Split Print Grading

I'm sure someone has described what I discovered recently, before. While it was an epiphany for me, I'm sure it's familiar to many of you. On the chance that it might be useful for others at a similar level of experience with split printing as I, here is an explanation of what I recognized while working on this print.

Typically, I will identify the primary highlight and primary shadow detail areas before begining to print a negative (fig1.jpg).

I do my soft test strip for the highlight using my test strip easel, determine a base soft exposure, replace the easel with my standard one, expose a sheet of paper to the soft exposure and then change to the hard filter and do an incremental, hard test strip. There I determing the hard exposure. Then I make a split grade print at these base exposures and from that, make decisions about additional burning or dodging.

When I did this with this negative, the highlight was right, the shadow was right and the entire non-sky area was MUD.

What I ended up doing was subtractive, I shortened the soft exposure to get the highlights I wanted in the rocks and then burned the sky back up to the original soft exposure for the original highlight. This worked but something occured to me...something I plan to try with the next negative I'm printing with similar attributes. What occured to me was that the two, clearly distinct print areas could be dealt with as virtually separate prints.

If I'd identified the primary shadow and the primary highlight in the rocks for the lower "print," (fig2.jpg) then identified that highlight exposure from the soft exposure test strip, I'd have determined a soft exposure for that area directly. I can find the desired base, soft exposure for the primary highlight for each of the two "prints" and extrapolate the burn time from the differential between the two strips (fig3.jpg).

Chancer are good that I wouldn't need a different hard exposure for the area that includes the second, burned highlight. But the same thought process could be applied if necessary.

Thoughts?

You might enjoy Les McLean's article
http://www.lesmcleanphotography.com/articles.php?page=full&article=21
and/or his book,
“Creative B&W Photography”, Les McLean, David Charles, 2002

He gave several excellent workshops at the Toronto APUG convention. I think he is giving workshops again this summer in the US and Canada. Check with APUG sponsor Elevator in Toronto.

John Powers

jp80874 said:

You might enjoy Les McLean's article
http://www.lesmcleanphotography.com/articles.php?page=full&article=21
and/or his book,
“Creative B&W Photography”, Les McLean, David Charles, 2002

He gave several excellent workshops at the Toronto APUG convention. I think he is giving workshops again this summer in the US and Canada. Check with APUG sponsor Elevator in Toronto.

John Powers

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Thanks very much. I've read that.

I'm not saying I discovered split printing!

I am not sure what your final print looked like. In my work sometimes I make things harder than they are by selecting the wrong thing to be the highlight. On my crummy monitor the fig 1 looks much better as a final print than the other two.

lee\c

not really sure what you're asking us for - looks like you've found an excellent way to manage the old "sky needs a different exposure to landscape" problem using your methods and equipment. Well done - the balanced print looks very nice by the way.

Lee, they're all the same scan of the same print. In figure two, I masked the sky to indicate that I was just discussing the bottom portion of the print. In fig 3, I showed the burn pattern for the sky. They're all the same.

Leon said:

not really sure what you're asking us for - looks like you've found an excellent way to manage the old "sky needs a different exposure to landscape" problem using your methods and equipment. Well done - the balanced print looks very nice by the way.

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Thanks Leon. I'm not sure what I'm looking for other than confirmation that it makes sense to identify more than one highlight for split grade printing and doing so from the same test strips. That, and other ways people approach this that might help me refine what I'm doing with that.

Thinking of drastically different print areas as though they were separate prints where each needs a primary highlight of it's own, seems like a useful way for me to approach this. If I scan the straight print just based off the one highlight and one shadow...with the resulting hard and soft exposures so that you see what mud the foreground was, you could see how I immediately recognized that just thinking in terms of dodging wouldn't really address this. Yeah, effectively I was dodging the soft exposure for the foreground but thinking of it this way helps me understand what I'm doing.

jstraw said:

Thanks Leon. I'm not sure what I'm looking for other than confirmation that it makes sense to identify more than one highlight for split grade printing and doing so from the same test strips. That, and other ways people approach this that might help me refine what I'm doing with that.

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Different strokes and all that. As long as it gets you to where you want to be, then why not?

Personal thoughts .... I will try to avoid making shots in places where the sky is vastly brighter than the foreground, that and using a good compensating developer helps to reduce the need to burn skies for too long with tricky edges etc. But if needs be, I'll often have long and drawn-out printing sequences to get them to where I want to be.

