I never did and had no problem. Where did you see this Crohnsie?
pentaxuser
I have done both, in the end I had issues with additives to the drinking water in the reservoirs due to a drought. From then on I never used a pre-wet for print making.
Depending on how many prints you are doing in a session, you may consider using double the amount of liquid and dropping half after each print, replacing the dropped solution with fresh.
This will retain consistency as the dilution of the developer is always the same.
I also used a 2% stop bath to instantly stop development, once again for consistency but also to reduce the amount of contamination of the Blix.
I prewet the paper in the past and I didn't find any differences in saturation, but I always use 20-30% more volume of developer than the minimum recommended. On the other hand it is possible that you need a stop bath between developer and blix to avoid stains as mentioned before . It depends on you particular process (machine, tank, chemistry). I don't need a stop bath with my Jobo CPP2 but I absolutely need it when I change to the CPE2.
I use drums and always use 30s water pre-wash. I can then use minimal amount of developer (since I use it one shot) and short times that go with 35ºC with no fear of uneven development. The greatest benefit of the pre-wash is that the paper will be nicely stuck to the drum wall when you pour in the developer.
I never observed desaturated colours with the pre-wash. BTW, Kodak recommends pre-wash for drums. Between a random Youtube guy and Kodak... I'd go with Kodak.
Anyway, you can test for this "desaturation" yourself. It won't take you 5 minutes. But you already run quite a modified developing regime (twice the economy compared to the recommended usage if I understood you correctly) so if you get good and repeatable results I wouldn't change anything.
I seen someone say developer is the first step because pre wet desaturates colours.
I’m using more than recommended but I’m only topping up by 10ml at a time. I’ve known people to use 50ml single use only. I guess there are many ways to skin a cat (as horrible a saying as that is). The jobo tank I use suggests 120ml but I listened to someone telling me you should add a little more so I went 160, maybe I’ll cut that back a little to save chemicals and introduce a stop Bath too.
I can imagine that if you prewet the paper AND you use a small volume of developer with insufficient replenishment and keep reusing it, the developer will at some point be dilute enough to start giving problems. So it would be a case of stacking fault upon fault.
Given how active RA4 developer is, a prewet won't do any harm if you use the developer one shot or replenish sufficiently. Indeed, a prewet may help in countering uneven development streaks in case you experience those and some like to use it to bring the tank and paper up to temperature (which IMO is more about peace of mind than an actual necessity). There's no reason why a prewet would be inherently wrong, not is it inherently necessary.
Yes, RA4 seems to be pretty flexible. Kodak states 1L of their developer has capacity for 16 8x10" prints*. You are getting more than twice that (assuming same print size). When I was concerned about economy I used to develop in diluted developer (1:1) and slightly extended time and couldn't tell the difference when comparing to prints developed with full strength developer, so I'm not surprised you get away with 10ml/print replenishing rate. But as koraks mentioned, pre-wash will dilute your developer with every run and this could eventually break your "system". I wouldn't change anything that works.
In my experience, stop bath is a good idea. Without it I would get a slight tint in whites on some papers.
* 40 prints for some noncritical applications
So, I use that amount of chemical in the drum because it recommends 120ml if chemicals so I just refresh 10ml each time. I do it up to around 6-8 8x10 prints before completely changing chemicals
will any stop Bath do?
When I was doing RA4 at home in tubes, I used household vinegar (typically 5% here) diluted 1:1 with water one-shot between developer and blix. Much cheaper than the indicator stop I use for B&W and worked fine. If you've got vinegar around, you don't need to buy stop.
Because stop bath is just so damned expensive!!!!!!
The biggest advantage of acetic acid based stop bath over vinegar for one-shot use with colour paper in tubes is how concentrated the bottle is - it requires almost no storage space.
If you are using stop bath one-shot, you get no benefit from the indicator.
Until recently, even the cheapest vinegar around her worked out to be more expensive per use than stop bath, but I'm not sure that is the case any more.
The biggest advantage of acetic acid based stop bath over vinegar for one-shot use with colour paper in tubes is how concentrated the bottle is - it requires almost no storage space.
However one can use stop bath with indicator many time with color paper and that will work out to be much cheaper than using vinegar as a one shot stop bath.
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