Turtle
Veteran
And this will work for most people most of the time, but if you run out of contrast at the top end of your enlarger/paper you are in big trouble.
People should not be afraid to do whatever it takes to get the results that work for them and this is why there is no substitute for using a lot of film and paper to find out.
Agitation and differing enlarger heads make huge differences and people often do not state them in their dev times and temperatures (and those developing for scanning skew things even more). When someone new to home development has a crack and wonders why everything he does prints flat as a pancake, he is shocked. Why am I using G5 and still getting horrid flat prints?
Well if Mr newbie is printing on a large/old colour head and gently agitating three times a minute and Mr Expert forgets to mention that he is printing on a high contrast condenser and vigorously agitates five times every 30s, therein lies the answer. Added to which Mr Expert lives in Arizona and shoots a lot in very contrasty light with a huge brightness range pretty well every day, but Mr Newbie lives in Swansea where it never stops raining and the SBR rarely rises above 3 stops. Its not hard to see how catastrophic these variables can be if not accounted for.
People should not be afraid to do whatever it takes to get the results that work for them and this is why there is no substitute for using a lot of film and paper to find out.
Agitation and differing enlarger heads make huge differences and people often do not state them in their dev times and temperatures (and those developing for scanning skew things even more). When someone new to home development has a crack and wonders why everything he does prints flat as a pancake, he is shocked. Why am I using G5 and still getting horrid flat prints?
Well if Mr newbie is printing on a large/old colour head and gently agitating three times a minute and Mr Expert forgets to mention that he is printing on a high contrast condenser and vigorously agitates five times every 30s, therein lies the answer. Added to which Mr Expert lives in Arizona and shoots a lot in very contrasty light with a huge brightness range pretty well every day, but Mr Newbie lives in Swansea where it never stops raining and the SBR rarely rises above 3 stops. Its not hard to see how catastrophic these variables can be if not accounted for.