Winter printing time

I started printing color negatives in the darkroom last winter.
Now that it's cooling down outside I am thinking about trying to wet print a few of my favorite shots this year.

Last time I used my scanned version of the frames as a guide to color balance the prints. This didn't work very well. When I took the prints home and looked at them under daylight I noticed how far off I was.

What's everyone else's approach for printing color negatives?

ericdan said:

I started printing color negatives in the darkroom last winter.
Now that it's cooling down outside I am thinking about trying to wet print a few of my favorite shots this year.

Last time I used my scanned version of the frames as a guide to color balance the prints. This didn't work very well. When I took the prints home and looked at them under daylight I noticed how far off I was.

What's everyone else's approach for printing color negatives?

Click to expand...

I usually print and dry with a drier. Then, using the LED of my iPhone, I search for any colour unbalance and try to correct it using the Kodak Viewing Filter Kit.. et voilà.

I usually start with a test print made at a filtration that worked in the past, based on my notes of how a particular brand of film exposed under similar conditions printed in the past. Or, for lack of anything better, I'll start at 50M+50Y. I'm getting better at eyeballing it and making adjustments, but a lot of times, I'll scan the test print using (and this is important) the "No Color Correction" option of my Epson V500. Other scanners should have a similar option. Think of it as a raw scan with no software adjustments applied. Then I'll take this raw scan into my photo editor and use the RGB adjustment dialog (see attached). Red, green and blue correspond to cyan, magenta and yellow respectively. I've found that small adjustments here are roughly equivalent to corresponding changes in the filtration. Adding 10% Green and 15% Blue (as shown) is roughly equivalent to adding 10 units of magenta and 15 of yellow. Of course, you should keep red (cyan) at zero. Also, you probably already know that changing filtration does affect your exposure somewhat.

With this, I might try a second test print at 60M+65Y. Or, using an easel and mask I made that allows me to move the paper around, I can expose the same portion of an image using four different filtrations (and/or exposures). So I might pick some other filtrations around this one, process the single print, and pick the best one. Or wash, rinse and repeat. See the attachment.

Unfortunately it's trial and error for your combination of enlarger, film, and paper. The first time I printed, after assuming a starting color filtration and finding a decent exposure time, I had no idea what color filtration corrections were needed. So I used the scanned image and software to get the look of the print that was way off so I could see which color filtration corrections I needed to make. This didn't suggest any exact magnitude of the corrections but at least it told me which corrections were needed and if they were large or small.

With experience, you can make the adjustments by judgement. Because you have to find the right color filtration and exposure time again when you change film, who developed the film, and the paper, I think it's important to stick to the same or just a couple of films and the same paper. Further, it's preferable to develop your own film in a consistent manner to eliminate that as a variable even if when sticking to one or a couple of films. Doing this, I never have to do test prints but sometimes correction and a second print is needed if the negative was not well exposed or there was an unusual lighting situation.

Exposure time roughly varies with the square of the distance from the lens to the paper, i.e, double the distance requires 4 times the exposure time at the same lens aperture; there are filtration adjustments required as well if you are using a filter pack but not for a dichroic enlarger.