It is my understanding that citric acid is a preservative so it's not necessary to use it in the sensitizer unless you are planning on delay printing until much later. When I first started salt printing I did use citric it in the sensitizer but in all cases I print right after drying ~ 1.5 hours after I coat and didn't need a preservative and stopped using it. It will precipitate out after a few days but otherwise has no effect.
All of the salt prints shown on my website were fixed in ~1 minute in 10% hypo with either 2mL of household ammonia or 2 gm of sodium carbonate. They look today as good as when I first printed them.
Thank you! That makes sense. I see now that if you don't mix in a separate dish, it doesn’t blend properly. I also need to make sure not to use more silver nitrate than necessary!
citric acid is added to prevent fogging in the image
Citric acid lowers the pH and extends the time you have before exposure. Since I always expose within a hour or two after coating it is not necessry. IIRC, I once coated 2 sheets without citric acid and exposed one when it was dry. I left the 2d sheet in the paper safe and over a relatively short period of time (a day?) it developed a stain where I had coated. I presume that was "fog." If I had used citric acid it would have extended the time to use it.
I learned to print salted paper from the 2d Edition of Alternative Printing Process which, for various reasons given, recommends using a maximum time of 1-minute to fix in 10% hypo solution. After fixing I wash the print in running water for 5 minutes or so, and another 30 minutes after a bath of hypo clear.
I agree that one must do their own testing because everyone's process environment is different. In my case, I found that initially when I fixed my salt prints for short durations, my prints developed some serious stains over a very short period of time. So I did a study to see the effect of fixation time and what I found that a much longer fixing time was required (for my conditions.) I shared the summary of this study here:Thank you both for the advice. I'm still new to salt printing, so there’s a lot I’m still figuring out. I plan to try different fixing times with test prints to observe the effects on the final result.
I also studied the washing time post fixation with the use of standard residual fixer test (using silver nitrate solution) and found that a 40 minutes (10 minutes x 4 in stationery baths) was required to remove traces of the fixer.
Thank you for the information!
The experiment on the linked site is fascinating. Once I get a bit more proficient with traditional salt printing, I’d love to try my hand at Developed-out Salted Printing as well. I hope Hypo clears can cut the washing time in half...
Oh. After the hypoclear treatment! Then it will use a lot of water…You are welcome.
My quoted washing times were after hypoclear treatment. The whole sequence is in one of the other posts in that link.
:Niranjan.
Oh. After the hypoclear treatment! Then it will use a lot of water…
I’ll take a closer look at your posting in the other link.
Many thanx!
I only use about 700ml of water for a 5"x8" print each time - repeating it 4 times for a total of about 3 liters.
:Niranjan.
While reading this entire thread, I can tell my images and likes simply don't belong.
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