Yesterday I helped a friend rescue black-and-white negatives after a basement flood. Ugh. The basic procedure was to remove them from their ruined storage envelopes, rewash briefly in a 3% isopropanol solution (in steam-distilled water) with half-strength Photo-Flo, and hang to dry. This is stunningly tedious, but it worked fine with an interesting exception.
One old (~50 years?) 120 neg turned light blue immediately upon immersion and didn't clear after it dried. I have no idea what film it was, as it was a single frame with no edge markings. The blue was not uniform across the negative and didn't seem to correlate with image density. Some of his other 120 strips were Ilford FP4 (not FP4+), but they didn't show this behavior. All the negatives seemed well-processed, there was no staining or other visible problem even though many of them were 30+ years old.
This wasn't a terribly important negative, and as he's gone digital he should be able to scan it OK, but the blue was very unexpected. The only "interesting" thing about this negative was that it had been stored in some kind of lightweight manila-colored envelope, whereas all the others were in plain white paper envelopes with no glassine or other "archival" protection.
Does anyone know why this happened? Any suggestions for removing the blue?
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