Bruce Barnbaum - The Art of Photography - An Approach to Personal Expression

My observations show three major differences among the papers. Warm tone papers have a warmer, yellower base than all neutral or cold tone papers. Toning does not change the base color of papers, so a toned neutral or cold tone print will not have the same overall look as one printed on warm tone paper. Warm tone papers are much, much slower to expose under the enlarger than the neutral or cold tone papers. They may require two stops of extra exposure to obtain the print you would get on a neutral or cold tone paper. This can present difficulties if your negatives are small and your enlargements are great, and/or if your negatives are very dense. Finally, some warm tone papers tend to have less contrast variation than neutral or cold tone papers.

Review of Contrast Controls

Before moving on to traditional color printing, it will be helpful to review the numerous controls discussed throughout the book for increasing and decreasing contrast. I have often seen photographers avoid subjects in the field that they feel are either too high or low in contrast, and I hope this review may embolden some to rethink the artistic possibilities of such subjects. (Also see the following section on Infinite Contrast Control after Negative Development.)

In addition to the controls listed below, be aware of the fact that the light source on your enlarger affects the contrast of your print. For complete information on the differences between diffusion, condenser, and point source enlarger lights, see Appendix B.

How to Increase Contrast

Filtration during negative exposure. The appropriate filter can further darken a dark area in relation to a lighter area, or brighten a light area in relation to others.

Long exposures and reciprocity failure effects. If the light is dim enough, the film is already in the realm of reciprocity failure and therefore increased contrast. If the scene is bright, a strong neutral density filter—perhaps in combination with another filter—can extend exposure times into the realm of reciprocity failure.

Extended negative development.

Selenium toning of negatives.

High contrast grade of enlarging paper.

High contrast developer, such as Dektol.

Selective dodging or burning of the print to decrease density of highlight areas and/or increase density of shadow areas.

Potassium ferricyanide reducing of prints.

Selenium toning of prints.

How to Decrease Contrast

Filtration. The appropriate filter can bring divergent tones together, thus lowering contrast.

Reduced or compensating negative development.

Low contrast grade of paper.

Low contrast developer, such as Selectol-Soft.

Selective dodging or burning to increase density of highlight areas and/or decrease density of shadow areas.

Flashing.

Masking.

Infinite Contrast Control after Negative Development

Despite all the methods listed above for increasing or decreasing contrast of your negative (either an individual negative from sheet film or a single frame from a roll), the contrast level may still be either too high or too low for you to print successfully with existing papers. There is still a surprisingly simple way to either increase or decrease contrast from that of the original negative.

Suppose the negative is too low in contrast, and printing with even the highest contrast filtration yields a print lacking sufficient contrast. Start with the original negative and make a contact image on the same negative material (or any finer-grained film, e.g., T-Max to T-Max, Tri-X to Tri-X, HP5+ to Delta 100), just as you would make a contact proof print. Make sure that the original negative (placed on top, of course) is placed emulsion to emulsion with the unexposed negative. Then develop the newly exposed negative material with increased contrast. This will yield a higher contrast positive image.

Then make a second generation negative by placing the newly created positive in contact with another unexposed negative. Again increase the contrast when developing the new negative. Now you have a new negative (created via an intermediate positive) in which you increased contrast twice. Of course, the degree of contrast increase at each stage is controllable by you, so you can raise the contrast slightly or greatly via the intermediate positive and the final negative.

Since each of the images is made via a contact process, there is no loss of sharpness. You can repeat this two-step process as many times as you wish, increasing the contrast to any extent you wish, giving you infinite contrast control. Obviously, for contrast decrease, simply lower the contrast when making the intermediate positive and again in making the final negative.

Also, you may simply wish to end this process with the intermediate positive (either an increase in contrast, decrease in contrast, or no change in contrast) and then use the positive as you would use a negative, producing a negative image. This can be quite creative and extremely effective.

Color Printing

Color printing is more varied than black-and-white because prints can be made from either negatives or transparencies. At the same time, it is more restrictive because classical color processes offer no variable contrast options for printing either negatives or transparencies. As noted in Chapter 6, color negatives are lower in contrast than color transparencies, so the prints made from negatives have lower overall contrast and more subdued tonal and color gradations. The difficulty with color negatives is that “reading” a color negative is very difficult and comes only with years of experience. With a transparency, of course, the picture is right before your eyes, and no translation is necessary.

Much of the information presented in the sections on black-and-white printing is directly applicable to printing color negatives. Dodging, burning, masking, and flashing are all usable techniques with color negatives. There is no color equivalent of potassium ferricyanide reducing or toning. However, color printing allows one interesting variation on either burning or flashing: both can be done with a change in color filtration to shift the color balance of the burned area in relation to the unaffected areas. In general, this must be done with subtlety or the effect will be sloppy or heavy-handed. If the subject matter is abstract rather than realistic, more leeway of the color shift is acceptable. With complete abstraction, any color balance may be acceptable.

I have used color transparencies rather than color negatives for years, so my familiarity with color printing is through positive-to-positive materials. I generally used Kodak Ektachrome Tungsten (Ektachrome 64T) film because of its lower contrast than daylight Ektachrome or other outdoor transparency materials. Now I use Fujichrome 64T. All papers possess a shorter contrast scale than the transparency, which means that contrast increases at the printing stage. (Of course, this is true of printing black-and-white negatives where the negative has a far longer scale than the print paper; techniques such as flashing or selective dodging and burning can make the extended negative scale meaningful for the print.)

The same techniques that apply to negative printing can be applied to positive-to-positive color printing, but you must totally reverse your thinking and remember that dodging makes an area darker, burning makes an area lighter, and flashing primarily affects the shadows, with little effect on the highlights. This reversal of thinking may be very disconcerting, especially if you alternate between black-and-white and color printing. Again, each of these techniques can be done via color filters to alter the color balance. As with color negative printing, there is no equivalent to potassium ferricyanide reducing or toning of color positive prints.