I'm not sure that it was clear that the title of this thread has the phrase turned inside-out on purpose. In any case, I guess I've made much ado about nothing.

for me printing is about doing what I need to do to accomplish what I think needs to have happen to the final print. if it takes just a straight exposure I am ahead of the game but it might not. Whatever it takes...it looks like you have found a way to deal with that, congrats.

lee\c

jstraw said:

I'm not sure that it was clear that the title of this thread has the phrase turned inside-out on purpose. In any case, I guess I've made much ado about nothing.

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And there was me thinking you were just having a "neurological event"

Leon said:

And there was me thinking you were just having a "neurological event"

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I'm not usually aware of when those turnstyle.

Much ado...

I wouldn't say you've made much ado.... - This split printing thing (which I've been doing for 2-3 years after 35+ years of graded) is not always straightforward, in my experience. I am in the graphic arts business and have used Pshop a lot in the last decade professionally, which has sharpened my expectations of wet darkroom printing (which, BTW, is the only method for my exhibition work).
You don't mention the grades you used for the low and high contrast exposures, but many folks seem to start with 00 or 0 and 5 for the end points. I wonder if you had started with a slightly harder soft point (like 1) if the problem with the forground would have been less, or dodge the foreground for part of the low contrast exposure, to allow more high exposure, which wouldn't affect the sky so much (might have been more dramatic).
I guess what I'm saying (and I'm no expert) is that the choosing of highlight and shadow points, juggling of end point grades, balance of exposure between them, and allocation of exposure (burning and dodging) is potentially pretty complicated.
You went to some trouble to prepare these images, and I appreciate your sharing the whole thing. It adds a bit of scope to my thinking process.

I think I tried to be too cute with the thread title. I was never talking about the straightforward approach to split-GRADE printing. This was my own personal epiphany that led me to a refinement OF split-grade printing. It has to do with (for certain types of compositions or subjects) treating different areas of the image as though they were separate prints when applying the split-grade methodology. This is where I got splint-PRINT.

I didn't get the right tones for the foreground of the example I posted until I arrived at a soft exposure for the foreground's highlights as opposed to the whole print's highlights.

For me this proved more functional than working from the overall highlight then dodging the heck out of the foreground to rescue the midtones.

I've I've failed yet again to explain what I was trying to get at, I will not be making another attempt.

George
I am a big fan of split printing, I use this method exclusively for the last years. Your point about a higher soft point is right on the money as I see it. I always use a 1 grade as a starting point or 2 if it is a pyro neg and after I have made the initial print , start adjusting my grade balances dependant upon the negatives values.
I find that I can get better highlight separation and shadow separation this way and leave the dodges and burns for the real difficult areas.
'

George Collier said:

I wouldn't say you've made much ado.... - This split printing thing (which I've been doing for 2-3 years after 35+ years of graded) is not always straightforward, in my experience. I am in the graphic arts business and have used Pshop a lot in the last decade professionally, which has sharpened my expectations of wet darkroom printing (which, BTW, is the only method for my exhibition work).
You don't mention the grades you used for the low and high contrast exposures, but many folks seem to start with 00 or 0 and 5 for the end points. I wonder if you had started with a slightly harder soft point (like 1) if the problem with the forground would have been less, or dodge the foreground for part of the low contrast exposure, to allow more high exposure, which wouldn't affect the sky so much (might have been more dramatic).
I guess what I'm saying (and I'm no expert) is that the choosing of highlight and shadow points, juggling of end point grades, balance of exposure between them, and allocation of exposure (burning and dodging) is potentially pretty complicated.
You went to some trouble to prepare these images, and I appreciate your sharing the whole thing. It adds a bit of scope to my thinking process.

Click to expand...

George Collier said:

I wouldn't say you've made much ado.... - This split printing thing (which I've been doing for 2-3 years after 35+ years of graded) is not always straightforward, in my experience. I am in the graphic arts business and have used Pshop a lot in the last decade professionally, which has sharpened my expectations of wet darkroom printing (which, BTW, is the only method for my exhibition work).
You don't mention the grades you used for the low and high contrast exposures, but many folks seem to start with 00 or 0 and 5 for the end points. I wonder if you had started with a slightly harder soft point (like 1) if the problem with the forground would have been less, or dodge the foreground for part of the low contrast exposure, to allow more high exposure, which wouldn't affect the sky so much (might have been more dramatic).
I guess what I'm saying (and I'm no expert) is that the choosing of highlight and shadow points, juggling of end point grades, balance of exposure between them, and allocation of exposure (burning and dodging) is potentially pretty complicated.
You went to some trouble to prepare these images, and I appreciate your sharing the whole thing. It adds a bit of scope to my thinking process.

Click to expand...

Thank you. I'm glad it was in some way useful.

I use Ilford's -1 and +5 filters. You have me really thinking about experimenting with different soft filters.