RA-4 Monobath - is it possible?

htmlguru4242 · Oct 12, 2005

I was working with my D-76 based monobath last night (it works somewhat well now), and it made me think about doing a monobath for RA-4 papers.

Is this at all possible? If the paper is slightly overxposed, and then run though strong developer with some very dilute bleach and fix, would this be possible?

Photo Engineer · Oct 12, 2005

No.

The bleach is an oxidant and would destroy both the developer and the latent image.

A monobath with just a fix would give a 'bleach bypass' look to the prints, if it worked, but usually due to diffusion effects would cause severe crossover between the layers due to unequal effects.

PE

htmlguru4242 · Oct 12, 2005

Hmmm ... you're probably right. What happens if the bleach step is bypassed. I've never seen or tried this before...

Photo Engineer · Oct 12, 2005

You get silver metal contamination of the colors with blocked shadows and desaturated color.

You can try it by this sequence. Develop (RA), Fix (Flexicolor C41 fix diluted about 2x normal), wash and dry. This will show you exactly a bleach bypass paper process.

PE

Photo Engineer · Oct 12, 2005

htmlguru4242 said:
Hmmm ... you're probably right.

I started thinking of this comment and decided to come back to it.

Just FYI, BTDT. No 'probably'. I guarantee it! At worst, no image, and at best a distorted parody of an image. If you do a bleach bypass at least there will be a usable image. And, if you don't like it, just blix and wash and you get a good print.

PE

RA-4 Monobath - is it possible?

htmlguru4242

Photo Engineer

htmlguru4242

Photo Engineer

Photo Engineer

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