DB masking advice?

BHuij · Aug 11, 2022

I have a 6x6 negative from my second ever roll of infrared film (Ilford SFX through a Hoya R72) that I really, really like. As I'm not anywhere near all the way dialed in on exposure and development for this film stock, this negative is very dense and very contrasty.

Yesterday I made a straight print as a starting point. As expected, by the time I got my white-ish foliage to the right tone, my tree trunks were significantly darker than I want them for a final print, even at grade 00.

I lack the number of limbs necessary to simultaneously dodge all of the areas I'd like to lighten during exposure, so for the first time I think I'm going to need to do some masking. All the reading I've done so far says: get a thin frosted acrylic sheet above the negative and tape your mask over the top of that. I can do that. I just don't know what to use for my mask. I have some transparency film I use for alt process digital negs, so I could make a 6x6 inkjet mask. Or I could try a more traditional mask that I make by hand (maybe on the same material?)

How exactly do you go about actually creating dodge masks for enlargement? What materials do you use? How do you control density (is it just guess and check)?

koraks · Aug 11, 2022

Given an 8x10 print and not too many overly complicated shapes, I'd just cut some masks out of cardstock and tape them to stiff wire. Looks like you'll need one for the tree in the left and maybe one for the center burn portion, although you could also do that with a generic shape of just a hole cut into a card and then burn the top separately.

BHuij said:
How do you control density (is it just guess and check)?

A metronome really helps. In the LED controller I built for my enlarger, I made it so that it beeps every second when exposing in burn mode. So I just have to count beeps when burning or dodging, based on calculated exposure. Seems like you've got the last part covered pretty much already!

BHuij · Aug 11, 2022

Are you suggesting cardstock masks immediately below the negative, or immediately above the print? I always print 8x10 to get a photo 'dialed in' and have a solid map of how best to print it, but I actually want to make an 11x14 of this one to frame and hang in my living room, so any technique where the mask can work for any print size is automatically a better one for me.

I do have a loud clock in my darkroom specifically so I can use the ticks to time out regular dodge and burn times.

pentaxuser · Aug 11, 2022

How much experience do you have with DB and how long and how many attempts are you prepared to make?

In my opinion DB good enough to improve this pic may require several attempts at the very least. For IR the pic doesn't look bad IMO. I'd attempt a small dodge at the bottom of the trunk as koraks suggests that you have marked and see what that looks like

Making a mask to fit exactly the part requiring dodging and placing it on the print projection is quite hard without leaving evidence of the mask. I'd make a thinner mask on the end of a wire and move it around during the dodge period

If you want an 11x14 print I'd project it to that size, place a test strip on the trunk's projection and do several test

I may be misunderstanding what you mean but I get the impression that you may believe that mask can be made for any size print and maybe you can do different size pictures of this neg with one size mask and same exposure

I see no way of doing this but I may appear to be doubting your skills and knowledge of DB. If so I apologise but that is why I asked about your skills and experience initially

pentaxuser

koraks · Aug 11, 2022

BHuij said:
Are you suggesting cardstock masks immediately below the negative, or immediately above the print?

The latter. Well, I generally never hold it immediately above the print, but somewhere halfway the print and the lens. Varying the distance of course allows to accommodate for various sizes, so the approach would actually fit your requirement in this sense. I'd recommend giving this a try simply because it's so much less work than making for instance film masks.

If a negative-stage mask is desired, I'd personally investigate the possibilities of inkjet (blasphemy!) printing a DB mask and then mounting it just above or below the negative outside the plane of focus. You could even go crazy and print blue/green combination masks to directly manipulate contrast on VC paper. But this seems a rabbit hole to me that brings a real risk of getting lost in it.

