This tool helps you analyse and compare wet plate collodion and emulsion recipes. It takes the burden out of common calculations so you can focus on understanding the chemistry. Use it to:
- Gain insight into what makes existing recipes tick and compare them to each other.
- Tweak an existing recipe and see the effect on halide balance and solvent ratios.
- Substitute ingredients when you have slightly different materials available.
- Compare a new recipe on paper before mixing it in practice.
BETA — this tool may contain bugs or numerical errors. Fluids are entered in ml, dry ingredients in g.
The Original Recipe
These presets are for illustration. Recipes collected from various books and web sources — formulations vary between sources. Most are vague about the exact collodion product, alcohol type, and whether hydrated or anhydrous salts are used.
Key Statistics
Change Solvents
Substitutes another collodion product or alcohol while maintaining the original nitrocellulose content and total solvent volumes. Negative values mean you would need to remove that solvent — i.e. the selected product combination cannot reproduce the original recipe's proportions.
Change Salts
Substitutes the cation (K+, Na+, NH4+, etc.) while maintaining the same molar halide anion concentration as the current recipe. The weighting factor controls the proportion when you use multiple salts for the same halide.
Expert System
Automatically generated observations based on simple rule checks. Treat these as starting points for investigation, not conclusions.
Enter a recipe above to see observations.