White Specs / Spots: Help required

[kbg32]

I have tried every filter you can think of and coffee is the worst. We are looking at super fine stuff.

The best I have found is a coffee filter with a square of first aid roll cotton and a second filter on top. It is still not 100%. Use one time only.

How is using a coffee filter the "worst"? The filtering worked for me. It is just a suggestion.

 

[f16sunshine]

My experience is these dots are from Fixer.
Paper Coffee filters placed in an ultra fine stainless steel mesh goes a long ways (double them up if you feel better..... I do that).
Ronald, I'm not sure why you find this to be the worst but would like to hear it.

Another thing that I find really helps is mixing in a large bottle.
I mix fixer in a one gallon bottle and normally develop one 120 or 2/135 rolls at a time (600-700mls fluid).

By pouring 600-700ml off of the top of a 1 gallon bottle, much of the particles are left in the bottom and do not go into the filter to begin with.
Silver is heavier than liquid fixer. Some bits may suspend but it won't be much.

I don't get much if any white spots if I don't try and re-use fixer for too many rolls.
Using Fixers as a one shot seems dramatic to me. There are viable work arounds for re-use.

Cheers!

 

[Bill Clark]

Haven't had the experience like some folks here.

Good water, perhaps.

I re-use my fixer until it won't work in a reasonable (4 min. max) time.

I've made lots of photos with Fuji Acros. Nada!

Did you sneeze? Ha!

Hope you figure it out! It's what makes film fun. It's an adventure!

 

[Dan Daniel]

Any chance you are using a hardening fixer where you add the hardener agent? I had these for a while and stopped using hardening fixer. They went away.

 

[jschrader]

How is using a coffee filter the "worst"? The filtering worked for me. It is just a suggestion.

Well, let us estimate the size. My specs are typically some pixels large, and I scan at 3600 dpi. So assume 3.5 px diameter = 1/1000 inch = 25 um.

I read typical coffee filters have pores of ~10 um (1/100 mm). So, they should remove most of the material that can be visible after a scan.

When I read this through, I see different people have different experiences:
1) spect do show up, but not always, so it depends on how clean one works
2) coffee filters can remove them, in cases. Changing fixer often can get the problem solved

Probably, there are different kinds of dust than can produce specs. Whatever one does to get is solved may help me also!

Thanks for all suggestions, and bring out more !!!

 

[Bill Clark]

Could it be the scanner?

Or do you see these when the film is in the enlarger?

Thought I'd ask.

 

[cmc850]

In my case, they are without a doubt on the film - difficult to see with a loupe on a light table but still evident - scanner adds no dust as the film is suspended without glass etc. A scan with no film in the carrier yields no spots. I do think if printed in a diffusion enlarger they would be masked to some extent. I printed color an d bw for years and never had the dust issues I do in my scanner, so I think anything on the film is just more likely to block the image than it would in an enlarger.

I use non-hardening rapid fix, mixed from powder. I will filter it before my next batch, using fresh stock (it looks crystal clear in the bottle). Odd that any particulate added in fixing would not rinse away during wash. The do look like spots, almost never like fibers or dust.

Here's a full-size really rough example:

 

[luibargi]

I can tell you what was my case, perhaps not a typical one but I use a sweetener in my house as here we have quite a hard water (30-35°French). In my case I had a chemist inspecting the whole chain and he found out some polyphosphates (I think is the right word) around in all solutions (develop, stop and fix) which made precipitates sticking to the film. The polyphosphates were coming from the house system so since then I dilute the chemistry with non-treated water, except of course final wash.

 

[jschrader]

I can tell you what was my case, perhaps not a typical one but I use a sweetener in my house as here we have quite a hard water (30-35°French). In my case I had a chemist inspecting the whole chain and he found out some polyphosphates (I think is the right word) around in all solutions (develop, stop and fix) which made precipitates sticking to the film. The polyphosphates were coming from the house system so since then I dilute the chemistry with non-treated water, except of course final wash.

Why not the final wash? I would expect also that might leave spots on the film, or not?

 

[luibargi]

I don't think it is the final wash as I use distilled water and only for washing. I also suspected the Ilfotol after final wash, it was years old so I reduced Ilfotol down to two drops per half a litre. I do not leave the film in it for mrore than 30".
The matter is that since then all black spots (in the negative are black) have disappeared.

 

[Photon42]

The water is an interesting point. I do use filtered water (Brita), but maybe that is not enough. Haven't had time to work on the subject during the last weeks, but now did ACROS in DDX for a change. Specs are still there, but only really on the first two frames. Very interesting.

 

[luibargi]

Water is the culprit in many cases and not because of solids in suspension (so filtering is possibly useless) but for elements in molecular form that interact with chemicals. I heard from my mentor that when he goes teaching in some places he brings 50 lt of his home water with him; it may sound paranoic but his negs are spotless.