If it's just for the odd print once in a while, cut cardstock masks are pretty hard to beat IMO for intuitiveness.

albada · Aug 11, 2022

You want detail in both leaves and trunks. Another way to do that is to flash the paper. Flashing will produce shadows at normal contrast, midtones at lower contrast, and highlights at lowest contrast. This technique is appropriate when you want to emphasize shadows and midtones, without losing highlights. For the fun of it, trying flashing to the paper's threshold at grade 5, and printing that negative at grade 5. Yes, grade 5. The texture of the trunks will be strong (contrasty), and the leaves will appear airy and delicate due to their low contrast. You might like the effect. I did this a few days ago with a photo of a stature of a horse, and the result was stunning. If it's too strong, you could back off to grade 0 or 1 to get normal contrast in the trunks.

Mark Overton

Arthurwg · Aug 11, 2022

I do like the picture.

BHuij · Aug 11, 2022

koraks said:
The latter. Well, I generally never hold it immediately above the print, but somewhere halfway the print and the lens. Varying the distance of course allows to accommodate for various sizes, so the approach would actually fit your requirement in this sense. I'd recommend giving this a try simply because it's so much less work than making for instance film masks.

If a negative-stage mask is desired, I'd personally investigate the possibilities of inkjet (blasphemy!) printing a DB mask and then mounting it just above or below the negative outside the plane of focus. You could even go crazy and print blue/green combination masks to directly manipulate contrast on VC paper. But this seems a rabbit hole to me that brings a real risk of getting lost in it.

If it's just for the odd print once in a while, cut cardstock masks are pretty hard to beat IMO for intuitiveness.

I'll give some of these techniques a shot. While the initial setup might be more of pain, I'm leaning towards trying an inkjet mask. It was easy to throw one together in photoshop, and I have good transparency film on hand since I do alt process printing with digital negatives from time to time. For future prints, simply taping the mask a few mm above the negative (on top of the carrier) will likely give more repeatable results than hand dodging with custom shaped dodging tools. At this point I don't see much need to screw with colored masks, as you said that's a rabbit hole best left for when my kids are older I'll test this out. I think the biggest question is whether I'll have adverse effects from omitting the oft-recommended layer of frosted acrylic between the mask and the negative, but I suppose if such a layer ends up being necessary, it shouldn't be very hard to source.

albada said:
You want detail in both leaves and trunks. Another way to do that is to flash the paper. Flashing will produce shadows at normal contrast, midtones at lower contrast, and highlights at lowest contrast. This technique is appropriate when you want to emphasize shadows and midtones, without losing highlights. For the fun of it, trying flashing to the paper's threshold at grade 5, and printing that negative at grade 5. Yes, grade 5. The texture of the trunks will be strong (contrasty), and the leaves will appear airy and delicate due to their low contrast. You might like the effect. I did this a few days ago with a photo of a stature of a horse, and the result was stunning. If it's too strong, you could back off to grade 0 or 1 to get normal contrast in the trunks.

Mark Overton

Also considered flashing the paper. Another technique I've been aware of for a long time, but never had occasion to actually use. I may give that a try first just to see if it gets the job done on its own; it's certainly far less fiddly than any flavor of masking. The problem isn't that I can't get detail in the highlights and shadows at the same time. The shadows are printing at about Zone III which would normally be what I'm looking for. But in this case, I want a very high-key rendered print, with the majority of the shadow areas falling on about Zone V. And if I could step up a grade or three with my MG filters with this method, all the better. The trunks could really benefit from some added microcontrast.

Arthurwg said:
I do like the picture.

Thank you! I'm really excited to see if I can get it to print how I have it visualized. Hopefully it will end up looking good in the living room.

koraks · Aug 11, 2022

Sounds good; I'm very interested to hear how your inkjet masking exercise turns out. Re: the frosting layer (we're baking carrot cake, aren't we now ) - I think such a thing can sufficiently faked in PS and then printed IF it turns out to be necessary, which I don't think it will be if you suspend the mask sufficiently out of the focus plane.

albada · Aug 11, 2022

BHuij said:
But in this case, I want a very high-key rendered print, with the majority of the shadow areas falling on about Zone V. And if I could step up a grade or three with my MG filters with this method, all the better. The trunks could really benefit from some added microcontrast.

