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I quit using stop bath on my film and my negatives came out better, fight me
Everyone online says you need stop bath between developer and fixer, but I ran out during a session last month and just used two plain water rinses in my kitchen sink in Tucson. My negatives from that roll of HP5 came out cleaner with no streaks, and the grain looked tighter than my usual batches. My local lab guy rolled his eyes at me, but I've done it on six rolls now with the same result. Has anyone else ditched the stop bath, or am I just getting lucky with my tap water?
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troy99611d ago
Heard a guy on a podcast talk about this... some old school developer from the UK who said stop bath is mostly a holdover from when people reused fixer until it died. If you're using fresh fix each time or close to it, water works fine for most films. The acid stop can actually cause little pinholes in some emulsions if you go straight from a strong developer into it too fast. Six rolls is not luck, that is a pattern. Tucson water is hard as heck though so maybe that is part of why the rinses work so well for you.
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