Understanding water qualities and effect on film

Two-bath fixing is the aspirin of photographic development!

Yes, it takes away the pain but does not necessarily solve the problem.

PE

Photo Engineer said:

Yes, it takes away the pain but does not necessarily solve the problem.

PE

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That's very good!

MattKing said:

Have you done a test to determine your clearing time? With T-Max, some recommend a total fixing time = three times the clearing time.
Personally, I've always used a total fixing time = twice the clearing time.

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This is good advice. The book "Monochrome Darkroom Practice" by Jack Coote suggest that 3 times the clearing time is usually safer with films which contain silver iodide, as it is the least soluble of silver-halides. He mentions Ilford HP5 as one such film.
I don't think you would go far wrong by following the manufacturers advice.

Back to the original question of this thread, I still don't see how using distilled water for film processing would affect graininess.

Keith Tapscott. said:

This is good advice. The book "Monochrome Darkroom Practice" by Jack Coote suggest that 3 times the clearing time is usually safer with films which contain silver iodide, as it is the least soluble of silver-halides. He mentions Ilford HP5 as one such film. ...

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In some cases, the clearing time is too short too use a 2 or 3x multiple in order to calculate a total fixing time. TMax fixes with two-bath fixing for 3 minutes each.

Keith Tapscott. said:

... I don't think you would go far wrong by following the manufacturers advice. ...

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Well... it's always a good start.

Keith Tapscott. said:

... Back to the original question of this thread, I still don't see how using distilled water for film processing would affect graininess.

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I don't either. At least not enough to worry about it.

RalphLambrecht said:

In some cases, the clearing time is too short too use a 2 or 3x multiple in order to calculate a total fixing time. TMax fixes with two-bath fixing for 3 minutes each.

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I'm a two-bath film fixer convert as well. It works great for paper, so why not use it for film as well.

Kirk Keyes said:

I'm a two-bath film fixer convert as well. It works great for paper, so why not use it for film as well.

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Quite right. It works especially well with rotation processing and when processing multiple rolls of film. The 2nd fix of the 1st roll gets promoted to the 1st fix of the 2nd roll and so on. In other words, you always need n+1 fixing baths and not twice as many as rolls of film as one may think.