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Old 22nd April 2019, 02:13 PM
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dsallen dsallen is offline
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The two examples that you posted links for do not have high contrast, no real blacks and look very light. Assuming that they have been developed to a reasonable quality by Ag better prints should be possible.

These kind of prints from reasonable negatives are quite often the result of too little exposure at the enlarging stage and/or too little time in the developer at the developing stage.

Firstly, let's tackle the developing stage. Are you developing for a consistent amount of time? or taking the prints out of the developer when they 'look right'? The best way of improving the consistency of your prints is to always develop the prints for a fixed time and, for RC paper, I would suggest with any fresh mainstream developer this should be for a minimum of 2 minutes. This creates a constant in your workflow and then you can address the question of how much exposure in the enlarger will deliver blacks where they should occur in the image.

Once you have a standard developing time, you should then do a test strip to identify what exposure will produce a good black in an area which should be black. During this process, you may well find that you have been giving insufficient enlarger exposure. If the exposure that gave you a deep black where it should be in the image produces a dark print with no bright highlights this would indicate that the film has had insufficient development. As Alex wrote, the best way of dealing with this is to develop the films yourself as you can fine tune everything yourself. If this is not possible for you, then you should, in the first instance, ask Ag to process your film for 20% longer than their standard development time (I have had a number of students who have used labs to process their films and were not satisfied with the contrast and the labs have told them that they have moved towards shorter development times because the majority of their customers scan their films and a lower contrast is better for scanning).

One final thing to note is that both myself and many photographers that I know have found that the modern Kentmere papers do not deliver a true Grade V contrast.

Bests,

David.
www.dsallen.de
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Last edited by dsallen; 22nd April 2019 at 02:16 PM. Reason: Typos
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