[pure-silver] Re: D-Max with pyro

At 08:20 AM 15/12/2005, Russ Gorman wrote: 
<snip>
It seems that using a water stop bath , and TF-4 fixer, to be a huge
part of getting consistent stain.  It is easy to make the stain
disappear ( either completely or unevenly) with an acid stop or with
traditional fixer. Weak fixer can also lead to uneven stain as well
as uneven clearing of silver.

That said, to the eye the negatives tend to look a little brownish
( some emulsions look greenish or yellowish) and a little thinner
than negs developed in Rodinal or D-76 but not greatly so.  They also
tend to have lots of information in the shadows and highlights in
spite of their "thinner" appearence.
The difference is not really apparent until they are on a light table
side by side with negatives developed in other chemistry.

One of the nice things due to tanning of the emulsion in Pyro is that
they are dust and scratch free... Clear skies and smooth clean skin.

Consistency seems to be important, and I have found that new PMK did not give as much stain as when somewhat older. Now I top up my aged PMK with a little of a new batch so that I don't have any sudden changes.

I have been using a slightly alkaline fixer (Agfa FX-Universal, pH=7.5 approx, made for C-41 primarily but quite ok for black and white). My stain is consistently olive/khaki, but nowhere near as green as some I've seen on web pages. With the demise of Agfa, and with importation to the end of the Earth here of Formulary products impractical, I might have to start mixing up some slightly alkaline fixer. I bought some Kodak Flexicolor Fixer the other day (pH=6.1) and was disapponted that it has the characteristic "acidic" smell of ordinary acid fixers, even though it is not as acidic as they are. I might add something alkaline to it. Would a tiny bit of sodium hydroxide be ok?

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