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Old 6th December 2021, 06:49 PM
John King John King is offline
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Location: County Durham
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This sounds as if the purveyor of the advice has either very little experience in the darkroom or has been on the 'sauce' for too long. He could of course be pulling a leg - quite deliberately!

You have to have a baseline where to work from and one of the base lines used is the time in the developer. It is known that in low light such as a darkroom safelight, eyes are less than efficient and can vary in that efficiency with the time you spend working under the safelight so just looking at the print is variable. Variables also tend to be unreliable!

So what was advise, probably given in good faith, seems to be a load of spherical objects.

The only way I can see this working is if you develop the paper to finality. Say the dev time for the type you are using is 1 minute, almost certainly tested by the manufacturer to strict constant times, but you develop for 3 minutes or 30 seconds (unmeasured of course) with the longer (unmeasured) time you are going to make sure all the sensitive silver does what it is meant to. But who wants to do this with every print or test strip. Take it to the extreme and you are going to get chemical fogging.

Does the 'adviser' say anything about temperature as well? It is all tied up with time. is that guesstimated as well?

Stick with the timer and you have a constant base for printing.

Oh yes I forgot, of course, it was on 'YouTube' so it must be correct!

Last edited by John King; 6th December 2021 at 06:56 PM.
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