Recovering a muddy image.

I was booked by Richie for a 1-1 darkroom workshop on Sunday.  It was a real pleasure to work with someone who had taken the trouble to learn how to correctly expose film, it makes life so much easier in the darkroom.  He explained that he took readings from the shadows and the sky then averaged the mid range for the exposure.  He was also looking at using different ISOs as a base for controlling tones for different conditions.  After processing a couple of his rolls of 120 film I could see that he was producing some pretty good negs.

We printed onto resin coated paper from is medium format negs with some excellent results.  He managed to keep detail in rapidly flowing water, at long exposure, while retaining the shadows.  While doing this I thought it would be an idea to demonstrate some of the advantages of fibre based paper.  I had been given a very old box of Report-Rapid 111 N by John Brewer so I used that.  The first print was rather dull and muddy, even using a hard mix of Dr Beers to dev it in.  I showed that by using a bath of Farmers Reducer to clear up the highlights, followed by Selenium Toner to darken the shadows and remove the warmth, you could get a reasonable print.

Orignal

Farmers Reducer and Moersch MT1 Selenium Toner