Need more contrast

gbenson said:

Could you give me a little more detail about this? The only multi-filter technique I've used so far has been to expose at grade 5 just enough to get a black (or a little less), then expose at 0 to get the midtones where I want them (dodging and burning the 0 exposure only). Is what you mean?

I put one of the pictures at http://inauspicious.org/photos/lm6/038/14/. That's just a straight print at grade 5, with just enough exposure for the blacks to be black. Note that my scanner puts a really odd tiger-stripey pattern in dark areas, that's not on the print. There is actually detail--just--in the woman's clothes and in the shadowed area to the left of her head, but they are probably a bit blocked up. I don't really know a lot about dodging and burning, the only thing I would think to do here is burn the spotty wall to the right at 0 to lower the contrast on it, and maybe burn the buildings and sky to the top left as I think they're distracting. What initially prompted me to post, though, was that the picture was already too dark all over in the grade 5 exposure... usually they end up black and white and nothing inbetween!

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nworth said:

My experience is that negatives that require grade 5 paper almost never give a decent print. Even trying digital tricks generally fails.

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gbenson said:

Hi all,

I pretty often run out of contrast when printing underexposed negatives. Obviously the real answer here is I should expose better, but it seems I struggle to get decent blacks when I hit grade 5 on the enlarger. Also, the difference between grades 4 and 5 seems pretty small compared to the differences between other grades. I'm pretty new to all this, so I wanted to check if I'm doing something odd--and find out if there's something easy I can change to get a bit more contrast!

Ok, here's what I do:

Film is HP5, 35mm, exposed at 1600ASA and developed in DD-X 1+4 at 20°C for 13 minutes, 4 inversions totalling 10 seconds each minute (basically what the datasheet says). When I expose it right I get lovely negatives that print at 3-3½.

I use an LPL VC7700 enlarger with a 60mm lens to print on 8x10" Ilford Multigrade RC gloss paper. Usually the exposures (at f8) end up being 12-14 seconds for a nicely exposed negative at 3-3½. I develop with Acugrade 1+9 for 90 seconds (which I do 80 seconds in the tray, and the final 10 seconds held above it to drip off, so the print goes in the stop exactly 90 seconds after it went in the dev). 90 seconds isn't what the datasheet says here--it says 60 seconds, but I would end up having to expose the prints forever (with really muddy results) when I tried that. I mix it at 20°C but I don't have any method of maintaining it's temperature (yet!) so it's generally dropped 2-3°C by the time I'm finished. That doesn't seem to make a lot of difference, I've done comparison prints at the start and end before and they look much the same.

Does anything look obviously wrong here?

Thanks,
Gary

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Bill Burk said:

Thanks for the tips in this thread. I had to make a print from a thin neg last week. This is a list of the things I did to improve contrast. I use single graded paper. But these things I did could apply to anyone hitting a wall:

1. Switch from diffusion source to condenser source.
2. Selenium intensified neg.
3. Retouched highlights with New Coccine.
4. Added Potassium Bromide to developer.
5. Cleaned haze off the lens.

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