How did your process run? Did you wash the film between bleaching and redeveloping? There are several things, which can go wrong here ...
@Ausar I'm not quite sure what I'm looking at in those shots of the film. Is the top one your bleach after bleaching but before redevelopment?
In any case, the pH can quite drastically affect bleaching time and effectiveness. It might be worth getting the pH up around 2-4 for your bleach. I think you are saying it's 0.2? Not quite sure.
Interesting experiment!
I do not want to disturb - but I wonder why KMnO4 bleaching has broken (damaged?) your film.
I myself have found a receipt that has worked well during almost all of my attempts with Fomapan R100, Agfapan APX100 (old!) and Rollei Infrared 400.
It contains two important things: Distilled water (instead of tap water) and additional Photo-Calgon, according to an old Agfa patent.
For 1 l bleach bath I would need:
I use to set up 220ml bleach bath for a small Jobo 510 tank which contains one 135 film.
- Liquid A: 425 ml distilled water and 75 ml H2SO4 15% and 10g Photo-Calgon
- Liquid B: 500 ml distilled water and 1,7 g KMnO4
Bleaching time: maximum 5 to 7 minutes. I am going to check out shorter times.
Yield: 3 films. I process them in one day so that the bleach bath is not left overnight.
The practical thing is that I can check the effect of the bleach bath and bleach for extra time if necessary:
If necessary, I'd set up a new bleach bath and bleach on until the film is lemon yellow.
- After bleaching, I open the tank and check to see if the film is lemon yellow.
- If it is lemon yellow, everything is fine.
- If it still has dark brown spots, I bleach for another two or three minutes and check again to see if it is lemon yellow. Normally, this is enough.
This way I have been able to bleach all 40 films I have developed so far since summer last year without any problems (after one breakdown at the beginning).
I forgot to wash my film after 1st dev, and bleached for 5min, then I found the KMnO4 turn from purple to clear
I suppose the problem in this case has been that you forgot to wash: so residues of the alkaline developer could have increased the pH value of the bleach bath.
It's possible that Lucky 400 might not be able to stand the burdens of the reversal process with its changes of pH value.
1. potassium dichromate + H2SO4 (Dangerous, I don't want to die or get cancer)
Cerium(IV) should work as a silver bleach, yes. Probably using cerium(IV)sulfate as the source material.
See e.g. here: https://patents.google.com/patent/US4563405A/en (in combination with DTPA), or even more concretely here: https://patents.google.com/patent/US4322493A/en
In the latter (Fujifilm) patent, cerium sulfate is used in an acidic solution. Several accelerators are used (cysteine being one of them) to improve performance.
It's kind of expensive; >€1/g in quantities that would make sense for a home darkroom user. It may be challenging to get hold of it.
what I don't understand is, why do we need Fe3+?
the bleach I bought, one said that it also has cerous, not just Fe3+。
We don't.
I linked to two patents, and they're quite different in how they propose to use cerium.
The Konica-Minolta patent uses DTPA as the bleach, but notes that this involves problems with yellow staining of the film. They propose to use cerium (or another lanthanide) to promote oxidation of Fe(II) back into Fe(III) so that very little/no Fe(II) is available to stain the film. I suppose cerium (or another lanthanide) is present in its capacity as a catalyst here, and the concentration might be quite low. The cerium as such is not there to act as a silver bleach, per se.
The Fujifilm patent does use cerium (and only cerium) to bleach the film, but notes that there are some limitations/drawbacks w.r.t. its efficacy and levels of fog. The patent I linked to explores in particular the bleach accelerator that make the cerium bleach faster and cleaner. Unfortunately, the crucial bits of the patent (i.e. the key of which compound is used for which accelerant test) is missing from the patent text, rendering it impossible to determine which compound made for the best accelerator. This may or may not have been cysteine.
Coming back to your original comment:
I suspect that your bleach may have a trace amount of cerium(IV) to prevent staining that would otherwise occur due to the formation of Fe2+ as Fe3+ steals an electron from Ag to form Ag+. Mind you, I don't know the makeup of the bleach you've got there, so I don't know for sure. The amount of cerium present would be a good indicator of what it's there for.
Why not try thiourea toning and rehal bleach? True, it won't have that beautiful black, but still beautiful...
what is rehal bleach? sorry I don't quite know what it is
"Rehal" = rehalogenating.
The idea is that you develop the negative image in the usual way. Then you fog all remaining silver halide into silver sulfide using a thiourea toner (sodium sulfide / polysulfide toner will work, too). Afterwards, you bleach the original silver negative image using a rehalogenating bleach. This can be for instance a normal ferricyanide + bromide bleach. Finally, the silver halide negative image is fixed out.
The advantage is that this can be done with quite ordinary chemistry and the process is easy and robust. The drawback is that the silver sulfide image will be brown to yellow in color. It's not possible to obtain a neutral greyscale image this way. If you like sepia toned slides, this approach works great, however.
But what I don't know is the toner's formula, I mean, I did hear that SnSO4 can act as a chemical reversaler, but someone said that it can't turn [all the remaining silver halide].
Can the toner you mention do the trick?
Any formula I can get?
thiourea
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