The Drust 80mm is 6 element in 4 groups design, I forgot who made it, one of the better German lens makers. I doubt that it is your enlarger lens, saying that you can improve color prints if you are willing to pay to upgrade to am APO design.
Are you referring to black and white printing, or color printing?
Black and white printing is a skill, and there are many variables, such as contrast grade, dodging/burning, paper surface, paper choice, developer choices, and toning. These all affect the elements you describe. A lens will have very little impact compared to these other factors, as long as it's stopped down to a medium aperture. The lens isn't the problem here, unless it's obviously defective.
Thank you, I'm talking about Colour printing. Would you know what factors might effect the tone of a print with colour?
Thank you, I'm talking about Colour printing. Would you know what factors might effect the tone of a print with colour?
The RA4 process is an industrial process for mass produced color prints, and has very little room for variability. You can't really control contrast, since there are no variable contrast color papers available. You can change the overall color balance by changing filtration, and you can still burn and dodge, Traditional color printing via this "wet" process has never been easy, and has always been expensive to do at home. There are many things that can go wrong, but the lens is the least likely problem.
These days, color film is usually scanned for digital inkjet printing. Even if you go to a commercial lab now, the prints will be inkjet digital prints, not the RA4 process. There are many advantages to this approach, since you can easily manipulate your scanned digital image in software such as Photoshop and others. The software give you the ability to change contrast, color curves, and many many other things, that would be almost impossible to do with traditional "wet" processing.
I would suggest taking one of your negatives to a commercial lab for printing, to see what kind of result you could expect. You can then compare that to what you've been able to get from you own developed images, then decide. It's hard to know if what you have now is a problem, it you have nothing to compare it to.
Frascofoto, can you shows us some examples of what you consider to be a decent results and others yjay lack what you refer to as tonality
Seeing examples ensures that what you mean is what we see. A verbal description can, unfortunately, mean different things to different people
Thanks
pentaxuser
Even if you go to a commercial lab now, the prints will be inkjet digital prints, not the RA4 process.
There are still a few labs who do RA4 prints from digital files, but that is now relatively rare.
And there are some custom printing services out there that print RA4 using enlargers, but they are expensive.
Tonality is more likely to be related to the light source than the lens, but even then any differences would be subtle.
You have doubts about the way your prints look...to you. It might be a good idea to ask someone with more color printing experience than you have (not a "minilab").
You mention light source, could it be the bulb?
I was hoping somebody on here might be that someone
There are still a few labs who do RA4 prints from digital files, but that is now relatively rare.
Are you sure, Matt? AFAIK the (vast) majority of the color print volume is still done on RA4. I.e. digital file to wet paper using high-throughput RGB laser imagers.
Are you sure, Matt? AFAIK the (vast) majority of the color print volume is still done on RA4. I.e. digital file to wet paper using high-throughput RGB laser imagers.
@Frascofoto
What is it in your prints you're not happy with? I can see two examples; they're perhaps somewhat soft. I'd check proper focus and any severe fouling of lens elements. To be honest I think the major factor in the lack of critical sharpness is actually in the negatives, looking at e.g. #2, which shows shallow depth of field and critical focus being on a couple of leaves and not much else. I think you missed the focus on the girl's face as well.
Those aren't my photos haha, they are by Ben Parks a very talented and established photographer.... those are the examples of what I'd like to achieve.
That's possible. And it's also a situation that's evolving - I'm not sure if RA4 will be as prevalent in a few years as it is now. But that's another discussion (we've actually had!)This is much more common in Europe than in North America. We really don't have many large volume printing labs on this side of the ponds.
I am assuming these are not your prints but I may be wrong as koraks seems to think they are yours?
There are still a few labs who do RA4 prints from digital files, but that is now relatively rare.
And there are some custom printing services out there that print RA4 using enlargers, but they are expensive.
Tonality is more likely to be related to the light source than the lens, but even then any differences would be subtle.
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