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Old 17th November 2015, 03:14 AM
jeanb jeanb is offline
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Join Date: Nov 2015
Location: montreal canada
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Printing color negatives is a thing of beauty in my experience. If you're a well seasoned b/w printer, of course your acquired discipline will serve you tremendously in the color darkroom. Fact is, I found it easy beyond my dreams when I start printing Cibachrome at first. But the extreme contrast of the slide/paper process made for dodging and burning, I even resorted to producing film unsharp masks in order to print contrasty scenes. Then I tried RA4. You were not merely enlarging a properly exposed positive image unto positive paper, but had to deal with the orange masked negative, no proper visual clue as to "correct" exposure, and translate it into a color-correct positive image. Filtration now had to be taken backward, wich worried me a bit, but I quickly got the knack of it : with correctly exposed negatives, average to good color temperature shooting, the task is made a lot easier. I very briefly processed in drums and quickly got a tabletop roller transport machine. If you can find a clean one, do not hesitate: loading drums is a real pain imo. A voltage-stabilized color head is obviously an asset, but I did some work using acetate filters under a condenser head as well as a stabilized cold light head ! With a fujimoto 3 baths machine, I just placed the exposed paper on a "slide", the rollers grabbed the paper, I closed the lid, turned on the lights, and whithin minutes, a processed color print came out of it. Picked the print with tongs, and dunked it into the Kostiner washer. All with keeping hands dry ... there was your con·so·la·tion prize for having to work (though not constantly in total darkness. Of course, you could process test strips of paper, you were not bound to use full sheets for tests. I am going to revive it soon after being in storage for 12 years. You just have to know that the preparation of the solutions takes a bit longer than a batch of D-76. When you load the machine, you try to print some quantity, as it still is a bit of work: the solutions can't really be left in the machine waiting, it has to be cleaned after printing. I'd say using 20 8x10 sheets per session was worth preparing then emptying the machine...good luck

Last edited by jeanb; 17th November 2015 at 03:35 AM.
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