Are more people printing color ?

[Jim Blodgett]

Lighting in your test strip/print viewing area is a funny thing. The truth of the matter is, most hobby prints are ultimately displayed and viewed in mixed light conditions - maybe on your bedroom wall or up the stairwell in your house. And these areas are usually lit with inconsistent combinations of daylight, incandescent, LED, and yes, even fluorescent lighting.

I find I get the best finished prints when I use a combination of incandescent and daylight balanced LED lighting in my test strip/print viewing area. There is even a fair amount of natural daylight in that room. I'm sure professional printers and real photographers wince when they read that, but that's what works best for me.

 

[pentaxuser]

I

Is printing color becoming more popular ?

I think this was the key question but the thread quickly diverged from answering it - interesting and instructive though that divergence it has been

If the question is: Is home RA4 printing becoming more popular then my guess is NO in terms of numbers doing it. Most newcomers to film that arrive here on Photrio seem to be film users that have not graduated to RA4 printing due to cost of equipment, facilities required etc. While b&w printing requires equipment and a darkroom it probably seems easier to a newcomer so that tends to be stage one if the person has the facilities available to set up a darkroom. Unless we get a revival in the manufacture of enlargers I think that even b&w printing may ever only be a small and worse shrinking market and colour enlargers may be in a " worse boat"

Henning Serger who keeps us abreast of analogue trends believes that this stage of a full darkroom revival will be reached in the future and he may be right but others and that includes me have doubts and in my case even more doubts about home RA4 processing ever being more than a very small part of the home analogue field

pentaxuser

 

[Tom Kershaw]

Small scale RA-4 printing would be helped by a fuller range of papers being available in cut sheet format.