Diffusion Transfer Printing ("Polaroid" peel-apart) recipes

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alecrmyers

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Try also https://onyxmet.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=1252

Here's an Etsy item:

Sodium Borohydride 99% - Etsy

This Cosmetic Bags item by JanuszexPL has 37 favorites from Etsy shoppers. Ships from Poland. Listed on May 3, 2025
www.etsy.com

You can try sodium hypophosphite too (hard to get where I live.)

Alternatively, take a leaf from our palladium/platinum printing colleagues - maybe try a pinch of ferric oxalate with the palladium chloride solution and expose to UV (or leave in the sun). I would still use some PVP as a capping agent. Oxalic acid might work too.
 
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Donald Qualls

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alecrmyers said:
sodium hypophosphite
Click to expand...

Another option would be sodium dithionite. In the US, it's sold in the laundry aisle of the supermarket as Iron Out (not super high purity, but it works as a self-fogging second developer for B&W reversal and might work for a receptor sheet if it keeps long enough).
 
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alecrmyers

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I did a lot of work with sodium dithionite last year without a lot of success, but I've changed developers somewhat since then so I gave it another go just now. Image is neutral tone (which is good) but Dmax is low - paler than it appears in the photo below. That could be worked on, most likely:

By the way - IronOut is only 15-40% dithionite (aka 'hydrosulphite'). I haven't tried it in place of the laboratory standard reagent.

I don't think the keeping quality is very important: once the palladium chloride is reduced (which process occurs in the vial before the paper is coated), you'd quite like any residual reducing agent to get lost. If it hangs around in the receiver paper then it might diffuse to the emulsion and cause fog.
 

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alecrmyers

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These two images are made with receiver paper prepared using sodium dithionite, today. I'm trying to reduce the slight yellow colour that appears in the highlights a couple of hours after the print is made (compare the two). But the dithionite does seem to work as well as the borohydride.
 

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Donald Qualls

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That looks like residual thiosulfate or similar. Are those getting a good wash after development? This may be why Polaroid still needed print coaters into the 1980s; the coater applied a layer of some sort of lacquer that blocked oxygen from the receptor sheet (as I recall).
 
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alecrmyers

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I'm getting good results with the dithionite now. Experimentally I determine that it's necessary to wait some time (nominally 60 minutes) after adding the dithionite before coating the paper - if you do, Dmax is much improved. This could be for two reasons - it drives the reduction reaction to completion, and/or it allows the residual dithionite time to decay. By contrast, the borohydride reductions give good Dmax within seconds of the borohydride being added.

Refering to the colour: this developer doesn't include thiosulphate - in fact it's entirely sulphur free - so it's definitely not thiosulphate staining, but I do have some hypotheses for what it might be. My goal is to formulate a system that doesn't need washing - so most of the sample images are not washed. However staining can (sometimes) be reduced by post-development treatments, of which washing is one possibility.

According to what Land wrote in Neblette, the image coating was necessary to prevent aerial oxidation and sulphurization of the silver, but was only needed for some paper types. Not (obviously) for what Polaroid marketed as 'coaterless' systems. I understand the major deterioration with failing to coat a coated system print was image fade, which took place in days to weeks. My images are (thankfully) fade free. I have tried some Polaroid coating swabs (a Photrio contributor was kind enough to send me some) on various of my print formulations but they don't prevent stain. Land's method to prevent stain was a timing layer and a shutdown layer which automatically lowered the pH a predetermined time after the developer was spread. I don't have access to the sophisticated synthetic polymers that he used for those, nor the patience to experiment with three or more successive coatings on each receiver sheet
 

Donald Qualls

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Dithionite, however does contain sulfur...
 
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alecrmyers

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It does, but the staining is present with paper produced with borohydride, which is where I've spent most of my efforts looking at it - it's not a dithionite specific thing.
 

Donald Qualls

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richyd

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Thanks for the links regarding sodium borohydride. One I had anyway but the seller is inactive, one is out of stock and the other say he has had customs problems with prevoius shipments. PVP is also impossible here but I have discovered that some contact lens comfort solutions use it.

I do have ferric oxalate so might have to try that and also have stannous chloride which might possiblty work though it is several years old now.

Regarding image changes over time I do see some change in tone from the cooler tones straight out to more warmer yellowy on prints a few weeks old (paper 212). I did coat half of one print with a Polaroid coater bar and there is a distinct difference now but I don't know how much of that is due to the change in surface ie very shiny gloss that the coating imparts. I did notice when making prints that some came out warmer, slightly yellow as opposed to cooler blue but don't know what processing or exposure differences might account for that.
 
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alecrmyers

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This is my first sort-of success producing an image on a layer of partially hydrolyzed cellulose acetate containing palladium sulphide. The challenge has been getting the CA to stick to the paper and not slough off. This system is much closer to Polaroid's coaterless chemistry than anything else I've done.
 

