I have a Beseler 23C III Dichoro enlarger, and have had good success printing on multigrade paper by dialing in the desired contrast grade using the M and Y filtration controls. I have a few negatives I want to print on some graded paper, and just wanted to confirm that I should set the all the filtratrion values to 0. Is the contrast then controlled by exposure time? Can the filters be used as ND filters, if so, what combinations give what filtration? Thanks Arnie

-- Arnie Milowsky (arniemly@earthlink.net), December 08, 2000

Answers

Normally you would set all controls to zero for printing on graded paper. To lengthen exposure times, I would simply add magenta.

-- Ed Buffaloe (edbuffaloe@unblinkingeye.com), December 09, 2000.

Arnie, Although you can control the contrast of graded papers to a certain extent with exposure time/development time changes to reach intermediate contrast grades, you will find more flexibility using different developers, one hard/normal contrast, and one soft-working developer (Selectol Soft, Ansco 120 etc.) and either using them two bath (the soft developer first) or mixing them to get the desired contrast. More information is in Anchell's Darkroom Cookbook and AA's The Print. Regards, ;^D)

-- Doremus Scudder (ScudderLandreth@compuserve.com), December 09, 2000.

Adding 30 units of each color (C,M,Y) will change your exposure nominally by one stop.

-- fred (fdeaton@knology.net), December 09, 2000.

The whole point of graded paper is that the grade is fixed, and the contrast can't be changed very much. To change the contrast you have to buy another grade of paper. Grades 2 and 3 are considered normal contrast, with grade 1 being softer, and grade 4 being hard.
Graded paper is also only sensitive to blue light, which means only the yellow filter of your enlarger will have any effect on the exposure. 30 units of yellow filtration should halve the light, and therefore double your exposure time, 60 units quadruple the time, etc. Quite why you'd want to do this, I don't know. Just set all the filters to 0, and use the lens aperture to control the light intensity if necessary.

-- Pete Andrews (p.l.andrews@bham.ac.uk), December 11, 2000.

Pete,

Because you don't want to be wide open or fully stopped down. So you then need to control the time with color/filtration.

I picked up a 3 stop ND gel for getting printing times to something reasonable when printing 5x7.

-- Terry Carraway (TCarraway@compuserve.com), December 12, 2000.