When dodging a face in a print, the face became "angelic" and washed out.

Just a quick question to something that's puzzling me.

I'm still a noob darkroom person and I've been taking a lot of pictures of my work-mates just for practice printing. I started out by just doing straight prints as well as I can and today decided to see if I could improve one of them by burning in "too light" highlight areas.

I started by getting a good exposure from a test strip for the man's face. Then after looking at the straight print, I decided that the white walls behind him were disappearing into the edge of the print too much, so I made a dodge tool out of a piece of wire and gaffers tape to give the rest of the print another half stop or so and dodge his face so that he wouldn't look too dark.

To my surprise when I did this his face turned "angelic." By that I mean bright, washed out, low contrast, and sort of glowing.

I finally ended up getting what I wanted but I got these glowing face prints several times before I got the correct thing.

I'm not positive but it SEEMS to be related to how high off of the paper I hold the dodge tool; but certainly that could be unrelated.

Any insight on this?

Dear rpavich,

How high you hold the dodging tool will definitely affect the way the print looks. Essentially the closer your dodging tool is to the paper the sharper the edge will be.

Have fun,

Neal Wydra

Too much dodging. If your exposure were, for instance, ten seconds, two or three seconds of dodging should suffice--maybe not even that. Generally, indiscriminate dodging will make things lighter and lower contrast, also

If you want lighter and more contrast, too, try potassium ferricyanide bleach, which bleaches highlights more while hardly touching shadows, or a combination of light dodging and a little bleaching to lighten and maintain contrast.

When the print is in the fix, mix a few crystals of ferricyanide in a plastic 35mm film can with a little fix from the tray, and spread that on the area you want to lighten with a q-tip, lightly spreading it, then putting the print back into the fix for more fixing and rinsing, for a few seconds, repeatedly. If the ferricyanide is too strong, the face will bleach too fast; too weak, nothing will happen. Work it gradually, lightening the face slowly until you like what you see. Don't get the ferricyanide places you don't want lighter! The bleaching will happen mostly while you're applying the ferricyanide, while the print is out of the fix; work dry so you don't make a mess, and if nothing's happening, up the concentration.


For dodging tools, take a foot of brass wire and form a keychain-type loop at each end--one loop to hold, the other to slide different dodging shapes in between the coils. I thing circles and ovals in the quarter size are the most useful, but you can also cut shapes to fit. Be sure to adjust height to get a soft enough edge that you don't see the tool as a shadow--about 1/3 up from the print is a good average height, and be sure to keep the tool moving as you dodge.

Ferricyanide is a great trick--I couldn't work in the darkroom without it.

Thanks very much to both of you, much appreciated.

Great suggestions above! If you are split filtering your prints with variable contrast paper try dodging the face during the yellow filter exposure. I try to get my exposure up around 20 seconds so I have time to dodge if required.

Combine a little bit of dodging with some localized burning in of the background.

And be sure that you keep everything moving constantly.

Practicing dodging and burning on scraps of paper is a great way to improve your darkroom experience.

Do you have a good book?

as stated above but in a different way, the edge of the dodging tool creates a great deal of diffraction of light so you get umbra and penumbra shadow areas on the print. The closer the distance to the light source the wider the penumbra will be extending well under the direct line from the dodge tool to the print. Its exactly what happens happens during an eclipse of the sun by the moon.
And the size of the dodging tool relative to light source size (used lens area) plays a significant part too

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umbra,_penumbra_and_antumbra

Hi rpavich,

Interesting that you had the problem trying to bring tone to white portions of the print, because that's where you might have to add a lot of exposure to get a little change.

I like to limit the dodging of faces to 2 test strip increments. I find that the dodge/burn is relatively invisible within that limit. For Grade 2, I work in 1/3 stops. So if the tone I want takes 2/3 stop more or less (dodge/burn) than the main exposure, I'll reconsider the problem.

You didn't say but I'm guessing you had to dodge more than a stop.

A different approach might be to "Flash" the edges of the print (while shielding the main subject from this flash exposure), to get a trace of tone at the edges (even if it won't have detail).

Say your original print time was say 20 seconds without using any tool. Then you decide for next print you want to darken the edges around the face so you used same 20 second time but used the dodge tool for part of that time you would be dodging the face and it would be lighter than in the first print becasue you gave the face less than 20 sconds. So this would be called a dodge exposure.