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alecrmyers

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I went to the hardware store (shop?) and bought some IronOut. It works about as well as lab dithionite, as per the attached picture, which was prepared as follows (let's call it paper type 247)

10g silica sol
0.5g 0.1% palladium chloride solution
IronOut enough to cover one match head
stir for 5 minutes
spread with 1μ wire-type coating bar
Optionally a coating aid such as 2drops PS20 10%, or substitute washing up liquid, or photoflow or similar

I skipped the poly(vinylpyrrolidone), which might affect the keeping quality of the prepared mix, but, who cares?
 

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Peter Schrager

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Alec are you just spreading this on the receiving paper??
thanx!
Peter
 

Raghu Kuvempunagar

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Is there a reason why a more benign reducing agent like Ascorbic Acid or Sodium Ascorbate wouldn't work for this purpose? Apologies in advance if this question doesn't make sense as I have not absorbed all the details in this long thread yet.
 
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alecrmyers

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Peter Schrager said:
Alec are you just spreading this on the receiving paper??
thanx!
Peter
Click to expand...

With a 1μ spreader bar, yes.

Raghu Kuvempunagar said:
Is there a reason why a more benign reducing agent like Ascorbic Acid or Sodium Ascorbate wouldn't work for this purpose? Apologies in advance if this question doesn't make sense as I have not absorbed all the details in this long thread yet.
Click to expand...
You need something stronger than ascorbate to reduce the PdCl2. I have spent some time trying ascorbate, dextrose, citrate and others, augmented by UV and/or microwave radiation (as described by a lot of papers available online) and I have got some reduction occurring - as I wrote, here earlier in this thread, but not a sufficiently dense production to give a strong image. And having a kg of dithionite and 100g of borohydride on the shelf has been a disincentive to pursue those methods to a sufficient degree. By all means experiment, and if you can get good results I'd love to hear about it.
 
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alecrmyers

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Two updates to report: I've been making pods with polythene vacuum-pack bags, which seems to be relatively successful. One 7x4 bag makes 4 pods. Here's a pile...


And here's one attached with some double-sided tape to a sheet of receiver paper in the correct orientation:


Secondly this is a new paper recipe (249) that gives good results with developer 152.

Here's the now empty pod after rolling through the machine (you can see the sponge is wet):



And this is the result:


This is the final print, wiped around the white margins but not washed, and then trimmed:



Comments: tone is very good, contrast too. Streaking is minimal. There's lots of shadow detail (more than shows up in this picture). Developing is a bit thin bottom left - I think this pod needed more developer in it. It took about 120 seconds from shutter to dry print.
 
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alecrmyers

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I use a different setting on the heat sealer for the seam I want to fail under pressure. The permanent seams use a setting of 5 (out of 8). The weak seam is made on a setting of just above the minimum. The adjustable setting determines the duration for which current is applied to the heating wire when the lever is lowered and so controls the heat applied to the seal. I was not sure if a seam could be made consistently strong enough not to leak under handling but weak enough to burst when needed. Hence the experiments.

Original Polaroid pods use some kind of red sealing material on the weak side. You can see it here in this video of one of the remaining machines in action.
 
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BardM

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Hello. Has someone tried that technique with the Polaroid 320? I bought one and I want to try to shoot. Is it possible to use it with this type of camera?
 

OrientPoint

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BardM said:
Hello. Has someone tried that technique with the Polaroid 320? I bought one and I want to try to shoot. Is it possible to use it with this type of camera?
Click to expand...

You could create single shot packs with this technique, along the lines of the "One-Instant" stuff from Supersense (https://the.supersense.com/collecti...nstant-diy-film-kit-type-100-packfilm-8-shots). Recreating the 8 or 10 shot Polaroid packs would a much more difficult task. I can't imagine doing that without some serious automation.
 

BardM

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And isn't there some problem with the automation in the 320 camera? It seems that the photo paper used for this technique has a lower ISO than an original packfilm.
 

koraks

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BardM said:
Hello. Has someone tried that technique with the Polaroid 320? I bought one and I want to try to shoot. Is it possible to use it with this type of camera?
Click to expand...

This thread is about an experimental approach towards creating instant photos. It's not focused on creating a product for use in Polaroid (etc.) cameras. If that ever happens, there will be new threads about it.
And welcome to Photrio!

BardM said:
And isn't there some problem with the automation in the 320 camera?
Click to expand...

This is really offtopic in this thread; for questions on specific Polaroid cameras, please refer elsewhere. Thank you.
 

OrientPoint

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If you use paper yes. If you use Fuji HR-U X-ray film, which is where things are now, then effective ISO is around 320. You can set the camera for ISO 80 and use a 2-stop neutral density filter to compensate for that.

EDIT: sorry - will continue in a separate thread when it is created.
 
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BardM

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I'm so sorry for my mistake. But thank you for your response.
 
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