After a several year hiatus with no darkroom, ( won't say how long, will give away my age!), I find that the availability of graded papers has greatly dwindled.So I guess it is time to try variable contrast again. I use a cold light head, and I wonder how this will affect the filtration? Years back when I tried it I got good results by using a blue and a green filter to fine tune the contrast but it was a pain in the ***. Can I use regular filters? Thanks in advance Bruce

-- Bruce Appel (appelgate @aol.com), February 09, 2001

Answers

Hi, Bruce.

I'm in a similar situation, and won't say how long either.

I gave up on cold light & switched to a color head. You can use regular filters, but your tube may not put out enough green light. Syptoms would be hard to get the contrast soft enough.

Solutions: try a CC40Y filter permanently attached to your light. But this might limit your hi-contrast level. You could get your tube replaced with a new Aristo tube. It has green & blue phosphors specifically for VC printing.

But there are still some good graded papers. Oriental is back.

-- Charlie Strack (charlie_strack@sti.com), February 09, 2001.

That's pretty much what I was going to say. I used to use a cc40y to try to even everything out, but even with a high intensity tube (d2 head), it just seemed to knock out half the intensity. When I use this head now, I just go ahead and use the filters by themselves. Or do what you did, use a 5+/-1 combo. If I can't get the contrast lower than say, a 2 1/2 or so, I either keep some grade 1 paper on hand, or (this probably isn't an option for you) just use another enlarger. Lately I just use a colorhead. If you use the filters, you won't need them all. Some will seem like they do nothing at all. I haven't tried it, but you may want to look into the new tube from Aristo, if this is the head that you have. Getting a little step wedge may help you figure out what kind of control you can get. Good luck.

-- D.K. Thompson (kthompson@moh.dcr.state.nc.us), February 09, 2001.

I'd like to build on Charlie's closing comment. My main paper is graded Zone VI Brilliant Bromide II. It has a traditional curve shape that works well unless your negative has a lot of dense high values. Then I switch to Oriental New Seagull G; it's toe enables separation to be easily maintained with such negatives. These are both beautiful papers, and, if it's important to you, are sharper than VC papers.

-- Sal Santamaura (bc_hill@qwestinternet.net), February 10, 2001.

I've been printing with a cold light (D2 Aristo) for about 15 years. Using the regular contrast filters, you will get some contrast change but not as stated on the filters, This is where I started, using compensating developers like Divided D76 and Diafine. With Ektapan, TriXP, Plus X and the like, you'll get great tones throughout the curve. From there I went to experimenting with a contrast changing developer... Dr. Beer's (found at Photo Formulary or you can mix it yourself) which with different additions of solution 2 you can fine tune your contrast. Most of the time though, I get what I want with LPD straight (for cold tones). Cheers

-- Scott Walton (f64sw@hotmail.com), February 12, 2001.