But if on second print you gave a full 20 second exposure without the dodge tool and then gave say another 10 seconds exposure with the dodge tool over the face, then you aren't dodging with the dodge tool, you are burning in whats around the face by using the tool. So a tool can be used as a dodge tool or a burn in tool.

So you need to get the terminology correct depending on exactly what you're doing and whether you're using multiple exposures on one print and your exposure times and whether the tool is being used to lighten what its covering or stop it from being darkened by subsequent exposures.

basicallly if you use a tool to cover part of the print during initail base exposure time you are dodging. If you use the tool to cover part of the print on subsequent exposures to same print, you are burning in whats not under the tool.

So it sounds from original post that you were doing a burn in and not a dodge and I can understand why you were confused about it. But its easy to make a mistake. You may have pulled the print from dev too soon, or you may have contaminated the dev with splash of stop or fixer so it wasn't as active or you may have given less time to first exposure by mistake, or you may have closed the aperture a bit. We don't really know.

Oh you did say... you dodged about a half stop.

rpavich said:

... so I made a dodge tool out of a piece of wire and gaffers tape to give the rest of the print another half stop or so and dodge his face so that he wouldn't look too dark.

Click to expand...

Well... dodging faces does give them angelic glows, you have to be careful.

MattKing said:

Combine a little bit of dodging with some localized burning in of the background.

And be sure that you keep everything moving constantly.

Practicing dodging and burning on scraps of paper is a great way to improve your darkroom experience.

Do you have a good book?

Click to expand...

Yes, I think it's just practice that I need.

RobC said:

as stated above but in a different way, the edge of the dodging tool creates a great deal of diffraction of light so you get umbra and penumbra shadow areas on the print. The closer the distance to the light source the wider the penumbra will be extending well under the direct line from the dodge tool to the print. Its exactly what happens happens during an eclipse of the sun by the moon.
And the size of the dodging tool relative to light source size (used lens area) plays a significant part too

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umbra,_penumbra_and_antumbra

Click to expand...

That sounds like what happened for sure. When I brought the dodge tool down that helped a lot.

Bill Burk said:

Hi rpavich,

Interesting that you had the problem trying to bring tone to white portions of the print, because that's where you might have to add a lot of exposure to get a little change.

I like to limit the dodging of faces to 2 test strip increments. I find that the dodge/burn is relatively invisible within that limit. For Grade 2, I work in 1/3 stops. So if the tone I want takes 2/3 stop more or less (dodge/burn) than the main exposure, I'll reconsider the problem.

You didn't say but I'm guessing you had to dodge more than a stop.

A different approach might be to "Flash" the edges of the print (while shielding the main subject from this flash exposure), to get a trace of tone at the edges (even if it won't have detail).

Click to expand...

Interesting! Thanks.

RobC said:

Say your original print time was say 20 seconds without using any tool. Then you decide for next print you want to darken the edges around the face so you used same 20 second time but used the dodge tool for part of that time you would be dodging the face and it would be lighter than in the first print becasue you gave the face less than 20 sconds. So this would be called a dodge exposure.

But if on second print you gave a full 20 second exposure without the dodge tool and then gave say another 10 seconds exposure with the dodge tool over the face, then you aren't dodging with the dodge tool, you are burning in whats around the face by using the tool. So a tool can be used as a dodge tool or a burn in tool.

So you need to get the terminology correct depending on exactly what you're doing and whether you're using multiple exposures on one print and your exposure times and whether the tool is being used to lighten what its covering or stop it from being darkened by subsequent exposures.

basicallly if you use a tool to cover part of the print during initail base exposure time you are dodging. If you use the tool to cover part of the print on subsequent exposures to same print, you are burning in whats not under the tool.

So it sounds from original post that you were doing a burn in and not a dodge and I can understand why you were confused about it. But its easy to make a mistake. You may have pulled the print from dev too soon, or you may have contaminated the dev with splash of stop or fixer so it wasn't as active or you may have given less time to first exposure by mistake, or you may have closed the aperture a bit. We don't really know.

Click to expand...

True. I was burning what was around the face and trying to shield the face from excess exposure.

Bill Burk said:

Oh you did say... you dodged about a half stop.


Well... dodging faces does give them angelic glows, you have to be careful.

Click to expand...

Yes...but the practice was valuable. I'll keep at it.

yes, practice, practice and practice again makes perfect. Did I say practice?