Film and developer for novice at making 8x10 contact prints

[chris_hawkins]

I admit to not being the best and I'm determined to improved. The

main issue I see with my work is with muddy prints.

[jay_de_fehr]

If by muddy you mean low contrast, you might try developing your film more, exposing less, or both, to increase contrast. Any film will make excellent contact prints, so buy the cheapest and buy lots of it. As far as developers go, nearly the same is true. Just about any developer can produce excellent negatives for contact printing from just about any film, provided it is exposed and developed appropriately. My favorite developer is PC-TEA, because it's easy to use, produces excellent negatives with every film I've used it with, it's almost non-toxic, extremely consistent, and very cheap.

[tim_curry]

Christopher, if your prints are "muddy" as you have stated, have you done film speed (exposure) and development tests? If this combination is not correct, your choice of developer and film may not be the issue. Is zone 3 really zone 3 and is zone 8 really zone 8? This may have something to do with it.

 

If your film tests are correct, is it sharpness, contrast, shadow values or a combination of these? Perhaps you could post an example for us on apug's gallery to show the problem in an image as you see it. This would be a bit more helpful. Words can be a bother to understand in cases like this.

[silent1]

Another source of "muddy" prints might be safelight fogging of the paper (assuming you're using common enlarging paper). You can test this easily by taking out a piece of paper and putting a couple coins on the emulsion side, then letting it sit under your safelight, where you normally work with it and/or above your developing tray, for five to twenty minutes (if you add another couple coins every five minutes, you can do the whole test in one go). Develop the paper normally; if you can see where the coins were, you have safelight fogging (or light leaks in the darkroom). If you can see only some of the coins outlined, than you can put a limit on your safe paper handling time based on how much exposure produces visible fogging.

 

Alternately, you might need/want to filter the light for a higher contrast grade, if using multigrade paper, or use a harder grade of paper if graded, in order to use less exposure to get the same blacks; that will leave the whites whiter, but if you need to go harder than Grade 3, you probably need to read above about increasing your negative contrast.