Is this normal grain?

[Freakscene]

Pre-soak, ammonium hyposulfite fixer and rinse using the Ilford method with 20C tap water will make all the anti-halation purple tint go away.

Rapid fix is ammonium thiosulfate. Hyposulfute won’t fix your film. With my water, this method doesn’t get rid of the purple tint with Ilford films. Pre-washing also removes products added to allow developer into the emulsion evenly and quickly.

Nowadays, pre-soak with 35mm film is quite mandatory. For some reason, the new films base creates more foam in the developer than before. Without pre-soak, you can have bubbles arrows stains at the top of your films, due to much foam happening in the tank while developing. Pre-soak will dramatically reduce that foam.

In some water conditions, with some Ilford films you can get foam. It is more likely with Delta than the Plus films. But it is a waste of time, water and effort to pre-wash if you don’t need it, so test first. It is the agent added to the emulsion and rear side anti-halation coating to make the film become wet quickly and consistently that causes the foam, and it only does it where there are too few ions of certain kinds in the water (these complex the wetting agent out of solution).

The double-sided anti halation layer of 120 films always made pre-soak mandatory with 120 films, anyway, so this is a normal part of the job. Two minutes pre-soak sounds less prone to make film swell than one hour post-soak. 😉

35mm films have anti-halation coating on the rear surface too.

Neither a pre-soak nor a post-soak are required. Time or a few hours of indirect light will get rid of any residual colour in the negative, and the stain doesn’t make any functional difference to the negatives anyway (they still scan or print fine). The longer your film is wet for, the more chance there is of artefacts from emulsion changes.

Marty

 

[Highway 61]

Rapid fix is ammonium thiosulfate.

Corrected, vocabulary error. Ammonium thiosulfate of course. Thanks Marty.

But it is a waste of time, water and effort to pre-wash if you don’t need it, so test first.

I have got foam with quite all the kinds of water I have been using for more or less five years, which wasn't happening before (been developing film at home since 1983) so my opinion still is that the film base is the culprit. The foam issue came out with their "Plus" films too, not only the "Delta" types films. Got it with their budget "PAN" films as well. Two minutes of stand pre-wash gets me rid of that pesky foam problem 100% so I wouldn't call it a waste of time nor a worthless effort, and as for the water amount required, well... It also allows me to enjoy a good expresso before starting developing once everything is ready on my kitchen table. Neither abnormal uneven nor too slow developer action to be noticed with pre-wash (I am aware of that add-ons chemicals which pre-wash would kill, but I never could see this in practice, even with T-Max films which I pre-washed as well, developing them altogether with Ilford films in the same tank).

Time or a few hours of indirect light will get rid of any residual colour in the negative

This trick quite never worked with my films, while pre-wash, a very good fixer and an energic way of using the Ilford rinsing method works just perfect here.

 

[Doug A]

FWIW Rodinal does an excellent job of removing the tint from cubic grain films like HP5 or Tri-X. But the tint that does remain when I use Ilfotec DD-X instead does not seem to have any effect on my scans, i.e., it does not significantly increase the film base density.

 

[Freakscene]

FWIW Rodinal does an excellent job of removing the tint from cubic grain films like HP5 or Tri-X. But the tint that does remain when I use Ilfotec DD-X instead does not seem to have any effect on my scans, i.e., it does not significantly increase the film base density.

The pH of Rodinal 1+50 is around 13, the pH of working solutions of DD-X is 8.45-8.55. It makes a huge difference, including the solubility of antihalation coatings on film.

Marty