On Mar 22, 2005, at 11:00 AM, William Robb wrote:
The whole point of a stop bath is to neutralize the development process
with an acidic environment in order to save the fixer. When I went to all
"one shot" development chemistry for film 22 years ago (more consistency
that way), I dispensed with it for film entirely.
The point of stopbath is to stop the development process.
Using plain water as a stopbath doesn't allow for an accurate development
time, since the develoment continues until the acidic fixer is dropped into
the tank.
If you are using a non acid rapid fixer, development continues, albeit
slowly, until the film is fully fixed.
So slowly as to not be significant, William. I spent a lot of time tuning B&W film development processes with Minox format film, makes tiny differences much more significant than 35mm or larger format film. I found the most consistent results to be processed without stop bath.
Godfrey
