Print processing: the archival sequence

Purpose

To take a print from the developer to dry by the sequence its makers publish for permanence, and to finish holding evidence that the fixing and the washing both worked rather than an assurance that they did.

When to use it

Every print you intend to keep. A work print you will throw away this month can have the short version; this one is for the print that goes in a box.

It stops at dry. Toning is not in it — the course hands that practice to a later part — and neither is mounting. Where a print will be toned, the wash after toning is a different specification.

Before you start

You should already know why a fibre base needs sixty times the wash of a resin-coated sheet, and what an over-loaded fixer leaves behind that no wash removes, from Part XI.

Three decisions are made before the first sheet goes in. No hardener in the fixer — the maker’s optimum-permanence instruction is explicit, and a hardened emulsion swells less and washes slower. Two fixing baths, by the rotation. And a control sheet: one unexposed sheet of the same paper and weight, carried through the whole sequence with the batch, because a residual test needs somewhere with no image silver to read a stain against.

On the bench: trays left to right — developer, stop, fixer 1, fixer 2, wash — each with its own pair of tongs, never swapped; the wash aid made up if you are using it; a thermometer; a timer; the capacity log; blotters or a drying rack; the labelled waste containers, silver-bearing among them. Run lab opening, and confirm today’s session is inside the safe time from the safelight test.

Procedure

Setting up

1. Bring every solution into the band, the wash water included: the published optimum-permanence sequence specifies 18 to 24 °C including the wash, and the wash is the one people leave out.
2. Check the fixer’s running total in the log against its published capacity before the session, not after it. For fibre prints at high permanence the ceiling is reached in tens of sheets per litre, not hundreds.
3. Put the unexposed control sheet into the batch now, and mark its back in pencil.

Developing to fixed

4. Develop for the maker’s published time, rocking the tray gently and continuously from the moment the sheet goes in, and lift it about ten seconds before the time ends so it drains as the clock reaches the mark.
5. Drain into the stop, and give it the published time — ten seconds at the stated dilution is a minimum rather than a target.
6. Fix by the two-bath rotation, half the time in each bath. For fibre base at optimum permanence the published figure is one minute at 1+4, and it is an instruction not to exceed as much as an instruction to meet.
7. Do not extend the fixing time because a print looks doubtful. A longer time drives thiosulfate into the paper core, and the answer to doubt is a fresher bath.
8. Add each sheet to the fixer’s running total as it leaves.

Washing

9. Resin-coated: a minimum of thirty seconds in vigorous fresh running water, then out. Do not over-wash it — the polythene seals the faces but nothing seals the edge you cut.
10. Fibre base, standard: fresh running water above 5 °C for thirty to forty-five minutes, with the prints separated and moved by hand rather than left in a stack.
11. Fibre base, optimum permanence: five minutes in fresh running water; ten minutes in the wash aid at its published dilution with intermittent agitation; then five minutes in fresh running water.
12. Never let the wash aid stand in for the first wash. Its capacity is small — of the order of forty sheets of 20.3 × 25.4 cm per litre — and the first wash is what protects it.

Finishing and proving it

13. Cut a strip from the control sheet after the final wash, while it is still wet, and run the residual tests on it before anything dries.
14. Drain each print, lay it face down on clean blotters or emulsion-up on a rack, and dry it flat, out of strong light. Nothing made today is archival until the tests in step 13 say so.
15. Route the waste: developer and stop to their own containers by the general waste procedure; the fixer, the wash aid and the first wash to silver-bearing waste; everything under the disposal caveat, which is where the route you may lawfully take is settled and not here.

How you know it worked

• Every bath, the wash included, was inside the published temperature band, and you read it rather than judged it.
• The fixing time was short, in fresh fixer, and nobody lengthened it.
• The wash was a sequence with a criterion at the end of it, not a duration.
• The control sheet’s residual-thiosulfate test shows no colour difference between its treated and untreated halves, and its residual-silver spot matches the reference.
• The log carries the sheet count against the fixer’s capacity, and the count is under it.

If a step fails

Step 1, the wash water is well outside the band. Temper it. A cold final wash slows diffusion at exactly the point where the published sequence is already relying on the slowest part of it.

Step 2, the fixer is already at or past its capacity. Mix fresh and rotate before the session, not during it. A bath that crosses mid-batch makes every sheet after the crossing suspect, and the clearing-time test is what settles where the crossing was.

Step 6, a print was left in the fixer far too long. Do not compensate by washing longer; it will not come out that way. Note the sheet, run the residual-thiosulfate test on it as well as on the control, and expect the answer to be worse.

Step 9, an RC print has been in the wash for an hour. Look at the cut edges. Water entering the exposed paper core is the failure mode the thirty-second figure exists against, and it does not reverse.

Step 11, you have no wash aid. Use the standard fibre wash of thirty to forty-five minutes in fresh running water instead, and record that you did. That is a published sequence too; what you lose is water and time rather than permanence.

Step 13, the residual-thiosulfate test shows a yellow-brown tint. The wash failed. Rewash the whole batch by the full sequence while it is still wet, and test again; wet prints are rescuable and dry ones much less so — see the troubleshooting entry.

Step 13, the residual-silver spot yellows. That is a fixing failure, not a washing one, and more water will not fix it. Soak the prints for five minutes and give them the fixing and washing sequence again in fresh fixer.

What to record

One line per batch: the date; the paper, its base and batch; the developer, dilution and time; the fixer, its dilution, which bath was which and the running totals after the batch; the wash route by name with its temperature; the number of sheets; and the two test results from the control sheet, read and written at the bench rather than remembered. A batch whose tests are not written down has no permanence claim attached to it, however carefully it was processed.