Internegative from color slides for darkroom printing

DREW WILEY

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Joined
Jul 14, 2011
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8x10 Format
Typically it was done with a color transmission densitometer. But with patience you can forego that. Take a good daylight master neg correctly exposed and correctly balanced for color temperature. Then replicate that on your enlarger. Judging negs by eye takes a bit of
practice. But you can accelerate process simply by printing test strips of your results from time to time, and slowly improving through trial
and error. And of course, you can adjust your colorhead to something more equivalent to photographic daylight. A color temperature meter
helps, but won't get you much past first base. The key is simply patience. But there can still be a long distance to second base, third base,
and home. Fine tuning these things requires actually printing a range of subjects and accumulating experience. In some cases you might
never be happy with interneg results. In other cases, a technically imperfect results might turn into an appealing accidental discovery of
a look you happen to like. If you enjoy darkroom work like I do, these various detours and curves on the highway aren't discouraging,
but generally fun.
 

Photo Engineer

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Apr 19, 2005
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29,018
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Rochester, NY
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You get exposure and color balance from trial and error.

I ended up at 100C, 50M (IIRC) and 1/2 sec at f22. This is to make an approximate 2x3 or 3x4 from a 35mm transparency.

This exposure centered a fully neutral step wedge on a 4x5 trial sheet.

PE
 
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