That's what paper-flashing does. Flashing gives the paper's curve a long toe. The curve has nearly your filter's contrast in the shadows, but highlights have low contrast. Given that your negative is contrasty, I'll guess that filter-2 will hit the zones you want, with high microcontrast in the trunks. But you'll need to see whether the low contrast of highlights (leaves) is to your liking.

Mark Overton

MattKing · Aug 11, 2022

Try making a base print at grade 2, and then add a significant amount of localized burning in the highlight areas at grade 3 or 4.
I know that seems counter-intuitive, but the nature of IR/extended red sensitive materials photographed through an R72 filter leads to moderate contrast in the shadow area, and highlights that are not contrasty, but rather overly dense and not particularly detailed.
You also may be expecting more out of the parts of the image showing Wood Effect than may be reasonable - resolution in those areas is usually lower.

BHuij · Aug 11, 2022

I'm already pretty happy with the way the leaves are rendering. I just want them to look white. There won't be a tremendous amount of detail anyway since the exposure was something like 2 minutes long and there was a breeze. I'd be happy to keep the highlights/foliage as is while simply bringing up the tone on the trunks and foreground. Sounds like flashing might be my best bet for that, but I'll try whatever techniques I need to try until I get it or I become convinced that this negative is destined for a hybrid workflow only

Maris · Aug 11, 2022

I've just finished some long darkroom sessions exploring trees and leaves taken on Rollei Infrared film at E.I. = 10 behind an IR720 filter. Frankly, the image provided by the OP is darn good and nearly there.
Accurate dodging of small areas I reckon is much harder than gently graded burning-in of large areas.
Here's some cheap opinion:
All the OP's picture needs is a burn along the top left between the tree and the edge of the paper, a graded burn to the top edge for the upper third of the picture, and a burn in the upper right corner to darken it. Tree bark doesn't reflect much infrared so the darker tones and textures of the tree trunks read about right.
Because visualising infrared tends to be a mix of experience, guesswork, and optimism it's difficult to aim for precise tonal renditions of elements in a scene. Sometimes it's good to accept what film and paper delivers as long as it looks nice or nicer.

BHuij · Aug 12, 2022

You make a good point that exposing the print for the shadows and burning in the highlights in this case would be easier than exposing for the highlights as usual and dodging the shadows. If I wasn't going for a very specific effect to match my visualization of the image, I'd be pretty happy with the image as is, just a straight print at grade 00. A bit of burning around the top and sides and I'd call it good.

Because I want an extremely ethereal and high-key rendering of the scene for my final print, I still think I'm going to try flashing the paper and printing at a higher grade. I'm hoping I can get the foliage to look more or less as it does now (basically Zone VIII - Zone IX with very little detail) and the trunks and foreground to land on about Zone V with high microcontrast to bring out the texture. Very little of the scene if any should fall below Zone V, only tiny areas to help ground it just slightly.

I hope I don't get smacked for this on the analog side of the forum, but for tricky negatives, I'll occasionally do some "dry runs" at how I want the final product to look using Lightroom. The "target" for this image is something along these lines, I'm just hoping to achieve it in the darkroom instead of on a computer. High hopes that preflashing will help me get there in a way that's repeatable and doesn't involve manual dodging and burning heroics.

BHuij · Aug 12, 2022

Maris said:
I've just finished some long darkroom sessions exploring trees and leaves taken on Rollei Infrared film at E.I. = 10 behind an IR720 filter.

BTW, how did you find that film? Near as I can tell it's the only IR sensitive film I can get in 4x5. This image is from a 6x6 negative, but I'm having enough fun with IR that I'd love to shoot some in large format. Is it more sensitive than Ilford SFX? You said you were getting good results at EI 10. I had to shoot my SFX at EI 1-2 in the shade to get good shadow detail, and develop for an unconscionably long time compared to my normal go-to film stocks. On this roll these particular ones were a bit overdeveloped but not much, other frames were just about right for printing at a normal contrast grade. I suspect the contrast of this scene comes more from me underestimating the actual contrast inherent in the scene, with much of it falling into deep shadow while some of the foliage was backlit by afternoon sun. More that than overdevelopment, probably.

