Capstone Stage 4: The Silver Prints

Purpose

To discharge requirement 8 — at least one contact print and at least one enlarged silver print among six to ten finished works — and to solve the problem that no earlier part of the course has set: six to ten prints made over several sessions, possibly on more than one box of paper, have to look as though one person made them on one day.

Every printing technique this stage uses is Part XIX’s. Nothing here re-teaches a test strip, a split-grade pair or a burn. What this stage adds is the discipline of holding a set together, and the one test the specification requires that Part XIX only rehearsed: a finished print remade from its printing map alone, in a later session, with a written account of where the two copies differ and why.

Learning objectives

By the end of this stage you will be able to:

• select negatives for a body of work against a stated intention rather than against technical quality alone;
• say what a contact print and an enlargement each teach that the other cannot, and print both;
• run a printing session as a controlled process, with the developer’s capacity tracked and a replacement rule applied rather than a judgement made;
• hold surface, image colour, contrast and finishing constant across sessions and paper boxes, and name the variables that break a set when they drift;
• prove a printing map by printing from it alone in a later session and account for the difference;
• read a set as a set, and remove a good print that does not serve it;
• state what your judging station is, as numbers, so that two sessions are comparable.

Prerequisites

Stage 3, with the negatives sleeved, labelled and proofed, and the control-strip data for every run.

From Part XVIII, maximum black, base white and dry-down, which owns your own measured dry-down figure — this stage uses yours and quotes no general percentage. From Part XIX, all of it, and in particular reading the negative and the work print, test strips, base exposure and the black point, contrast filtration and split-grade printing, local control, print development and session consistency, washing, drying, flattening and mounting and the exhibition print and its critique. From Part XVI, the contact printing frame and the commissioned enlarger.

SOPs executed here: print processing, archival sequence, two-bath fixing rotation, handling paper in dim light and storing unfixed prints.

Safety classification

Level A. Tray printing with a print developer, a stop bath and a fixer in a ventilated darkroom, at the paper datasheet’s own temperatures — 20 °C ± 1 for the developer, and stop and fixer within a degree of it — with nothing heated and nothing volatile. The controls are the standard ones: nitrile gloves and eye protection whenever solutions are handled, tongs rather than fingers, dedicated labelled trays and utensils kept away from food and food utensils, an openable window or an extractor, and the safety data sheet for every product to hand.

One step is raised, and it is not part of this session. If your print developer is mixed from raw chemicals rather than diluted from a concentrate, that mixing is the Level B operation described in Stage 2 and is done under those controls, on a different day, at a bench — not at the sink between prints. The developer arrives at this session as a made-up solution.

What is not a hazard here, and why. Nothing on this page burns, and that is exactly why the gloves are not optional: the risk is cumulative rather than acute. Prolonged skin contact with print developer is the commonest cause of darkroom dermatitis, and its mechanism is sensitisation — a one-way door, after which the reaction happens at doses that never troubled you before. A printing campaign is several sessions of repeated immersion, which is the exposure pattern sensitisation responds to, so a stage that is chemically the mildest in the capstone is also the one where the control most needs to be habitual. Nothing here evolves a gas as written, nothing is heated, and the acid and the thiosulfate meet only in the emulsion layer of a print, in microlitres. The reason that is uneventful is quantity and sequence: the same stop bath poured into the same fixer tray is a very different proposition.

The enlarger and the safelight are used inside their commissioned limits, from Part XVI’s fog test and enlarger commissioning. And the mains boundary applies here as it does everywhere: no lamp is switched by anything other than a bought, certified, sealed appliance used as its maker directs — see Stage 1 for what the course looked for and did not find.

Hazards

What	Why it matters at this bench
Print developer, working strength	Alkaline; the developing agents are skin sensitisers. Prolonged and repeated contact is the hazard, not a splash
Stop bath, dilute acid	Eye irritant. Must not reach the fixer tray or the developer tray
Rapid fixer, working strength	Eye irritant; the spent bath is silver-bearing
Wet floors and a dim room	The most likely thing to actually injure you in a printing session, and it is a housekeeping problem
The enlarger lamp and its heat	Hot after a long session; and a lamp change is done cold and unplugged

Required PPE

Nitrile gloves whenever a tray is worked, and tongs for every transfer — one pair per tray, of visibly different appearance, never interchanged. Eye protection while solutions are poured and while trays are emptied. For handling finished prints, the Library of Congress’s own instruction: freshly washed hands, or lint-free cotton or inert plastic gloves, and no contact with the image surface. That is a control for the print rather than for you, and it belongs in the same list because it is the one people skip.

Ventilation

An openable window or an extractor running for the length of the session, because a stop bath and a fixer are open in the room for hours. This is dilution ventilation for a low-level acid odour rather than the control of a specific vapour; nothing on this page produces one at working dilution and room temperature. A darkroom sealed for light-tightness is still ventilated — Part XVI’s blackout is designed to be light-tight and air-permeable, and if yours is not, the session is run with the door open between sheets.

