RE: Pt./Pd. question acid pre-soak

DEAR CLAY & ERIC,
        May be a dumb question but...
        After the acid back soak, do you dry the paper as is with the acid bath in
it or do you rinse after and then dry?
                        CHEERS!
                                BOB

 Please check my website: http://www.bobkiss.com/

-----Original Message-----
From: Clay [mailto:wcharmon@wt.net]
Sent: Friday, August 12, 2005 10:46 AM
To: alt-photo-process-l@sask.usask.ca
Subject: Re: Pt./Pd. question acid pre-soak

On Aug 12, 2005, at 9:10 AM, Eric Neilsen wrote:

> Clay, I missed this post yesterday. That was a 2% citric acid bath for
> several minutes?

I soak the Fabriano EW for about 5 minutes minimum. I try to rotate
through the stack just like developing sheet film so that I get fresh
acid on the paper in a regular manner. I don't have any way to
measure pH to the precision you are talking about. I just have the
paper strips that are by-guess and by-golly. I generally mix up 4
liters of acid soak at a time and that seems to treat about 10 full
sheets of EW with no problem. I mix it fresh each time.
> Have you just taken the Fabriano and soaked it in
> distilled water as a pre treatment.
Yes. It doesn't work. (in the sense of allowing you to make a decent
platinum print) There is one hell of a lot of carbonate in EW. It
fizzes when you put it in the acid bath. Tiny little bubbles.
> Have you checked the pH of the acid bath
> after? How do you determine how many sheets you can treat?

10 sheets is all I can dry at one time, and my tray holds about 4
liters of solution. That is as scientific as I get on the pre-
treatment issue!

Clay
Received on Fri Aug 12 09:16:14 2005