, sometimes longer if I forget. Again, with something like TF-4, all you need to do is remove gross amounts of developer prior to fixing whereas with an acid fix you need to "prep" the print in an acid solution to prevent premature exhausting of the fix bath. I routinely test my TF-4 solutions with Edwal hypo check and the film leader method. They hold up extremely well over the course of 2 weeks or more. In fact, to date, I have never been able to exhaust this fixer and end up dumping it prematurely out of paranoia rather than test its true limits. At any rate, rest assured that a water stop and TF-4 is about as " bulletproof" a method as you will find. Of course if you are using a standard acid rapid fix for printing I agree that there is no benefit to using a water stop bath in terms of convience and the longevity of the fixer.

I've written a whole paper plus considerable testing on acid stop bath. I won't belabor the point, but acetic acid or citric acid are excellent. If you are lucky you can use a water bath but it isn't a good idea.

 

Lynn

Teresa, there was a thread on the same topic in 2004:

 

http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=009ZDV

 

which had to be stopped by the moderator because it escalated to a near-fight between Bill Troop, one of the authors of "The Film Developing Cookbook" and a former Kodak employee. The whole idea behind a stable stop bath (as put by Troop, who is a proponent of all-alkaline process) is that it should be buffered and have a pH indicator dye to show that it is exhausted. From the 2004 discussion it was clear that if there was a difference between using a water (or no rinse at all) and an acid rinse, it was only in the lifetime of the fixer. I personally do not see a point in deviations from the film manufacturer's recommendation if a film is going to be scanned.

All I can add to this fray is that I do use a stop bath for both film and paper. I have seen no practical evidence that using an acid stop bath in conjuntion with an acid fixer causes any problems over the short or long term for either film or paper. What I have personally seen are stains on fiber based prints when using water for a stop bath and dramatically diminished fixer capacity. Diluting food grade white vinegar with an equal part of water will certainly work, but it is not more economical to do so. There are also no environmental advangates to the practice either. Both stop bath and vinegar are dilute solutions of acetic acid. Stop bath has the advantage of containing a ph indicating dye which lets you know when the solution is exhausted by inspection.

whoa i am new to this and so did not wish for any fights to occur. as i said i am looking at ways to reduce my own use of chemicals as much as possible and thought that a natural substance such as vinegar or better still water would do just that.

so thanks for the info and i do appreciate it al, but please no fighting over it as i am sure you all agree that photography can be technical and subjective

teresa

when you guys say "water" are you guys talking about deionized water or just regular faucet water?