Hypo-Clear v. Photoflo

Hypo clear is a five minutes bath to clear Hypo :) Photoflo is to avoid marks of heavy water in the negative when you hang it to dry. You can use the Ilford method to wash to waste less water. Search some of this in google. You can find help in sites like unblinking eye and the masssive development chart. Good luck

There is no stupid relationship between them. Hypo Clear neutralizes hypo, so it becomes more water soluble and washes out of the film emulsion more completely. Properly washed film becomes archival, meaning it is stable over decades. A completely clean film is open to degradation from the elements (it’s silver, so it will eventually stain) unless it toned from the gitgo, with a very mild solution of Selenium Toner or Gold Toner (forget it, can’t afford it). Photo Flo is soap. It helps water run off the film. No more, no less.

does anyone tone their film?

http://photo.net/large-format-photography-forum/004xVO

http://www.apug.org/forums/forum42/21067-dangers-selenium-toner.html

Stoop, thanks for that information. I get what each does now. So what do I choose, I’d like my stuff to last longer, so should I go with the hypo, giving it five minutes? I’ve also heard that I should error on the side of over diluting the hypo? Any suggestions are welcome. My process is as follows:
1: 30 second rinse in water
2: Develop for appropriate time
3: 90 second rinse in water
4: Fix for 8 to 10 minutes, how ever long it takes me to clean up my stuff.
5: Wash for at least 5 minutes
6: Hypo for 5 minutes
7: Shake the crap out of the roll
8: Throw in dryer for 3 mins on warm, 8 on cool.

Is my process flawed?

Hey Cameron, Hypo is Fix, don’t confuse the terms or you can make mistakes in the future with the labels of your bottle. Put the word Clear very big. You don’t need to wash before the hypo clearing agent if you use a little amount and throw it. After the hypo clearing agent you have to wash the negatives, depends the method the time. Finally you put a last rinse of water with some drops of photoflo and then you hang for dry. Cheng, none of the solutions tone the film.

Film processing:

http://unblinkingeye.com/Articles/Developers/My_Technique/my_technique.html

Printing:

http://unblinkingeye.com/Articles/Archival/archival.html

Pick up The Negative by Ansel Adams, and the Craft of Photography by David Vestal. Almost every stupid library has both, and they’ll answer all your processing questions and then some.

cameron,

you are going at it completely WRONG. i hate to tell you this but you need to be properly instructed before you ruin any more film. Herman and the others above are correct:

HYPO is the old word for FIXER. you’ve got your sequence right up until this step.

now, 1 minute rinse in water. you can visually inspect film at this point.

(not that there’s much you can do other than fixing it a bit longer if it was under-fixed, or apply emergency products like farmer’s reducer or intensifier if you TOTALLY screwed up. Screw-ups usually happen because of developing at the wrong temperature, the wrong time, the wrong dilution of chemistry, or too much/too little agitation.)

then, HYPO CLEARING or PERMA-WASH or FIXER-REMOVER, it’s marketed under these different names depending on which company’s formula you buy.

NOW you wash, for at least 10 minutes. the fact that you did not wash your previous negatives after you hypo-cleared them is a SERIOUS problem. I do not know the long-term chemical impact of unwashed negatives that are coated in hypo-clearing agent. But it cannot be good. If I were you I would re-wash your important negatives.

FINALLY, photo-flo is the VERY LAST step. as stated above, this is a soap that allows the film to dry quickly and evenly without stains. photo-flo will not have a chemical impact on archival keeping.

And dryer on cool before warm, otherwise the film sticks to the reels and is hard to remove. (assuming you are using a tube dryer. if you’re removing the film first then it doesn’t matter.)

Selenium toning has its whole school of adherents for both film and paper. You could do it AFTER the hypo-clear and BEFORE the final wash, if you like.

