why is enlarging baseboard white not black?

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newfilm

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I'm curious, why is the enlarging baseboard, or the easels, they are all white? wont the white surface act as a reflective light pollution that might fog the paper? Also, since I'll be doing this in my bath room, I assume the white tile are equally no good? Or is it kind of insignificant and I'm just being over paranoid 🙂

(disclaimer, I have yet to print my own, in the mid of preparing the equipments)
 
I don't think it really matters, when I have a dark room I always had a paper holder 5 x 7, 8 x 10, that raised the paper a few millimeters off the baseboard and held flat. mine was a natural wood no stain.
 
Don't you want to focus with the paper on the easel, not the baseboard?

In any event, I don't think that light reflecting up off the baseboard will fog the paper. Light reflecting off the walls is another matter. ;-(

Randy
 
I have a Delta magnetic easel that allows borderless prints be made. It is black and I find impossible to use in black. I have one sheet of photographic paper, that's sacrificed in other words gets exposed but never used, the size I'm going to develop. I use that paper to set up the enlargement for the paper used. So I get a white view and also can focus quite well as the paper is the same thickness of my final print. The Delta easel works quite well and gives me pretty much a borderless print.
 
For avoiding lightfogging (is that even a word? ;-)) I guess it makes sense to blacken adjacent walls/reflecting surfaces. The board itself, being exactly opposite of the light source, will generally not be able to influence the paper. And while critical focusing should be done accounting for the thickness of the paper, for all practical purposes it can be handy to make a rough estimation of image size and focus on the enlarger board itself.
 
What's more critical is avoiding any light spillage from your enlarger head, condenser stage, etc. This may reflect off any adjacent walls or the ceiling and affect your print, especially with longer printing times. I put black foam board on the wall immediately behind the enlarger, just in case. Some older enlargers may be prone to this, but my new(er) LPL enlarger is nice and spill-proof.

Unless you've got light spilling somewhere, most of it should focused thru the lens directly on to the paper, not hitting the baseboard.

Color of the baseboard probably doesn't matter, other than a personal preference. Especially if you use an easel to hold the paper. A light colored baseboard allows me to easily see any dodging tools or negatives I may have placed on it.
 
jim_jm said:
What's more critical is avoiding any light spillage from your enlarger head, condenser stage, etc. This may reflect off any adjacent walls or the ceiling and affect your print, especially with longer printing times. I put black foam board on the wall immediately behind the enlarger, just in case. Some older enlargers may be prone to this, but my new(er) LPL enlarger is nice and spill-proof.

Unless you've got light spilling somewhere, most of it should focused thru the lens directly on to the paper, not hitting the baseboard.

Color of the baseboard probably doesn't matter, other than a personal preference. Especially if you use an easel to hold the paper. A light colored baseboard allows me to easily see any dodging tools or negatives I may have placed on it.
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Jim, curiously my LPL enlarger spills light everywhere. I spent quite a while affixing black paper in strategic locations to correct that!

Randy
 
Room reflectivity certainly does matter, but if the projected image is bright and the exposures short, less of a concern. I worked for years in the commercial large-format printing business, where we used horizontal enlargers on rails to project and enlarge onto the wall, where would use push pins to hold RA4 paper, up to 50" roll width by possibly 12' for a single enlargement. This often meant fairly dim projection, even with 8 250W halogen bulbs in the enlarger! Most of our darkrooms were painted black all around, although the projection surface where we pinned the paper was white. Otherwise, it would have been impossible to size and frame the print as needed. We did do final focusing with a grain magnifier resting on a paper scrap. We also used Duratrans, a semi-transparent material for backlight signage etc - less sensitive to light than the paper but having an anti-halation backing that worked fine with any surface underneath. Don't forget to stop down before exposure - you might have a single piece of material on the wall that cost $100 or more before processing!

I do recall trying to diagnose strange color casts on one side or the other of a print, and determining it was some reflective object placed too close to the wall - maybe even the operator's clothing. Color and exposure was often very critical as we commonly made larger prints by seaming the 50" width paper together as separate darkroom exposures. Largest I recall was a photo-wall made from 12 individual 48"x12' vertical prints, made from several 8x10 color copy negatives, each covering a partial area of the original artwork, which was done at perhaps 20% of final size. Thank god for wide-format inkjet printing, which came along in the late eighties and ended this foolishness.
 
newfilm said:
Wow, good point all around guys!

cmc850 I have just added "dress in black" in my darkroom check list 😀
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You may want to add ... don't put ones' phone in a shirt pocket if it rings as you're loading a film the keypad screen is bright enough to fog film through a shirt pocket (and it was quite a heavy cotton, one of those washed Oxford shirts)
 
Sparrow said:
don't put ones' phone in a shirt pocket
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It also happened to me but I was wet-printing and there was no damage (that I noticed).

I also have a smart watch which displays emails. I found the light it emits does not fog paper - it's a pebble with an e-ink screen so it isn't ultra bright. But when it first happened I almost dropped everything I had in my hands in trying to hide the light 🙂

Regardless of the above - your point is indeed valuable.
Ben
 
... I usually keep the phone in my trouser pocket, but I'd had one call and just put it in the shirt pocket, switched the light off, then half way through loading the second film they rang back ... I did the panic response, I lost the film I was loading, and fogged the one already on the spiral even though it was behind me
 
zauhar said:
Don't you want to focus with the paper on the easel, not the baseboard?
...
Randy
Click to expand...

I read that all the time, but it really makes no difference once you stop the lens down to f8. If you enlarge with wider apertures, maybe, but why should one do that. Even the 6-elements lenses benefit from being stopped down.
 
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