On Sat, 27 Apr 2002, Jim Noel wrote: <snip>
> As for BAking soda in dektol, don't do it. The use of baking soda will > increase the activity of the developer and thus create mor cpontrast, not > less. > Jim I disagree. I have experimented with this. When I added baking soda to dektol it decreaed the contrast to some extent. I believe Dektol uses Sodium Carbonate as its alkali agent - it has a pH of around 11 in solution Baking Soda is made of sodium Bicarbonate - it has a pH of around 8 in solution. Adding Baking Soda should lower the pH to some extent. I don't know if the sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate react in any way at room temperature. In my experiments it has. There are better ways of reducing contrast, so I don't really recommend using this in practice, but I was curious to see if it would work. Gord --------------------------------------------------------- Gordon J. Holtslander Dept. of Biology [email protected] 112 Science Place http://duke.usask.ca/~holtsg University of Saskatchewan Tel (306) 966-4433 Saskatoon, Saskatchewan Fax (306) 966-4461 Canada S7N 5E2 ---------------------------------------------------------
