Lost Azochrome

pearl harbored: USP 2,322,084

Azochrome was an early dye destruction(Ciba type) process. Kodak patented the bleaches but never released the product. WWII came to the world as this was being finalized. Patented, but never produced. The patent remains a rich source of information about ‘BLIX’ and dyes that could serve as the foundation to homebrew, low technology “chrome” prints.

The inventors: Richard Young and Merrill Seymour worked at Kodak.

This invention relates to improvements in color photography and mor particularly in processes wherein dyes present in a silver halide emulsion are bleached in the vicinity of a ilver’image.

It is known that the bleaching of dyes selectively in the neighborhood of a silver image can be accomplished by reagents such as acid thiourea. It is possible’to control the contrast of the dye images by the addition of azo dyes or other mild oxidizing agents to the bleaching solutions which cause less image-forming dye to be reduced by a given amount of silver for the available reducing agent because they compete with the azo dyes present in the emulsion, as described in our application Serial No. 355,098 filed August 31, 1940.

It is cited by the Ilford patent US4304846A of Marthaler, and Jan

Processing of exposed silver dye-bleach materials is in general effect in four consecutive steps:

1. Silver developing

2. Dye bleaching

3. Silver bleaching

4. Fixing.

for the class of these type patents see: G03C5/44 Bleaching; Bleach-fixing

P3X Ingredients

Potassium Iodide CAS 7681-11-0
3 Mercapto-1 Propanesulfonic Acid sodium salt 17636-10-1
2,3,6, Trimethylquinoxaline 17635-21-1
Sodium Iodide 7681-82-5
Sodium Bromide 7647-15-6
Sulphuric Acid 7664-93-9
Sulphonated Trialkylphosphine 86563-95-3
Ethyldiglycol 111-90-0
Sodium 3Nitrobenzenesulfonate 127-68-4

pH<1

qtr:glop note

You can force QTR to put glop in 255 white areas by doing the following:

– Open appropriate xyz.quad file in a plain text editor (like Notepad or TextEdit)
– Look for line that starts with “# Y curve” or whatever position glop is in. It will look something like this:
# Y curve
0
32347
31927
31506
31086

The 0 means in 255 spot it will not put down glop. Change 0 to something else, in sequence with numbers under it. Doesn’t have to be precise, just duplicating the number below it will be fine.

If you do this it will put glop on the entire page, including areas outside your actual image. You could keep two versions of your .quad file, one with and the other without this hack.

Here is a simple proof: print a pure white image. If the printhead starts to move left-right like it is printing something, it is placing glop. If it just spits the page right out of the printer, you have no glop on pure white.