Effect of White Light on a Fixing Print

I have the occasional habit when printing of turning on the main darkroom light, i.e. not just the safelight, once a print has gone into the fixer.

I've never observed a problem that might have arisen either at the time of processing or when looking back at prints which are years old. It did just occur to me though that perhaps I might be storing up potential problems by exposing to white light prints which have not then fully fixed.

I can support the idea that no harm can be done by arguing that though un-removed silver halides might well be affected by light exposure even once the print is in the fixer, the continuing fixing process will eventually remove all of those salts anyway so there could be no future breakdown of them to cause staining.

Does anyone have a view? (Of course even if you agree with me that there's no likelihood of harm arising, feel free to tell me it's poor practise anyway).

Trevor Littlewood

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