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  #11  
Old 18th March 2016, 07:50 PM
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MartyNL MartyNL is offline
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Now that's what I call dedication.

I've only ever tried colour once and that was at college and it was fully automated so it probably doesn't count.

Best of luck!
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  #12  
Old 18th March 2016, 10:41 PM
John King John King is online now
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Once you get a good print with correct exposure and colour balance what is a good help is make what used to be known as a ring-a-round chart. Check the colour balance of what will be your 'good' print in good daylight, not under artificial lighting, or even a blue 'daylight' bulb

Basically to start off this good print should have a good range of colours across the spectrum. Now make another one but add say 5 magenta then another print with 10 magenta added and pin them on a board alongside the good print. Set the enlarger back to the original filtration and make another 2 prints and this time subtract 5 magenta and then 10 magenta and pin them alongside the good print but opposite the prints with plus magenta settings. Repeat the same for the Yellow and Cyan channels.

Now the complicated bit, make more prints with the same filtration values, but for the variation this time use +&- Magenta+Cyan to give you red. Cyan+yellow to give you Green and Cyan+Magenta to give you blue. Don't forget altering the level of filtration will also alter the exposure time as well.

Can I suggest that you place these sets of prints with the accurate one in the centre of a piece of card with the Green print at the 10 o'clock position, yellow at 2 O'clock. Red at 3. Magenta at 5 Blue at 7 and Cyan at 9 ( O'clock positions) They will give you a good idea what filtration you will need to alter on your enlarger for other negatives which do not print accurately when compared with your original settings. Even now after 24 years of colour printing I still get caught out occasionally with Yellow and Cyan casts.

Don't forget that when RA4 prints are wet there will be always a blue colour cast visible, especially in the shadows. The assessment MUST be done when the print is fully dry. Personally, I wipe the test print with a cloth and then dry it off using a redundant hair dryer. Once I get the test print correct I don't bother with the one I wish to keep.

As you suspect the colour variations may be down to the developer temperatures being incorrect. To make life easy for yourself they MUST be consistent as well as the developing time of 45 seconds. One you have established a pattern of working, try to change film, developer and Film developer as infrequently as you can. This gives it little opportunity to vary far from the original settings.

To make things easier for myself again, the 1st frame of every cassette is used to photograph an A4 sheet of plain grey card. This frame is always printed first and this gives me the basic setting where to change the filtration (if it needs doing).

Last edited by John King; 18th March 2016 at 10:49 PM. Reason: More information
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