Hi, I’ve had loads of help recently and many thanks to all contributors.
I bought the Valoi 360 kit (recently got the hugely expensive slide carrier 3d printed-how do they get away with that cost?)
Anyway, having perused some of the slides that I’m going to start with, I’ve noticed marks and patches/spots that could be mould and wondering how to clean them up.
I could add a photo here but the variation of different faults i’ve seen is quite big, and this crosses both the slides and negatives taken in the 50’s onwards.
So, naively, I was thinking denatured alcohol but I’m sure you’re going to tell me that will obliterate the image emulsion, or will it?
Any advice will be greatly appreciated as I’m about to start on my epic adventure.
With the disclaimer that I am not a conservator nor any other kind of expert, and I have never had to clean mold off of film, I use PEC-12 with PEC-PADs when I do need to clean a piece of film beyond what normal dusting can do.
Thanks Digitizer, but anyone can do that. What I was looking for was personal experience and that I got from graveladvisory, then I goggled it to see if others concurred which they did.
Job done, though that stuff is expensive and not that available here in the UK
All I have to do now is work out who DB Cooper was or is.
For slides I personally prefer to remount them. The corners of slide mount is notoriously hard to clean completely. So I open the old cardstock mounts , extract slide, easily clean it with PEC12 and soft microfiber and mount them in cheap and easy to load plastic Pakon or vintage Hama mounts. The added benefit is that all slides end up in the mounts of same thickness so scanning them becomes easier - less refocusing. HTH
I’ve run my own commercial picture library for 40+ years. I’ve never had mould but almost everything else - food & lacquer spray mostly. I demount the transparency, add 2 drops of fotoflo to a small petri dish with enough tap water to make washing easy, submerge the film & let it soak for a minute or so then gently wipe the surface(s) with plain cotton wool while submerged. If that doesn’t work then leave it alone & retouch. A bent paper clip to hang from a corner drains the liquid to the other corner where a tissue dabs it off without touching the film. A bit steam punk but I’ve never damaged a neg or transparency like this.
Pec is an organic solvent & best with grease or oil based contaminants.
Hi thanks for the info. I, ordered the PEC on other’s advice and did notice that it was a solvent and that it did leave streaks so wasn’t that impressed.
I like your idea to clean, but what is the process of demounting, a scalpel to open the cardboard?
I’m not going to go through the hassle of buying other mounts, so I guess I just slip the slides back in again after cleaning?
I have a blower bulb, canned air and a Kinetronics brush, but first tries with PEC-12 didn’t provide results, apart from streaking, it didn’t get rid of the faults, but those are clearly something else.
I’ll post a scan of one of the ones with spots that I thought were mould and that the PEC-12 didn’t remove.
I’m not going to invest in LR but probably get a repurposed copy of Photoshop, so hoping that will do some of the after-repair
Pec is good for its correct uses, but cleaning negs and slides isn’t one of them. If it is leaving streaks, that’s probably from the dirt that’s already there and you haven’t removed it all. For most purposes, Fotoflo solution is a better option.
Slide mounts vary a lot. Sometimes the glue is quite weak and you can open them just with your fingernail. I use Pritt or another adhesive stick to put them back together again. Other mounts, the glue is really tight, and if you use a scalpel you’ll actually cut into the cardboard rather than separate the two halves. I find a blunt penknife does that job better.
If it’s really, really solidly stuck, then the best option is to cut through the mount with a scalpel, cutting across the bottom a few mm up just below where the bottom of the film is, and then you can just pull it apart. You will need a new mount, but cardboard mounts are very cheap. It’s often easier and cheaper, unless there’s data on the mount, just to put them into new ones as you go.
Interesting to see that the Kodak information sheet simply recommends 99% isopropyl alcohol, well apart from water when re-washing for certain difficult situations but it doesn’t go into much detail. I might be inclined to use distilled water and Photo-Flo for those situations but then we’re in a very hard water area. 99% isopropyl alcohol is relatively easily available and inexpensive.
I don’t know how your slides were stored, but if the damage is caused by storing for a long time in PVC binder pages, very little can be done to remove that damage — It is chemical. It’s not just a surface deposit. Back in the 1970s, PVC was very popular as a print, slide, and negative storage medium. It was cheap, tough, clear on one side, and could be frosted on the back side. It was EVIL to photographic materials. Polypropylene and Polyethylene were the correct storage media.
PEC•12 is usually reliable for fingerprint removal, and for getting rid of surface grime and other organic substances. We used it in the school portrait lab years ago to clean 100’ rolls of negative film after it went through several sets of hands and the first of several printers. It worked quite well for that.
When I was doing AV production in the 1980s, we cleaned our slides with canned air, or a blower bulb, and StaticMaster brushes. Show slides were mounted in Wess glass mounts, which had four glass surfaces that had to be cleaned. Preparing a 960-slide show for projection was a chore… Some mounts contained a slide and a Kodalith mask. Eight surfaces…
I’m a victim of plastic archival slide pages. Many slide look like drops of water covering the emulsion side of the slide. I agree it must be chemical because nothing I’ve tried removes the marks.
This is a slide that prompted me to try and clean up the collection of them.
It was taken of my mother when she first came to UK, so that would’ve been 1959 or 1960.
As you can see, there are those bright spots, I couldn’t remove them.
Full disclosure, this is VERY lo fi, I held the slide up to my kitchen tiles and using my phone photographed it just so you can see the spots in question.
If it makes any difference, once I scan it, I’ll post here again so people may be able to see better what has damaged the slide.
Happily, this 70 year old slide was framed and stored well. NLP was able to restore what could be called the colours of the time. Newer slides have suffered much more
Polyvinyl chloride is dangerous to people and different plastics (film and film emulsions). For important images, editing in LrC or Ps has been my only solution.