Materials

Material	Quantity	Note
Enlarging paper, one box	The campaign’s total, plus test strips	One box for the whole set if you can. Record the box code even so
Contact printing paper, if a different grade or surface	as needed	The contact print may be on the same paper; if it is not, that is a set-consistency decision to argue
Unexposed control sheets	1 per processing batch	Carried through for the residual tests in Stage 6
Spotting medium	1 set	Recorded, because a spotted print is a print with a second material on it

Chemicals

Chemical	Quantity per session	Form
Print developer	1 L of working strength	Either a concentrate at the maker’s dilution, or D-72 mixed in Stage 2 and diluted 1:4 for bromide enlarging papers
Citric acid or acetic acid stop bath	30 mL of concentrate	Working dilution per the product sheet
Ammonium thiosulfate rapid fixer	120 mL of concentrate, as two baths	Non-hardening. See the fixing section below
Washing aid	per the maker’s dilution	For fibre-base prints; the price file prices one at £12.83 to £17.99 a bottle

Equipment

The enlarger with its commissioning results; the contact printing frame; the timer; four trays and four pairs of tongs; a thermometer you have verified; a lux meter or a phone application you have checked against one, for the judging station; a safelight inside its fog-test result; a loupe; a washing arrangement; drying racks or blotters; a flattening press or weights. None is consumed and none appears in the table below.

Estimated cost

££ on the planner’s bands. The capital — enlarger, frame, trays, timer — already exists by this point in the course and the planner carries it. The recurring cost is paper, and paper is the row that scales with how many work prints a picture needs, which is the number nobody estimates correctly on the first campaign.

Estimated consumables cost

Every figure with a source is the planner’s own dated UK price and every quantity comes from the Materials and Chemicals sections. The run costed is one printing session: work prints and test strips for two pictures, and two finished prints, on resin-coated paper.

Consumed	This session	Sourced price	Cost this session
Variable-contrast RC paper, 8 × 10 in	20 sheets	£33.50 for 25 to £96.18 for 100	£19.20 to £26.80
Paper developer concentrate	100 mL, at the maker’s dilution	£10.52 per 500 mL to £20.03 per 1 L	£2.00 to £2.10
Stop bath concentrate	30 mL	£10.66 to £12.18 per 500 mL	£0.64 to £0.73
Rapid fixer concentrate	120 mL, as two baths	£21.05 to £25.98 per 1 L	£2.53 to £3.12
Fibre-base paper, if the set is on FB	20 sheets	£47.04 for 25 sheets to £150.28 for 100, glossy variable contrast	£30.06 to £37.63
Washing aid, for fibre-base prints	200 mL of working solution	£12.83 for a powder making 3.8 L of working bath; the file’s other washing-aid listing is a concentrate whose working dilution it does not state	£0.68
Spotting medium	a few drops	The price file could not price it, and it is among the presentation materials the file names as a gap	—

The priced rows come to about £24.37 to £32.75 for one session on resin-coated paper, and that is a floor and not a total: the spotting medium is the one consumable here with no figure behind it. Working the same session on fibre puts the paper row at £30.06 to £37.63 and adds £0.68 of washing aid, which takes it to about £36 to £44 — the fibre premium the part warns about, in money. A six-to-ten-work portfolio will contain something like five to eight sessions of this size, so multiply the paper, developer, stop and fixer rows accordingly. Equipment used and not consumed is in the prose above and deliberately not in this table.

Waste streams

Spent print developer, alkaline, collected separately from anything acidic. Spent stop bath, acidic, kept away from the developer and from the fixer containers. Spent fixer from both baths, silver-bearing, retained for silver recovery — and a print campaign generates far more silver-bearing fixer than a film campaign does, because paper carries more unused halide per sheet. Spent washing aid, which is an ion-exchange bath carrying the thiosulfate it displaced, and goes with the fixer stream rather than the developer one. Wash water, which has no separate container.

Local regulation governs disposal and this page gives no jurisdiction-specific instruction; read the disposal caveat.

Alternative route

This is the stage where the darkroom requirement becomes real, and the page will not pretend otherwise.

The contact print half has a complete alternative. A contact print can be made in a room darkened temporarily — Part XVI’s reversible blackout — under a small lamp whose field you have mapped, with the negative and paper in the frame or under glass and a weight. Processing is tray work at a sink. Nothing about the printing map, the test strip, the dry-down correction, the session log or the remake-from-map test depends on an enlarger. Requirement 8’s contact-print half is therefore fully available without a darkroom in the usual sense.

The enlargement half has none, and that is stated rather than worked around. Magnification, the enlarger’s own contribution to the image, and local control at a distance are precisely what the second half of requirement 8 tests, and a contact print supplies none of them. A reader in that position declares the substitution — obstacle, route, and the requirement it affects — and carries a stated gap. The specification is explicit that the rubric’s honesty criterion can still reach its top band with that gap, because a named limitation is documentation working correctly.

Two partial routes are worth knowing. A borrowed or hired enlarger for two or three sessions is enough for the enlargement half, if the map and the session log travel with you so the prints are comparable with your own. And where the portfolio’s alternative-process print is contact-printed from an enlarged negative, requirement 10 carries some of the interpretive work requirement 8’s enlargement would have — not all of it, but the negative route becomes a place where scale is decided deliberately, and that is worth saying in the documentation rather than losing.

