Single grade fb paper - contrast control?

Hallo,

I print using vc fb papers but am considering trying some single grade (fixed contrast) fibre paper. I know this may be making life difficult for me but I just fancy trying something different/new to me.

My query is: with a single grade of paper e.g. grade 2, is it possible to gain any contrast control through different exposure, development time, developer dilution etc?

Those who know will think this a daft question - but at the moment I do not know what flexibilty (if any) can be achieved. If there is none I might not proceed, if there is some I might have a go!

Usually dev with MG standard and warmtone developers - guess these won't be suitable- any suggestions? Not really into mixing dev from raw chemicals if it can be avoided.

Any thoughts from the "old school" printers?

Thanks in advance.

That looks interesting - have to find a U.K. supplier, which I reckon is going to be the hard part!

Ansel wrote about using Dektol and Selectol Soft to reduce contast. Kodak MAY have discontinued Selectol Soft (I'm not sure), but perhaps Ilford, Edwal or some other manufacturer has a substitute.

You can also flash the paper to reduce the contrast or

use Amidol and a water bath to reduce contrast or

extend development to increase contrast or

tone the negative in Selenium to increase contrast or

Buy Ansel Adams The Print for more ideas.

Good luck,

I purchased Selectol Soft as recently as 2 months ago so I believe they still make it (unless the shop I purchased it from was selling old stock).

The Ansel Adams method: mix Selectol Soft and Dektol working strength solution to make up the total volume you want and vary the concentration depending on how much contrast you want.

Ie...

100% selectol soft = soft print
50% selectol soft / 50% dektol = something in between
100% dektol = hard print

Some graded papers like Efke Emaks and the new Lodima contact printing paper respond well to amidol and waterbath processing. Water bath development can work with other developers, but is particularly useful with amidol, because of the way that amidol develops from the bottom of the emulsion layer up, rather than from the surface toward the paper base.

The technique I use is to develop in amidol until the image emerges, and then transfer to a plain water bath, gently and without agitation to avoid disturbing the developer in the emulsion layer too much. This is why water bath is so effective with amidol, because the developer isn't easily washed away at the surface. While in the water bath, the developer will be quickly exhausted in the shadow areas while the highlights continue to develop. If you want more depth in the shadows, transfer the print back to the developer tray, and back to the water bath as desired.

Papers that respond well to amidol tend to do well with other kinds of developer controls as well, like Dr. Beers or Dektol/Selectol Soft, as well as autotoning developers and such. Papers with more modern emulsions like Galerie are designed to be more consistent independent of developer choice, so they aren't as flexible, but on the other hand, they are more consistent.

Beer's developer's data sheet includes mixing from raw chemicals. Those may well be easier to acquire.

Also, you should feel very comfortable that your metering and processing will be consistent enough to live with one or two grades of paper. The way I print, 80% could be on gr2 15% on gr3 and the rest being problem children of too high or two low contrast. My favorite was to deal with a single grade of paper is to print in lith, but that is a whole different story!

Seriously, if you have a couple of different grades of paper and have a way to modify to contrast with developers, you can produce great prints.

Pre-flashing is something I've found useful printing very contrasty glass plates onto fixed grade paper. I've never tried it, but Fuji Rembrant is a single-weight VC paper.

Ian

Kodak D165 or Ilford ID-3 are the same formula as Selectol Soft, and Ilford ID-14 is a contrast developer.

ID-14 will give more contrast than Dektol or similar, and a bit more than the Dr Beers contrast dilution/mix.

Ian

Dear Sim2;
It is much easier and effective to reduce contrast than to increase it significantly therefore it would be better to start with a grade 3 paper and reduce contrast by using a softer developer or by pre flashing or my personal favorite method, SLIMT, that is, a one minute rinse of an exposed sheet of paper in an extremely dilute Potassium Ferricyanide bath and then regular development in your choice of developer. The contrast reduction can be adjusted by the strength of the bleach bath. I have found that dilutions of up to 1+10,000 for one minute can reduce contrast by 1/2 to 1 full grade with no deleterious effect on tonality in the middle values and that a subsequent toning in Selenium can give a great richness to the darker values in a print thus processed. I know that if you will experiment with the procedure you will be amazed at the flexibility you can achieve.
Denise Libby

Thank you all so much for these replies.
Being a bit of a child of the multigrade the potentials of single graded paper have passed me by, but I am intrigued. I am thinking of using it just for controlled lighting shots (studio shots infer something grander than my cloth background and light stuck in the corner ). These have been printed fairly easily around a single MG setting so am tempted. Doubt I could use it for my rare "out & about" shots as they tend to be burnt/dogded at different "garde" settings using split-grade printing.

Off to do a search for unrecognizable product numbers - ID what? We've got ID11, never heard of ID? you got that right? - can imagine the telephone conversations even now. :rolleyes:

Sim2.

ID - Ilford Developer, ID-14 isn't manufactured any longer, it was discontinued before WWII

You need to amke many formulae up from raw chemicals these days.

Ian

Ian Grant said:

ID - Ilford Developer, ID-14 isn't manufactured any longer, it was discontinued before WWII

You need to amke many formulae up from raw chemicals these days.

Ian

Click to expand...

Doh!

*In a Homer Simpson type of way*

I knew this was sounding too easy!

David A. Goldfarb said:

The technique I use is to develop in amidol until the image emerges, and then transfer to a plain water bath, gently and without agitation to avoid disturbing the developer in the emulsion layer too much. This is why water bath is so effective with amidol, because the developer isn't easily washed away at the surface. While in the water bath, the developer will be quickly exhausted in the shadow areas while the highlights continue to develop. If you want more depth in the shadows, transfer the print back to the developer tray, and back to the water bath as desired.

Click to expand...

