How can I mostly quickly turn unused E6 film clear, for testing?

My recent batches of slides have been coming back with weird speckly divots in the clear areas. Or maybe they're in all areas, but most visible in the clear areas. This is all from a stock of long-refrigerated E100GX that I've been slowly using up over the years. Previously I didn't have these problems. Has something gone bad on my stash of film? Or is something going wrong in processing? I figure the quickest way to find out is to take some unused film and just turn it clear, then check for the speckles.

Is it as simple as running it through some B&W fixer? Or are the dyes in the film going to remain opaque until properly developed?

Duncan

The color couplers in E-6 film are by necessity either clear, or removed in the fixing process. IIRC the color couplers remain in the emulsion after fixing, otherwise E-6 wouldn't have some of the longevity issues not seen in Kodachrome, who has the dyes added at processing time (couplers for Kodachrome are in the color developing solutions, the couplers for E-6 are in the film). So I'd say cut a piece of leader off and dunk it into the fixer and see what happens.

You could try exposing it to light and then having it developed normally.

Many E6 emulsions have a yellow filter layer and/or an anti halation layer, which is composed of colloidal silver. If you just fix these films, you will get dense brown slides. If you want clear slides, you need to BLIX/STAB, or run the whole prebleach/bleach/fix/STAB program.

About embedded color couplers: yes, they are clear unless they react with oxidized color coupler. In the long run, though, they may cause trouble, so they need Formalin treatment as some point in the process chain. This is done by typical prebleach bathes in kits with separate bleach&fixer, and by STAB bath in typical BLIX kits.

I'd forgotten about the yellow filter layer that's present in all color films. Good catch, Rudeofus.

MattKing said:

You could try exposing it to light and then having it developed normally.

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Well part of the point is figuring out if the problem is showing up because of something happening in processing. So I want to just sacrifice a roll and make it clear and see what it looks like.

I don't even need stabilizer, because I'll just be throwing the film away after this test! I think I have some bottles of E6 Bleach hiding somewhere, so maybe some of that plus some Ilford Rapid Fix will do what I need.

I also don't want to just do a clip, I want to do the whole roll, because these speckles are not on every slide when I get them back. They're on some and not others, so I want to see what a whole roll looks like. It will suck if my hoard of E100GX has gone bad somehow, but it's even worse to be so totally dependent on ICE to clean up my slides, and unable to project them at all. If the film is bad I want to stop using it.

Duncan

Simply bleach, fix, wash and treat with photo flo. Then dry.

You should have clear film with everything built into it intact. Then you can examine the results.

PE

I don't think you'll need a whole roll for this either; a few inches of leader would probably suffice for the test, I think.