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  #1  
Old 25th April 2013, 08:39 PM
IainHC IainHC is offline
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Default Agfa and Kodak enlarger filter values

Hi all.

I am trying split grade printing but without much luck! :-( I have Ilford
multigrade paper and I am trying to print on grade's '0' and '5' I have set the panel of my Philips PCS2000 to the respective 'KODAK' numbers but without much joy

On the filter panel I have 4 lots of filter values ((+ and -) and (Agfa and Kodak))
Do Agfa and Kodak have the same filter values or do I need to use the readings on the right (Agfa Magenta, yellow) or the readings on the left
(Kodak Green, Blue) to set for the different grades?

Please help because i'm going nuts trying to work this one out!! Also,,can I thank you in advance for your (much needed) advice :-)

Regards
Iain
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Old 25th April 2013, 11:25 PM
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I'm not familiar with the Philips colour enlarger but in general, Yellow light from the enlarger gives soft grades (0) and Magenta light gives hard grades (5).

Ilford have a PDF at http://www.ilfordphoto.com/Webfiles/...8932591755.pdf which lists Kodak values (amongst others) for multigrade filtration.

Others may have that enlarger and can give more details.


Good luck, Bob.
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Old 26th April 2013, 07:48 AM
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If I'm not mistaken the Philips system uses Red-Green-Blue lamps, not CYM filters, so for split-grade printing you'd use full green only for the soft (grade 0) exposure and full blue only for the hard (grade 5) exposure. I've never used a Philips enlarger so I don't even know if you can do that, but it's what you need to do if you can!
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Old 26th April 2013, 05:36 PM
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Most enlargers with colour heads use colour filters which filter out, or 'subtract' some colours from white light. The philips is 'additive', where the light of 3 coloured bulbs adds up to make white, or any other colour. Including, of course the different shades of yellow and magenta needed for multigrade printing.
These were relatively rare items- I've never used or even seen one. If nobody can say how this works from experience, could Ian post a picture of the controls, and let us see if the process is deducible??
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Old 26th April 2013, 09:38 PM
Mike O'Pray Mike O'Pray is offline
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Hi Iain from a near neighbour in Daventry and welcome. Sorry not familiar with the additive system but as Richard has said it would seem that full green then full blue is the way to go.

I take it you don't have the full instructions for the enlarger? If so and if none of us here use this enlarger then try a site called Butkus. He specialises in manuals for a whole range of equipment and might just have the instructions for your enlarger. There has to be a way to set full green and then blue just as there is a way for full yellow and full magenta on the subtractive enlargers

Mike
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Old 27th April 2013, 08:22 AM
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Skellum - if you try and print on VC paper using yellow and magenta light it will not work, you'll get nothing. When a colour enlarger is used for VC printing the light looks yellow because the yellow filter removes the blue component of the white light. Similarly it looks magenta because the magenta filter removes green. It's the green and blue components to which the paper is sensitive, the paper is NOT sensitive to either yellow or magenta - that's why I suggested using full green and full blue respectively for the soft and hard exposures.

Here's a handy guide to the PCS enlargers:
http://www.jollinger.com/photo/enlargers/philips.html
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Old 27th April 2013, 09:30 AM
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RH Designs . . .hmmm. I follow what you're saying. This, then, is why hard grades 4 and 5 are slower than the soft grades (stronger filtration to leave less available effective light reaching the paper).
However, when I want to print 'hard' on my LPL why don't I simply dial IN lots of blue, rather than lots of magenta to remove the blue?
Will be in the darkroom this evening and put it to the test-
expose two sheets, one on 160 magenta and one 160 blue. Very interested to see what happens. It's painfully easy to do something for years and years without ever really questioning just how it works.
Cheers!
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Old 27th April 2013, 10:33 AM
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I have an LPL C7700 pro for up to 6x9 format and when I put in maximum Magenta I still cannot get a 'Grade 5' contrast -- if I put in equal amounts of Magenta and Cyan to make the 'Blue' do you think that would give higher contrast ?
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Old 27th April 2013, 12:58 PM
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Found a really interesting read, but not smart enough to link it-
the workings of variable contrast papers and local gamma (pdf )
Google should get you there.

Years ago I used Ilford Gallerie graded papers, which were beautiful. For some time now I've favoured multigrade for cost and convenience (the warmtone version in particular is really nice)
However, from time to time I've experienced the frustration of having a negative which I thought was very pretty, but which just would not print the way I thought it should. Either the image would just lack sparkle, or the lighter midtones (say zone 6'ish) would somehow look 'fake'. Very hard to describe.
Interestingly, it never happens to my 6x6 work (all PanF) but mostly afflicts my 5x4- all FP4. Both are dev'd in PMK. PanF barely stains, while the FP4 stains very strongly. The more I read about VC printing the more it sounds as there may be some negatives which would never print as well on VC as they would on graded- with the complication of the variable stain from Pyro sometimes being enough to influence local contrast.
It troubled me enough that I've actually been looking to replace FP4, perhaps with Fomapan.
I've been avoiding graded paper on the basis that I don't print huge volume, and didn't want to hold a stock of paper that I might not use before it expired. In reality, I actually use grade 2-3 most of the time, but do like the ability to split-grade and burn selected areas of the print at different grades. Ah well, more experimentation needed . .
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Old 28th April 2013, 08:41 AM
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You can't dial in "lots of blue" with a colour enlarger, that's not how the filters work. To produce true blue light (rather than light which looks blue to the eye because you've taken the yellow out of white light) you would need a blue bandpass filter, not a yellow bandstop one. The Ilford Multigrade 500 enlarger head uses blue and green filters instead of yellow and magenta, as does the Philips enlarger the OP was asking about.

Many colour heads don't have a sufficiently strong magenta filter to produce a true grade 5 - we have discussed this at length before on this forum.
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