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Black and White Magic - part 2 of 1 2 3

by Winston Ingram Published 01/02/2001

The last part of this process and possibly the most important is the contrast you decide to use.

The contrast on multi-grade paper goes from 0 - 5 in halves and the way to set up the filters on your enlarger to achieve the various levels of contrast is as follows:

0 = 40 yellow, 40 cyan
half = 30 yellow, 30 cyan
1 = 20 yellow 20 cyan
1half = 10 yellow, 10 cyan
2 = 10 magenta
2half = 20 magenta
3 = 30 magenta
3half = 40 magenta
4 = 50 magenta
4half = 60 magenta
5 - 70 magenta

Although enlargers do go up anywhere from 0 - 200, on all the yellow, magenta and cyan filters, after 70 you find you're just getting longer exposures because of the extra filtration put in and no other benefits. The longer range of filtration on the colours are of course there for colour printing.

I usually decide, when I shoot my pictures as to what grade I'm going to print them on in advance. The can only be done if you know how to expose your negative so that when you give it a normal development, it will not go outside of the range of highlight and shadow which is printable on a piece of paper, because a negative has a much greater contrast range than a piece of paper. Therefore if you have too little or too much exposure, you can find with too little exposure (under exposed) your highlight detail is beginning to disappear and your shadow detail could possible have disappeared depending on the amount of underexposure you've given. If on the other hand, you over expose too much you'll have such a lot of heavily blocked shadows and washed out highlights, that you won't be able to print them within the contrast range of your paper. I find I like to shoot my negatives so that they'll print easily on grade 2½. This allows for a nice contrast and stops the whites going a shade of grey (commonly known as a dirty print), which is neither acceptable nor desirable. One last comment about contrast - if you want to make a black and white print from a colour negative, because a colour negative when printed black and white will lack contrast (because of the colour masks), if you use the hardest grade - grade 5 or 70 magenta - this should put some contrast into what would otherwise be a flat print. Although it is true to say that you won't get as good a black and white print from a colour negative as you will from a black and white negative.

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1st Published 01/02/2001
last update 09/12/2022 14:51:46

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