Struggling with Black and White spots

[Craig Tuffin]

I’ve tried everything to eliminate these spots but just can’t seem to lose them. Ignore the scratches from the poor polish…I’ve since improved the quality of my buffs thanks to Jerry and Takashi’s advice.

The spots are equally deposited over the plate so not just favouring the shadows or highlights. The black ones I’m assuming are powdered rouge that hasn’t been removed prior to sensitising. The white ones are a mystery. I thought that is may be the hypo or mercury build-up in the hypo but they appear on the very first plate of the day. Mercury too hot or mercury condensation?

Damn it’s frustrating…I’m seriously burning through plates trying to get it solved.

Attachments:

You must be logged in to view attached files.

[Craig Tuffin]

Ok, I’ve finally had a win! I’ll fill you all in just in case you experience this sometime.

At the end of this my last day testing, I finally performed a bromine/mercury quadrat test. The result is an extremely informative image (ungilded plate of course). It ends up I was fuming with my bromine and developing far too long. Reducing my bromine times significantly (from 50 sec to 15 sec) totally removed the fogging. Those crazy and extremely annoying white spots are there, but only begin to appear at the 2 minute developing mark.

At the end of the day the best time for fuming with bromine was 15 sec (after a first iodine of 15 sec) and the perfect developing time (@85 degrees Celsius) was 1 min. This was TODAY’s answer…tomorrow might be different.

The next test….reducing the mercury temp to 70 degrees and developing longer. So there’s more to do, but I can sleep a bit better tonight regardless 🙂

Attachments:

You must be logged in to view attached files.

[Author]

Posts