This sounds an interesting technique, my concern with it is that I seem to find judging a developing print in the dev to be very tricky - what looks like a big blob of solid black under safelights actually is full of detail when the lights are on. So I have settled on a fixed dev time and judging test strips etc under white light.

I think that if I was judging the print in the dev/water bath I would be pulling too quick, before the blacks had reached thei potential but unable to see if they had gone too far. Is there a way that you know of to almost "standardize" times for the dev/water bath process? Or apart from experience, any "easy" ways to monitor the print?

Thanks for the suggestion.

I find that Emaks isn't at all responsive to a water bath; or longer developing times in general. I've noticed it has a tendency to stain; the paper base going quite reddish. I use Dektol 1:2 with Emaks, for no more the 3 min. It doesn't seem happy in warm water, either! I've not tried Amidol, as David Goldfarb suggests, and would definitely give it a go if it was more economical.

I used Dr. Beers formula with Ilford Galerie a couple of years ago, and felt I wasn't getting more than 1/2 grade either way. The biggest problem I have with Dr. Beers, or other two bath developers, is that the paper tone changes quite dramatically. Not as much of an issue with Galerie as Emaks, but still significant. If you're printing a show, and the images are going to be hanging beside one another, I've always thought it's a deal breaker if one print is warm in tone and another is cool. Maybe I'm too fussy.

I've found the best way of controlling contrast is by using different light sources. Not a viable option for everyone, no doubt. I print in a communal darkroom, and have access to condensers, colour heads, cold light sources... there's even a point light source floating around! The difference between a print on my Durst 138 with condensers, and an Aristo cold light source has got to be close to 1 1/2 grades of contrast. No change in paper tone, either!

Dear Sim2,
another pair of developers you can use instead of Dektol + Selectol are Tetenal Eukobrom + Tetenal Centrabrom where the former acts like Dektol and the latter as Selectol.
I use these developers with Emaks and Varycon because with Dr. Beers I had the same result as Marco Buonocore.
Centrabrom is a very soft developer, it allows you to build up whites easily but not blacks. My workflow is 30 - 45 seconds in Centrabrom, rapid water bath and then Eukobrom for at least 3 minutes.
Tetenal has another developer (Dokumol) which is contrasty. I think (but I have not yet tested it) that this could be used as Dr. Beers 7.

@ David A. Goldfarb and Denise Libby: thank you for your suggestions! Another thing to play with!

Andrea

Sim2 said:

This sounds an interesting technique, my concern with it is that I seem to find judging a developing print in the dev to be very tricky - what looks like a big blob of solid black under safelights actually is full of detail when the lights are on. So I have settled on a fixed dev time and judging test strips etc under white light.

I think that if I was judging the print in the dev/water bath I would be pulling too quick, before the blacks had reached thei potential but unable to see if they had gone too far. Is there a way that you know of to almost "standardize" times for the dev/water bath process? Or apart from experience, any "easy" ways to monitor the print?

Thanks for the suggestion.

Click to expand...

Well, experience. Eventually you get an idea of what a print should look like under safelight (at least in a darkroom where you work all the time) and what a wet print should look like under white light when you print on the same paper most of the time.

Experiment a bit. What I'm doing when I pull the print when the image emerges is a form of factorial development. Ansel Adams recommended factorial development for greater consistency when doing large runs of the same print as a way to compensate for the exhaustion of the developer during the printing session. The idea is that by experimentation, you can determine the ratio between the emergence time and development for maximum black, and instead of developing by time, you develop by that factor. So say that your normal development time for a given paper is 2 minutes in fresh Dektol. You put the print in, and you notice that the image starts to emerge at 30 sec.--that's the emergence time, and the total time is four times the emergence time (or alternately, the remaining time is three times the emergence time). Now say that instead of timing development at a fixed 2 minutes, you just watched the print with a timer running (or a metronome, as Adams used), and you noted the emergence time, and based the remaining development on the emergence time and the factor. If the image emerges at 40 seconds, then the remaining time would be 120 seconds in this case.

So what I usually do is develop a print normally, and if I decide that it would be useful to reduce contrast using the water bath method, I pull the next print from the developer when the image emerges and allow it to remain in the water bath for the remaining time. One round of this is usually enough, but if you're not sure, fix and dry the print and see how it looks (remember that with fiber based paper highlights will look a little duller when dry--search on "dry down" for more info. You might give a second print another round in the developer or maybe the developer and water bath to compare the two when they're dry. Eventually you'll develop a sense for when the print needs to go back in the developer.

Marco Buonocore said:

I find that Emaks isn't at all responsive to a water bath; or longer developing times in general. I've noticed it has a tendency to stain; the paper base going quite reddish. I use Dektol 1:2 with Emaks, for no more the 3 min. It doesn't seem happy in warm water, either! I've not tried Amidol, as David Goldfarb suggests, and would definitely give it a go if it was more economical.

Click to expand...

Amidol will work much better with water bath technique.

David A. Goldfarb said:

Ansel Adams recommended factorial development for greater consistency when doing large runs of the same print as a way to compensate for the exhaustion of the developer during the printing session.

Click to expand...

Thanks for this, I may have to give it a try. Although I do not do long runs of a print I can see the sense in it - I just rather liked having the same dev time as a fixed constant to work the variables against.

David A. Goldfarb said:

(remember that with fiber based paper highlights will look a little duller when dry--search on "dry down" for more info.

Click to expand...

I have got the dry-down fairly well dialled in now, spent some of last year getting to grips with it - was so much easier once I got an RH Designs timer with a dry-down calculator built in! That and pre-flashing were my learning curve last year, guess that factorial development may be this years.

Btw, this is why I love the darkroom - ask a simple question and find out that you've turned a corner with a whole load of new stuff to experiment/learn, sure beats a photoshop slider!