Contrast combating

Hello,

yesterday, or rather today early in the night, should I say, I made my first print. I won't mention the path I had to follow in order to complete and set up all the equipment, suffice to say the enlarger was posted from south areas of Poland more than month ago. Anyway, all is well that ends well and I could set it all up yesterday.

It all went wall considering the fact I ruined just ten sheets of paper and came up with four prints of 13x18cm size. However, I am not quite satisfed with the result (hey, no wonder) as prints are a bit too contrasty for my taste. Even on a tiny contact sheet - which was printed by a local shop owner - there are more details in highlights and shadows.

I used FomaSpeed RC Normal mat paper. The exposure times varied from 4 to 5 seconds (sic!), with no filters applied. The developer was Fomatol LQN 1+7, development time about 75 seconds.

The prints are contrasty, the details in the shadows are lost, the negative preserves - as far as I can see - much much more.

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The questions, if you don't mind, are:

• were the ingredients I used right for the beginner?
• will using soft paper decrease the contrast?
• what developer - that isavailable in Europe - would you recommend for FomaSpeed?
• anything that comes to your mind I should be aware of as a newbie?

Yes, a softer paper will reduce contrast. You also have a small amount of control of contrast by using a different developer giving less contrast. Your exposure time is much too short if you are interested in any kinds of local controls. If you can, stop the enlarger lens down, perhaps two stops, which should give you about thirty seconds of exposure time, allowing you to burn and dodge easily. I might add that, given your first darkroom session, thiese prints look pretty darn good! You are on your way. Have fun.

Fomaspeed paper you say? OK, that's a graded paper and using variable contrast filters won't change the papers contrast curve. So, if you have too much contrast in the print, then your negatives have too much contrast for this paper. There are some print development techniques that might work, but modern papers don't respond that much to them. You could try a soft working developer, similar to Kodak's Selectol Soft, or you could try using a more dilute version of what you are already using. Still, I would not expect to see a big difference. Another solution would be to use a softer grade of paper. Fomaspeed comes in four grades. A more effective way to combat the problem would be to develop your negatives a bit less and expose the film a bit more generously. That will lower the contrast of the negatives by keeping the highlights from becoming too dense while preserving, and perhaps even enhancing the shadow detail. Ultimately, you might want to try using variable contrast papers. I happen to like the Foma products, and I get them here in the US under the Arista.EDU Ultra brand from Freestyle Sales in California. I believe the stuff I use is Fomaspeed Variant III, but that will do for you. This way there is no need to stock papers of different contrast grades. The contrast grade can be controlled with the use of variable contrast filters.

As John says those aren't bad prints for a first session, take his advice. The Fomatol LQN 1+7 should be fine for the paper, it's a standard PQ print developer, pretty much the same as Ilford's print devs. (I have the Foma formulae).

Get some softer grade paper, stick to the same brand and see how it prints. It's difficult knowing what your negatives are really like. There are advanced techniques for reducing print contrast but you need to get experience first.

Ian

VC papers I am leaving for later, as I am too little experienced, in my judgement, right now. I know I need filters but right now I am not even sure were they should be put - there's a filter carrier, as far as I know, in Opemus 6 which is my gear, but it's occupied right now by the soft glass that diffuses the light. And that's just one of many questions I have regarding VC papers so I think I stick to graded papers, just for now, and when I get some more experience and confidency, I will try VC.

Anscojohn: thanks for kind words regarding the prints. I just wish I knew what was I doing and payed more attention to all the things I was supposed to do but haven't done (i.e. stopping down the lens).

Another question, if you don't mind: can I use the same type of paper regarding the fact I use HP5+@320 and R09 exclusively? Or you would rather recommend using different gradations for different frames?

lgrabun said:

VC papers I am leaving for later, as I am too little experienced

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There is nothing to them -- much easier than graded -- you just put the filter under the lens or in the lamphouse and forget about it. Too much or little contrast and you just change the filter. Be assured the contact sheet you have was made with VC paper.

Getting good prints with graded paper is harder. You need better negatives and you need to play with development techniques to fine tune contrast.

With the paper you have now try diluting the developer 2x to 4x what you are using and develop for about 1 1/2 minutes - you will have to increase the exposure. That should reduce the contrast.

Personally, I like your prints, particularly for this type of shot. One, I tend to like them a bit snappier, and two, considering your depth of field to emphasize your subject, softening would "open up" the background a bit, but in my opinion, lend little to the overall image. Nice work.

Hey, nothing wrong with these prints!

Some random musings....