At any rate, even if I'm a big Ilford fanboy and haven't really ever touched Rollei films, a boost in effective speed would be welcome, and if I end up liking the 4x5 enough I'll probably try it in 120 as well.

BHuij · Aug 17, 2022

Carved out some darkroom time tonight and gave pre-flashing a try, since it seemed like the easiest of the possible solutions. I preflashed at grade 00 and then printed the negative at grade 2 for all my tests. Kept finding that the trunks were still going too dark by the time I had any detail in the highlights. Eventually I wound up preflashing enough that I'm pretty sure I was no longer achieving paper base white anywhere in the print (i.e., too much). I backed it off a hair and tried printing the negative at grade 1 instead of grade 2.

The result is in the rinse right now, I'll see if I can take a phone pic of it tomorrow to post up here once it's dry. It's an improvement, but it's still not quite the way I visualized. This negative is proving to be a catalyst for trying all sorts of new big boy techniques in the darkroom

I read up on Barnbaum's recommendation for making an unsharp mask. It seems like a perfect theoretical match for what I'm trying to do, which is decrease global contrast and increase microcontrast. It's also nice because if it works, I get to stick with an all-analog workflow instead of messing around with inkjet masks. I'm going to give that a try next time I have a chance, and see how it works. Just need to figure out some way to make sure the negative and the mask stay in perfect registration. Probably MacGyver something with pins.

Thanks all for an illuminating discussion and some really good tips.

albada · Aug 17, 2022

Your final flash was at the paper's threshold. I flash at grade 5 so that all three emulsions are at the threshold. You could try it to see whether the image gets better or worse. In any case, the trunk and area around the lower left will probably need some dodging.

koraks · Aug 17, 2022

albada said:
I flash at grade 5 so that all three emulsions are at the threshold.

Please correct me if I'm wrong; it's been a while since I delved into the intricacies of VC emulsions, but...

I don't think that's how it works. If you simplify VC paper, it's basically a fast, blue-sensitive emulsion and a slow, orthochromatic emulsion. Flashing at grade 5 (so virtually only blue) to a visible threshold will put only the fast emulsion at its threshold, but the slow emulsion will still lag behind a couple of stops.

Of course, this does not mean at all that it won't work to get the desired effect! Definitely give it a try. I just don't think that the underlying mechanism works the way you think it does.

RalphLambrecht · Aug 17, 2022

BHuij said:
I have a 6x6 negative from my second ever roll of infrared film (Ilford SFX through a Hoya R72) that I really, really like. As I'm not anywhere near all the way dialed in on exposure and development for this film stock, this negative is very dense and very contrasty.

Yesterday I made a straight print as a starting point. As expected, by the time I got my white-ish foliage to the right tone, my tree trunks were significantly darker than I want them for a final print, even at grade 00.

I lack the number of limbs necessary to simultaneously dodge all of the areas I'd like to lighten during exposure, so for the first time I think I'm going to need to do some masking. All the reading I've done so far says: get a thin frosted acrylic sheet above the negative and tape your mask over the top of that. I can do that. I just don't know what to use for my mask. I have some transparency film I use for alt process digital negs, so I could make a 6x6 inkjet mask. Or I could try a more traditional mask that I make by hand (maybe on the same material?)

How exactly do you go about actually creating dodge masks for enlargement? What materials do you use? How do you control density (is it just guess and check)?

this works best with a copy negative on regular film stock! google for Lynn Radeka. He's an expert in this technique or if you email me at rwlambrec@gmail.com, I can send you a free pdf with instructions.

koraks · Aug 17, 2022

@RalphLambrecht is there any possibility of sharing the pdf more widely? I'm sure many others would be interested, I myself too.

