Sroyon’s Darkroom Printing Guide

Contrast and Tonality Part 3: Characteristic Curves for Film and Paper – By Sroyon

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Most major manufacturers of film and photographic paper release datasheets with technical details about their product. If you’ve ever looked at such a datasheet, you may have seen graphs like the ones below:

These graphs are called characteristic curves (because they show they show the characteristic properties of film or paper) or sensitometric curves (sensitometry being the study of light-sensitive materials). In this post I’ll try to explain how characteristic curves can help us with film choice, metering, exposure, developing and printing – in short, at pretty much every stage of the (film) photography process.

Contrast and Tonality Part 2: The Curves Tool, and What We Talk About When We Talk About Contrast – By Sroyon

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In Part 1 of this three-part series, I used histograms of famous photographs to introduce some fundamental ideas about contrast and tonality. In this part I’ll talk about software curves, and what contrast means in the context of photography. The next and final part will be about characteristic curves for film and paper. The idea …

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Contrast and Tonality Part 1: Histograms of Famous Photographs and What They Can Teach Us – By Sroyon

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Let’s face it, “analysing” photos with histograms can only take us so far. A hundred years later, people may or may not look at your photographs and gasp in admiration. But if they do, they almost certainly won’t say, “Wow, they had beautiful histograms.” Nevertheless, here we are. Introduction Objectives The real reason for this …

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3 Ways to Make Contact Sheets and What They Can Tell Us – Darkroom Technique Part 6 – by Sroyon

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I originally conceived my Darkroom Printing series as a five-part affair, but I figured I’ll add more as I learn, especially if I find something that’s not covered in most online tutorials or books. Guess what, it turns out that contact sheets is one such subject. Well not quite: contact sheets in general are covered in lots of tutorials, but I am yet to see one which has a detailed description of more than one way to make a contact sheet. Prescribing one way to do something furthers the impression that it is the way to do it, which is something I always try to question.

Dodge, Burn and Other Heresies – Darkroom Technique Part 5 – by Sroyon Mukherjee

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So far in this series I’ve only talked about ‘straight printing’, which is to say, no part of the image was locally manipulated. I tweaked exposure and contrast of course, but those tweaks were applied uniformly to the whole image.

Part 5 is about two classic techniques for local manipulation of exposure and contrast – dodging and burning. Dodging lightens certain print areas by blocking enlarger light from reaching them. Burning darkens certain print areas by giving them additional exposure. Local manipulation can also be classified into same-grade and split-grade; I’ll explain the distinction later, along with examples of both types.

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