How about preflashing your paper. Expose it maybe 3 stops under the point when you would see tones begin to appear under normal development. Then expose normally (mind you, the paper will now be a bit faster than before). You will thus move the net exposure a bit up the tone curve and have a bit less overall contrast index. This trick also works for film, of course. Sometimes this can tame runaway highlights.

Another thing you can do, if you have undesired hotspots on your print: you can can insert your [warm] finger into the developer and rub that area and build up a bit more density there, locally, more quickly than it would appear under normal development.

Then there is warm water bath or two bath development, that might help. I am not a practitioner of that and generally my negs for which I think of such things are already too contrasty for it to make much difference, but I think the basic idea is have one dev bath at normal concentration and then next at much lower.

You might think about diffusing your highlights a tad, by doing part of your exposure though a diffusing medium (plastic? paper?)- this can make the black/white boundaries a bit smoother without sacrificing too much critical detail. N.b. I also tend to go to a more surface-textured, fiber matte paper in these situations because the texture contributes some natural diffusion, whereas rc glossy or smooth-textured paper can be too incisive in the tonal boundaries (just my opinion of course).

I think the bottom line is to realize that we notice contrast more than absolute tone, so in other words if you have deep blacks, then those may set off the highlights more than deep greys would.

I think Nicholas is right though, the best place to begin is with exposure/dev ratio. Use test strips!

P.S. In #1, let me suggest cropping to just below the bench surface, to include her hand, which is where the interest is IMHO. That is quite nice, the way her hand is resting, and more relative open space about her head may be helpful. The lights to the bottom left are distracting to my eye, you could try burning those in.

I fully agree with Nicolas, the paper which are best to start out with are VC papers. Then you have the means to correct for all the "other mistakes" in a box of filters. You don't need several boxes of paper, only one. While there are many experienced printers in this forum, I believe that every single one of them will give you the same advice, that is begin with VC paper.
In fact, if you compare most of the remedies given above (another type of developer, pre-flashing the paper ...) all of them needs you to be quite experienced with darkroom work. A better remedy is to use a softer paper grade, (which will cost you the money for a new box of papers anyhow) so that you don't have to use the "advanced tricks".
The VC paper isn't in any way more difficult to work with. Just about the same exposure times from grade 00 (very soft) to grade 3.5 (hardish). Then about double the time for grade 4-5 (hard). That is really all there is to it.
Also, there's another thread where one of the masters made this posting: (there was a url link here which no longer exists), which may come in handy later.

You seem to have gotten most things correct. I personally like HP5, I like Rodinal (same as R 09), you use a standard paper developer. Just get a box of VC paper and a filter set. I guess that you are shooting normal 36 exposure film rolls. You will have a lot of different scenarios on that film, each and every one with different contrast, so being able to easily adjust these variations in the darkroom with a simple change of filters is really nice.

I have been printing on and off for some 35 years. When I started there was only graded fibre paper. I saw the introduction of first the RC paper and then the VC paper. While I like fibre paper much better, I always start printing a negative on RC VC paper to see what I have to work with. If the picture will benefit from whichever and particular graded paper I happen to have at home I try that out, but most of my pictures finally get printed on fibre VC paper.

Finally, keep up the good work. As the others have said, these are very good prints for a first run.

//Björn

Hi,

so I ended up with a set of multigrade filters (Foma's, they're cheaper, not sure whether Ilford's are better, very positive they're more dear) and three packs of Foma VC paper. My better half is heading tomorrow to city of Lodz and I'll be on my own for couple of days and definitely am going to make use of it. That's setting up a darkroom, certainly ;-)

Thanks for all the input and very useful hints. The next thing I will try is split grading which gives, as far as I could see on googled webpages, awesome results.

Cheers to you all.

For those who are interested. With Foma Variant III the results are much much better. Take a look:

.

Thanks once again for most useful replies.

This negative, I am almost sure, has much shorter contrast range than the negatives for your prints. Those first negatives obviously had important detail over a greater range of tones. This print looks fine; but it obviously depends upon the mid tones for conveying your image.
Have you learned anything in this printing session about how to print the first negatives so the prints have the details in the shadows and the highlights that you want?
Many times, a Variable Contrast paper used without filters is a bit less contrasty than a graded normal paper--so this VC paper might be just the thing for those too-contrasty first negatives. Have you tried printing those first negatives with this paper?

Seems like you're getting there. I took a quick look at your Flickr page and really liked what I saw. Have a lot of fun in the darkroom.

//Björn

After three sessions in the darkroom, all I can say that I totally dig it; the feeling of holding a print in my hands... it can't be compared to anything. It so much different from scanning the negative and checking what the picture looks like on computer screeen. Cheers to you all for giving me support and most useful input. Here the last one I am currently most proud of. Most people seem not to like the picture but for me there's something special in this picture.