VinceInMT · Aug 17, 2022

As another possible solution for dodging, I built this “jiggle machine” which provides a means for repeatable results for making multiple prints. This is not my design but something I learned in a college class and I think it came from John Sexton who was a guest speaker and friend of our professor.

It’s 2 wooden frames held separate by springs. A piece of glass is mounted in the top frame and the print easel placed underneath. The dodging material such as card stock, tissue paper, etc. is placed directly on the glsss. Another tip is to draw on the glass with grease pencil for the small areas that need dodging. During exposure, the top frame is “jiggled” to avoid harsh lines from the masks.

BHuij · Aug 17, 2022

Wow, that jiggle machine is ingenious!

I’m also a little confused about the utility of flashing at grade 5, and the comment about “all three emulsions.” Both of those contradict my (perhaps incorrect) understanding of how variable contrast paper works.

I’ll give unsharp masking a try next. Think I’ll make the mask with TMX since it’s the finest grain stuff I currently have on hand.

At any rate, here’s the print at grade 1 after grade 00 preflashing. Like I said, improvement, but not quite where I want it.

albada · Aug 17, 2022

koraks said:
I don't think that's how it works. If you simplify VC paper, it's basically a fast, blue-sensitive emulsion and a slow, orthochromatic emulsion. Flashing at grade 5 (so virtually only blue) to a visible threshold will put only the fast emulsion at its threshold, but the slow emulsion will still lag behind a couple of stops.

I learned the following from Ilford's documents and Way Beyond Monochrome (Ralph Lambrecht).

VC paper consists of three emulsions. To reach the paper's d-max, all three emulsions must be at their d-max's.
All three are equally sensitive to blue (identical curves).
Two of the three emulsions also have some sensitivity to green (i.e., they are sensitive to both blue and green).
Green sensitivity is lower than blue (lower contrast).
The three have the same threshold when exposed with blue, but their green thresholds differ and are lower than their blue thresholds.

An easy way to remember the behavior of the emulsions is that threshold and contrast of blue are both higher than green.

Consequently, when exposing with only blue, all three curves add at the same exposure, creating a steep composite curve, creating high contrast.
When exposing with a mixture of green and blue, the three curves are shifted (due to differing thresholds), reducing the composite slope, reducing overall contrast.
The threshold-difference is why green affects highlights more than shadows, and why blue affects shadows more than highlights. That threshold-difference is also why blue requires more exposure to reach threshold, but after reaching threshold, blue is more sensitive (higher contrast) than green.

Because all three are equally sensitive to blue with identical curves, pre-exposing (flashing) with only blue will bring all three to their thresholds.

Mark Overton

DREW WILEY · Aug 17, 2022

It should be apparent by now that we're talking about a whole major tool kit going from simple cardboard dodging & burning all the way to very precise punch and register systems involving unsharp film masking, with everything in between, including grease pencil and dyed overlays. And obviously, some people choose to make masks via scanning and digital printers, but that's more of a detour route and actually less precise. I'm not going to repeat things I've posted numerous times before, and simply advise one to refer to the many past threads on masking as well as split printing. All of this can be either as simple of as complex as one wishes. I'm pretty much an "all of the above" practitioner, with the exception of scanning and printer methods, which offer nothing of advantage in my own case.

Incidentally, TMax 100 sheet film is an excellent masking option. But you need to develop it to a very low contrast, which is most easy to do with highly dilute HC-110. And exposure and development-wise, aim for a mask DMax of around only .30 to .45. Diffusion is achieved with a 3-mil or 5-mil sheet of mylar or Duralar frosted on both sides (don't use acetate for anything - not film, tape, or diffusion; among other problems, it isn't dimensionally stable).

koraks · Aug 17, 2022

@albada thanks for your explanation; that sounds plausible indeed! I'll need to (re-)read up on this when I find the time.

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