color darkroom in the future?

Hey, I was thinking about getting a color darkroom in the future, probably ten

years from now when I get a house and the available budget for more photography

equipments. However, I remember a year ago my photography teacher took down the

color darkroom and replaced with computers installed with photoshop because he

said traditional color work takes too long and the popularity is dropping. Is

color work really going to die out soon before it is ten years from now?

If you want to do color darkroom work, do it now. I'm not saying it won't be possible in 10 years but it will be much more difficult. Both B&W and color darkroom equipment is already going for pennies on the dollar and the good news is you should be able to get equipment virutally for free 10 years from now -- if you can find it at all, or if it hasn't become so scare that the price goes back up. But the bigger issue is materials. Many have already been dropped and others are going by the wayside every day. IMHO, color darkroom work has a much steeper learning curve than B&W. If you're going to spend years becoming a master printer, do it with the current technology. In other words, spend the next 10 years learning Photoshop as the software, hardware and materials get better and better instead of spending 10 years learning a dying technology that may not even be available by the time you master it.

With sophisticated scanning software, such as SilverFast, and image processing software such as Photoshop, Lightzone, and others, one can truly do wonderful things with negatives and/or digital images from digital cameras...things that one could only dream about in a conventional darkroom. No one can predict the future 10 years from now. That's a long time. But the digital darkroom doesn't take up much space. For a reasonable about of money, one can buy a decent film scanner (the ones with SilverFast Ai bundled provide much value per buck), and a decent computer system, such as an iMAC. Then, with perhaps Photoshop, Lightzone, or some other image processing software, you are ready to go. All you need is some deskspace at home or work. No need to wait 10 years from now!

The RA-4 paper market is narrowing down to papers intended for digital exposure in Fuji Frontiers, LightJet machines, etc. Kodak Portra Endura has been discontinued, leaving only the high-saturation Ultra Endura.

IMHO, there will still be color darkrooms, but they will be rare and very, very expensive to run. Spinoza is right. You must love film to stay with it, and as the number of people still doing it drops, the more expensive it will be to stay in this increasingly niche, hobby market. Put a nice computer room in your to-be house, and buy a top-end scanner and printer.

there is just no magic with "digital" darkroom. i personally will never forget the first time i

saw a print appear on paper. As for setting up the color darkroom, go for it. in my opinion

you may see a slight shift in favor of traditional techniques as people get tired of "digital"

There will always be digital, because you can do some truly amazing things, but there will

never be the magic that a real darkroom has.

John,

 

I still see Kodak Portra Endura on BH photo. Is it old stock?

Josh, I've done a fair amount of darkroom work in my day, but I find "magic" in the line-by-line "developing" on the printer. And you still wait to see if the color balance on screen really got to the printer intact.

 

Of course, in our younger days, there were always other things that were possible in co-ed darkrooms. Now, there's magic!

Photography is my hobby and I have processed color film and printed in my color darkroom for over 40 years. I purchased Photoshop about 8 years ago and started learning digital processing. I now also have a digital darkroom setup with Photoshop CS3, monitor calibration hardware, pigment ink photo printer, Nikon D200, and Nikon Coolscan 9000 film scanner. I have not used my conventional darkroom for over 2 years and find supplies are getting harder to find. I have not used my medium format camera in 2 years. My wife still shoots film with her 35mm Nikon SLR and I have film processed only at a local professional lab and I scan it with the Nikon Coolscan 9000 film scanner. I get better results with the digital route using files from a digital camera or scanned film than with the conventional wet darkroom.

If you have the space I would start working with color right now. I started using JOBO tanks, but learned quickly that it was way to tedious. Especially if I wanted to do allot of prints. With the JOBO system, you have to wash the tank and dry it before starting on a new print.

 

So I moved up to a Durst table top processor which I kept in a walk-in closet with my Beseler Dichroic color printer. From there, I Purchased a more modern Durst Printo table top processor, but I still kept the old Durst.

 

My printing sessions consisted of weekend Marathons where I would start printing on Friday nights and if I didn't pass-out, all the way to Sunday morning. By then the chemicals would have been totally exhausted.

 

Unfortunately around the same time I purchased the Durst Printo, I switched to Digital and started buying equipment for my 'Dry darkroom'. Now I rarely go into my wet darkroom anymore, because I'm no longer shooting film.

 

However, I still think that if done right, the RA4 prints had that little extra punch that is missing from the more pastel looking ink-jet prints. The thing about digital is that you have more flexibility in fixing the color negative before making a print. With color film everything had to be perfect, or you were heading for a very long night, while wasting tons of expensive paper. Good Luck !

I don't know about 10 years from now but I'd imagine the stuff will still be around, many other supposedly superseded formats for sound and even old movie cameras still exist today that were forecast for demise many years ago.

 

There's an economic term called 'the long tail' thanks to the internet suppliers can continue to supply customers with niche products, it may take longer to turn a profit but there still is one, especially when you sell many niche products. The people here, like most, only think of companies and shops stacking shelves in every city with products to make sales. Darkroom supplies aren't sold this way now because of very low local demand. With the internet you pick up all the worlds demand, and it all adds up. No there won't be so many suppliers, but there will be some where there's a profit.

 

Colour darkroom materials ARE readily available from 3 or 4 places on the internet in the UK alone. People who say they aren't don't look or don't want to find them to justify their digital decision, not that they need to.

 

Colour darkroom is highly rewarding, with so much of our lives carried out through a monitor these days it's also a welcome escape from the silicon world. Not forgetting the results are nothing short of fantastic. Buy a cheap shed, do it in the garden! Do it now! Do it because it's rewarding. I say this having tried (and still owning) a dedicated film scanner, and enthusiast dslr.