Darkroom tips
From Silvergrain Products
Contents |
Try something new
New to Silvergrain Tektol developers?
Welcome to the new generation of eco-friendly darkroom chemicals.
This may be the right time to try more of exciting new things in your darkroom.
- Try to use a toner. (Recommendation: selenium or brown toner.)
- Try to use an old negative that you couldn't print well before.
- Try a new paper.
Printing tips
Summer glitches
One common glitch in summertime is muddy highlights. You can expose more, and you'll get too much gray. You cut the exposure, and the print will be too light.
Why is this?
Most likely, this is because the developer tray is too warm. Keep a thermometer in the developer tray, and make sure it doesn't go higher than 24C or 75F for best results. Also, when the developer is warm, the developer oxidizes with air faster than at the proper temperature of 20C or 68F.
How to cool the developer tray?
Look into a recycle bin and pick up a few 500ml (pint) water bottles. Clean them and fill them with plain tap water about 3/4 of the way. Freeze them. When the print developer is too hot, put one of these in the tray and stir the solution until the solution temperature drops to about 18C or 64F. You are ready to resume printing.
Other muddy highlight glitches
Sometimes, muddy highlights are caused by improperly strong safelight, or safelight that is not really safe. Keep safelight dim, or minimize the duration of safelight exposure.
Another common cause of muddy highlights is old paper. Unfortunately, there is nothing you can do to reverse the aging effect of the emulsion. Always buy paper from retailers who sell a large volume of traditional darkroom products to get the freshest possible stock. (Hint: try Digitaltruth.com.)
Weak shadow glitches
If you get prints with weak shadows, there can be a number of reasons.
- printing exposure is insufficient
- paper contrast is too low
- the negative is overexposed or overdeveloped
- developer is stale
- developer is too cold
- developer is too dilute
- development time is too short
Many printers, except for some experienced printers, tend to choose contrast that is too low for the image, so as to minimize the need to burning and dodging during printing. If you tend to do this, learn to use burning and dodging effectively, and use more natural contrast for the image. This will be an immediate improvement to your prints.
Some papers take longer time to develop than others. In particular, Tektol print developers are designed to reflect the character of the paper emulsion, and because of this, some "non-developer incorporated" type papers may take 30-60 seconds extra development time. Be patient and give the extra time for the rich tonality and rich black. If you would rather save time than optimize the image quality, you may choose to develop at 24C/75F or mix the developer stronger than the recommended dilution. If not used to exhaustion, the developer should be kept in a tightly closed bottle filled to the top, to make the maximum use out of the developer and to minimize the chemical waste.
If the developer does not give rich black in the same time as the freshly prepared developer, the developer is stale. Replace the developer.
