Easy home RA4 Colour Printing at room temperature

[Lilserenity]

Hiya,

I have finished a guide on home RA4 colour printing at room temperature (18-24degC) on my blog. I have been doing a lot of experimenting, and getting some fabulous results.

There is a lot of useful info on the web about this, but this gives it a 2010 and UK slant (in terms of goods supply.)

It is of course as applicable to the UK as it is to the USA, France and Thailand I am sure!

Click Here : RA4 Home Printing Guide

Hopefully someone finds this interesting and useful.

If anything it should show RA4 is easy to do at home. I do mine in my bathroom with the enlarger on the washing machine, and one of the trays on the toilet seat! (My bathroom is nice and clean!!)

Vicky

 

[MartinP]

Aarghh, you persuaded me!

When I worked in a lab, doing black-and-white stuff, the RA4 was scary (huge ultra precise Kreonites) but you have humanised the process. Keep up the good work

 

[apconan]

nice guide, similar ones over at APUG. this one is good because you provide rough outlines for filter settings for different films.
you shouldn't need stop bath at room temperature

 

[jan normandale]

Vicky it's Jannx at flickr.. first I've seen you here! Mind I don't drop in a lot. I'm going to flip the link to a friend of mine Ursula Pfitzer who recently embarked on colour printing. Great write up.

Personally I think I'll pass ;D

 

[aizan]

that's a great write up! i should add that electronic timers should be covered when you print color, as the red LEDs can ruin your prints.

color papers don't have as good reciprocity characteristics as bw, so i set the timer to 10s and make most exposure adjustments with the lens aperture. i mostly use the timer to make small adjustments in filter density.

i've found that test strips are ok for determining exposure, but ring arounds are better for color balance. you need to cut a mask out of thick, black card stock. for convenience, you'll want a paper safe to stash the paper in between repositioning.

i've never developed color prints without a processor, but if the colors don't shift, it should be ok!

a print viewing station would also be useful...i have no idea what to do about this at home. the bulb needs to be daylight balanced. i guess you could go outside if it's sunny. don't look at the print too long, or your eyes will adjust.

 

[Lilserenity]

Aarghh, you persuaded me!

When I worked in a lab, doing black-and-white stuff, the RA4 was scary (huge ultra precise Kreonites) but you have humanised the process. Keep up the good work

Thanks! It really isn't as difficult as you would imagine, as I say in the article, the most difficult bit is working in complete darkness (you get used to it) and assessing colour balance by eye if you have no other tools or analysers at your disposal. Apart from that, it's not really any more difficult than black and white processing.

nice guide, similar ones over at APUG. this one is good because you provide rough outlines for filter settings for different films.
you shouldn't need stop bath at room temperature

Thanks, I hadn't considered not needing the stop bath, it seems to work for me having it in the middle so I'm gonna stick to it. I sawe the guides on APUG and they're great but I thought one with a decidedly UK/European bias in terms of what the Kodak RA4 chems you need was a good idea.

Vicky it's Jannx at flickr.. first I've seen you here! Mind I don't drop in a lot. I'm going to flip the link to a friend of mine Ursula Pfitzer who recently embarked on colour printing. Great write up.

Thanks Jan! I hope it comes in useful!

that's a great write up! i should add that electronic timers should be covered when you print color, as the red LEDs can ruin your prints.

color papers don't have as good reciprocity characteristics as bw, so i set the timer to 10s and make most exposure adjustments with the lens aperture. i mostly use the timer to make small adjustments in filter density.

i've found that test strips are ok for determining exposure, but ring arounds are better for color balance. you need to cut a mask out of thick, black card stock. for convenience, you'll want a paper safe to stash the paper in between repositioning.

i've never developed color prints without a processor, but if the colors don't shift, it should be ok!

a print viewing station would also be useful...i have no idea what to do about this at home. the bulb needs to be daylight balanced. i guess you could go outside if it's sunny. don't look at the print too long, or your eyes will adjust.

Thanks for all the extra information, it goes to show there are infinite depths to how far you can plumb this topic -- I think the purpose of my write up was a.) reflecting my very basic knowledge and experience (~8-9 months) and b.) to give people the basics to get them going. I remember reading some guides on black and white years ago which were just scary complicated. It wasn't that the information was wrong, it was just too much of it at an early stage.

That said all the things you say are great advice, some of which i have never tried myself.

Generally speaking though, RA4 at home is not really too difficult to accomplish these days. As I pointed out the biggest risk is that the papers will drop support for optical printing. Fuji Crystal Archive is now only in roll form but I believe Ilford is/was/might/hoping to buy massive rolls of this and cut it themselves to sell (the caveat being that Fuji CA tends to need higher processing temperatures) -- and it looks as though Kodak Supra Endura is now only available in sheet form; not a problem -- but some people have construed this as the end for this paper. People I have spoken to who deal with Kodak say this isn't the case, Supra Endura is continuing in sheet form only, only the roll paper is discontinued -- which makes some sense if the main use for Supra Endura is the optical printer (I can't imagine why digital labs would use it if a cheaper more suitable digital roll paper was available, which there is in Supra Endura VC Digital now.)

So we will have to see, but for now we're still OK. I'm just making the most of it while I can.

It's just as well that fundamentally I am a black and white person but the past year has seen me photograph more in colour than I have in my entire life!

Anyway, enjoy!

Vicky

 

[Finder]

I process RA-4 at home and you cannot skip the stop. Nasty things happen if you do. It is easy to try though, just skip the stop bath.

BTW, I just did a search for Crystal Archive and it still comes in sheets.

 

[apconan]

have never made a print at room temp with stop bath, prints turn out great, great enough for me to exhibit