Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/07/15
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Bill wrote: > > Mark Rabiner writes: > >For your own black and white darkroom you don't want a dark orange mask to > act > >like a safelight built into your negative! You want no mask at all for > printing><snip> > > This is simply untrue. The orange mask does not act as a safelight. It does > (to me) make reading the negative very difficult. In printing on polycontrast > paper, you will find you need to increase the contrast grade at least one from > what you would normally use for a black and white film negative. ><snip> > Bill Larsen Why simply untrue? Orange light coming from the enlarger is the same as orange light coming from your safelight. Of course the exact part of the spectrum of orange that the paper is not sensitive to is more to the point. But in that area of the spectrum the paper does not respond as well unless it's Panalure. Some of the C 41 black and white films have this orange layer to help out the minilab's and some not so. I'm just saying it makes more sense for ones black and white darkroom use to use the ones without. The films without the mask should not print that much different that regular negs. Those negs (XP1?) used to have a spit tone effect with the thin areas warmer than the dense areas if I recall which made printing from them slightly unpredictable as when you changed contrast filters the effects would not be quite the same in the highs as on the lows. But if you get a muddy low contrast test than go to a higher contrast filter or paper and test that. Perfect results should be obtainable. And you should be able to alter your time of your regular Tmax or whatever negative to match the contrast that you get with your C 41 stuff. Mark Rabiner