Question for you paper preflashers

Doremus Scudder · Mar 14, 2021

Pieter12 said:
Sometimes the areas needing detail are difficult to burn without making custom masks or tools and pre-flashing is quite effective. And it certainly works with VC papers. That's all I use and I can easily see the results.

The beauty of burning with a #00 filter or equivalent is that it won't leave a halo in the darker surrounding areas. It primarily affects the highlights, bringing them down rather quickly, but not doing much, if anything, to the mids and shadows.

The opposite is true when burning with a #5 filter or equivalent; the shadows darken first, but the highlights remain unaffected.

Try it once and compare it to your masking. I'll bet you find that you can do away with a lot of masking and flashing you think necessary...

Best,

Doremus

Pieter12 · Mar 14, 2021

Doremus Scudder said:
The beauty of burning with a #00 filter or equivalent is that it won't leave a halo in the darker surrounding areas. It primarily affects the highlights, bringing them down rather quickly, but not doing much, if anything, to the mids and shadows.

The opposite is true when burning with a #5 filter or equivalent; the shadows darken first, but the highlights remain unaffected.

Try it once and compare it to your masking. I'll bet you find that you can do away with a lot of masking and flashing you think necessary...

Best,

Doremus

I found that to get the detail in the cement in this shot, flashing was much simpler and easier to control than multiple burns. Unfortunately, this is a small jpeg of a scan of a print, and you lose some of the subtitles of the original.

Doremus Scudder · Mar 15, 2021

Pieter12 said:
I found that to get the detail in the cement in this shot, flashing was much simpler and easier to control than multiple burns. Unfortunately, this is a small jpeg of a scan of a print, and you lose some of the subtitles of the original.

Yeah, I would've probably flashed that one too. Easier than burning and easier than printing soft and burning the shadows with the #5 filter.

You've convinced me to add flashing back into my toolbox for situations like yours.

Best,

Doremus

Doremus Scudder · Mar 16, 2021

Doremus Scudder said:
Yeah, I would've probably flashed that one too. Easier than burning and easier than printing soft and burning the shadows with the #5 filter.
You've convinced me to add flashing back into my toolbox for situations like yours.
Best,
Doremus

Thinking about it some more...

I imagine you could get the same or much the same result by simply giving the needed overall exposure with the #00 filter instead of flashing. I would be interesting to try both and compare the two results. Next time I've got a situation similar to Pieter12's, I'll try both and see.

Doremus

Pieter12 · Mar 16, 2021

Going more 00 exposure would also darken the midtones, making the vegetation and foreground muddier.

Doremus Scudder · Mar 16, 2021

Pieter12 said:
Going more 00 exposure would also darken the midtones, making the vegetation and foreground muddier.

Probably a tiny bit; but compensating by printing a tiny bit more contrasty with less exposure and then burning back with the #00 filter might give identical results. That's what I'll be testing next time I have a similar situation to yours.

Best,

Doremus

David Allen · Mar 16, 2021

The significant difference between pre-flashing and giving an overall #00 exposure is that the pre-flash reduces the inertia in the very bright highlights but, when accurately done, has very little effect on the overall contrast. Giving a #00 exposure puts a veil of low contrast across the whole image and significantly diminishes the micro-contrast within the image that is so important for my work.

So, for example, using the image in Pieter12’s post, the background vegetation areas would loose some of their ‘kick’ that is important to the image’s overall feeling of blistering sunlight within the scene.

Pieter12 · Mar 16, 2021

I am confused. I get more highlight detail when I flash VC paper (with no filter)--that would not be the same as lowering the contrast overall. I have a test that I ran flashed and not flashed on that image. I will scan & post it when I get a chance. I also have one with a greater 00 exposure, giving flatter highlights.

MattKing · Mar 17, 2021

The thing to understand about pre-flashing is that the best results happen when the flash is such that, if you were to develop the paper with just the flash exposure, you will have difficulty telling whether the paper had any exposure at all.
It is difficult to achieve the same effect with a low contrast burn.

MattKing · Mar 17, 2021

michael_r said:
The point I’m trying to make is simply that flashing reduces contrast, most in the print highlights and progressively less with increasing density.

Michael,
Not necessarily - it depends a lot on the negative.
In some cases, there is lots of available contrast in the highlights, its just that the necessary print exposure to get a print from those highlights needs to be increased. Flashing provides part of that increase, and a carefully applied high contrast burn can supply the rest.

radiant · Mar 17, 2021

MattKing said:
Michael,
Not necessarily - it depends a lot on the negative.
In some cases, there is lots of available contrast in the highlights, its just that the necessary print exposure to get a print from those highlights needs to be increased. Flashing provides part of that increase, and a carefully applied high contrast burn can supply the rest.

Does this mean that you get more separation to the highlights (that are too compressed on negative) ?

radiant · Mar 17, 2021

Pieter12 said:
I found that to get the detail in the cement in this shot, flashing was much simpler and easier to control than multiple burns. Unfortunately, this is a small jpeg of a scan of a print, and you lose some of the subtitles of the original.

Hey, I have probably pretty similar negative myself. It was pain to burn the cement which would have been overexposed otherwised. That negative is good example to try pre-flashing.

Here is the print I've made by excessive burning:

Pieter12 · Mar 17, 2021

As promised, I found the test I made fishing/not flashing. It is not on the same paper as the final print, but it shows the difference.

radiant · Mar 17, 2021

@Pieter12 the mid/shadow is a bit more exposed too on Flash versio. It's easy to say here but could a bit more exposure bring the highlight details to No Flash version too?

Flashing seems a bit counter-intuative because highlights are the ones which get always the least light. So thinking logically flashing should affect more on the shadows/dense areas because those get much more light than highlights.. Puzzles me

Pieter12 · Mar 17, 2021

vedostuu said:
@Pieter12 the mid/shadow is a bit more exposed too on Flash versio. It's easy to say here but could a bit more exposure bring the highlight details to No Flash version too?

Flashing seems a bit counter-intuative because highlights are the ones which get always the least light. So thinking logically flashing should affect more on the shadows/dense areas because those get much more light than highlights.. Puzzles me

Certainly, but the burning for the highlight detail is more involved and it would take a purpose-made tool or mask, more work than dodging the midtown areas. At least for me.

MattKing · Mar 17, 2021

vedostuu said:
Does this mean that you get more separation to the highlights (that are too compressed on negative) ?

Yes.

MattKing · Mar 17, 2021

michael_r said:
Matt, I'm not sure I follow.

I'm not talking about the negative. The negative might have lots of highlight contrast or little highlights contrast or anything in between. But flashing the paper (exposure to non-image forming light), on it's own, will always reduce paper contrast.

Michael,
I am talking about the image contrast you can achieve, rather than the paper itself.

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