To review, your sequence should be as follows:

1: PRE-WASH: 30 second rinse in water (optional)
2: DEVELOP for appropriate time
3: 60 second rinse in water
4: FIX for 6 to 10 minutes (RAPID FIXER will be faster)
5: 60 second rinse in water
6: HYPO-CLEARING for 1 minute
7: FINAL WASH: 5-15 minutes or at least 6 full changes of water
8: PHOTO-FLO: 30-60 seconds
9. Drying

Alan, Got it. I definitely had my terms screwed up. In my list, I did mean hypo-clear. Anyway, I think I’ve got everything straight in my head now. Your post helped a lot. I’ll be running some film tonight or tomorrow, granted if you read my previous post, I might have other issues. I’m doing some test runs on some 14-year-old tri-x. We’ll give it a shot. Thanks again, guys. I’m a pretty serious film camera buff, and now that I’m out of the school environment I really need to have a decent b/w developing system to keep up with everything. Getting color film developed at a lab is just too expensive.

Developing your own color is not as easy as with stupid b&w. Temps are critical to within a degree, chemicals are expensive and have to be fresh, and the fumes are much more dangerous than those from b&w chemicals. If you plan to do your own color, look into Jobo drums. http://www.jobo.com/web/Darkroom.333.0.html

What ever happened to stop bath? Doesn’t going from develop to water increase the development time? I can remember developing night shots and using a water bath to bring out detail in the shadows.

In other words, you need something acidic to stop the development process. Fix is acidic, I think, but don’t you reduce the effectiveness of the fixer?

yes, you can use a stop bath if you like instead of water rinse, that will extend the life of the fixer. I use my fixer 4 times and then dump it. same with the hypo-clear and the photo-flo working solutions.

in the days before the vanilla-scented stop bath, the stop was such a nasty smell that i avoided using it. these days it matters less.

also, as you point out, that water rinse allows the development to continue a little longer for the shadows - a bit of extra oomph without blowing the highlights out - a de facto push which is usually good.

developing C-41 color should not cost more than $3-5 a roll at most decent 1-hour labs. doing your own C-41 is no big deal either, the temperature is easily controlled with hot water and the Tetanal Press Kits were easy to use. we used to do this in the field when labs were not available. but it’s true, why bother when the lab will do it for $3 a roll.

14-year old Tri-X will have higher than normal fog, reducing contrast. But it should still yield usable or at least interesting results if you run some tests…

Alan, I like the smell of stop bath, though I haven’t been in a darkroom in years. Brings back memories…

JL…And it also makes a great salad dressing…just add olive oil, garlic,and S&P. Dressing to die for…and you probably will. HA!

Instead of Acetic Acid Stop Bath, one can substitute vinegar, thereby avoiding stupid poisoning mistakes there. Unfortunately, nobody has yet come up with an edible developer or fixer, though developer is commonly called soup.

Where do you get this vanilla-scented stop bath? How New Age! The concentrate I get from Kodak is based on highly concentrated acetic acid…it’s a powerful smell, and uses only 16 ml of concentrate per liter of bath (that’s a 1.6% solution).

And, like Jonathan, I get nostalgic whenever I get a waft of stop bath odor.

Incidentally, I cannot find a rapid fixer with hardener. So given the choice between rapid fixer and fixer with hardener, shouldn’t I use the latter?

Fixer with hardener makes for a longer wash, as hardener reduces the swelling of the emulsion layer, making the silver which needs to be washed out much harder to remove. Hypo Clearing Agent helps, so does a half an hour end wash. Otherwise, when it comes to any old stupid film, very little difference. When it comes to paper, the hardener should be avoided if archival prints are to be made.

the vanilla scented stop is made by sprint or heico or one of the other companies…too lazy to go into my darkroom to check, but it is labeled as such when you go to the store.

personally i don’t think hardener is necessary unless your negatives are coming physically really soft and scratch too easily too much of the time. i think old film that cracks over the decades may have had too much hardener?

the NH-5 rapid fix is great for both films and paper.