Limited space, or a shared kitchen. The reduced-volume single-tray route: one tray used in sequence with a thorough rinse between baths, chemistry made up for the session rather than by the litre, and everything cleared away afterwards. It costs throughput, and it costs one technical thing worth planning around — two-bath fixing is awkward in one tray, so retire the fixer early on the sheet count rather than stretching it, and record that you did.

Preparation

Select before you print, and select against the intention rather than against quality. Read the contact proof sheet and the control-strip data for each run together. A technically perfect negative of the wrong picture is not a candidate; a slightly difficult negative of the right one is. Mark on the proof sheet, for each candidate: the run it came from, that run’s contrast index, and one line saying what the print has to do.

Decide the presentation format now. Mounted set, portfolio box or bound sequence — because it governs the print size and the borders, and a print trimmed for one format cannot be re-trimmed for another. Stage 6 will not accept a decision deferred to it.

Fix the judging station, as numbers, and describe it once. Part XIX’s station has five recorded quantities and this stage requires the same five: the light source’s type and colour temperature; the illuminance in lux, measured with a meter face up where the print sits; a neutral mid-grey surround larger than the print; the viewing distance, held constant; and a second check at the wall, at the 30 to 100 lux the Library of Congress gives for exhibits, because that is where the print will actually live. The one sourced figure there is the display range; the rest are yours, recorded so that two sessions are comparable.

Prepare every solution before the first sheet, and check that all of them are within a degree of the working temperature. ILFORD’s own instruction, and the reason is that a stop bath five degrees colder than the developer changes the development time of the sheet that meets it.

Procedure

Per picture: the printing sequence

1. A work print at a standard exposure, read against the negative rather than against hope. What the work print is for is deciding what the print has to do, not deciding whether it is good.
2. Base exposure and the black point, by test strip, judged dry by the standard Part XIX establishes, and corrected by your own measured dry-down figure from Part XVIII. The course publishes no general dry-down percentage — Part XVIII established that no manufacturer sheet in the corpus gives one for a developing-out silver gelatin paper, and refused to invent one. If you have not measured yours, say so on the map and treat every exposure as carrying an unknown offset.
3. Contrast decided by filtration or split grade, with the order of the two exposures fixed on the map, because a map that does not fix the order has a variable in it.
4. Local work planned on the map before it is executed. Every move as an area, an increment in stops and the filter it was given through. A burn written as “+3 s” is true at one base exposure, one aperture and one magnification; a burn written as “+1/2 stop” is true at all of them, which is what makes the map portable.
5. The finished print made in one deliberate exposure from the completed map, rather than discovered by iteration. If you find yourself on the fifth version, stop and re-read the map: the map is where the thinking happens, and a print arrived at by accident cannot be repeated.

Per session: the discipline that makes a set possible

6. Batch prints of similar contrast. A session that goes grade 2, grade 4, grade 2 spends most of its time re-establishing a base exposure.
7. Track the developer’s capacity by sheet count, against a published figure where one exists. ILFORD publish, per litre of working strength: 100 RC or 50 FB 8 × 10 prints for MULTIGRADE at 1+9; 70 and 40 at 1+14; 70 and 45 for PQ UNIVERSAL at 1+9; 70 and 45 for BROMOPHEN at 1+3. They also publish the working-solution life: developer left in an open dish is not kept for more than one working day.
8. Replace on a rule rather than a feeling. The rule is a sheet count against the capacity figure, or a stated fraction of it, decided before the session. Record the sheet at which the developer was replaced, because the prints either side of that point are the evidence for whether the rule was tight enough.
9. Fix in two baths, non-hardening, with the capacity of each logged and the rotation run by the SOP. Kodak state that improper fixing is probably the major cause of stains in toned prints, that two-bath fixing gives the best results, and that a hardening fixer is not recommended for prints intended for toning because it makes the emulsion less receptive. At least one print in this portfolio is going to Stage 5’s toner, and you will not know which until the set is laid out — so fix the whole set as though every print were going to be toned.
10. Log the session, one line per batch: date, bath temperatures, the developer bottle and its age, the sheet count against capacity, the paper box code, the fixer rotation state, and the judging station by name.

The repeatability test the specification requires

11. In a later session, print one finished work from its map alone, without looking at the first copy. Then lay the two together and write down where they differ and why.

!What the remake actually tests, and what the session log is for

The map records every decision, and all of those decisions are recoverable: filter, aperture, magnification, base exposure, each local move in stops. What the map cannot record is the state of a bath that no longer exists.

So when the second copy comes out half a stop darker, the map is not necessarily wrong. The session log carries the candidate causes — the tray temperature that day, the sheet count against capacity, the developer bottle and its age, and the paper box code — and the difference is attributed to one of them or declared unexplained. Paper batch variation is one of those candidates and is real, which is why the box code is logged; ILFORD claim print-to-print and batch-to-batch consistency for at least one of their fibre papers, and a claim is a thing to test rather than a thing to assume.

An unexplained difference is a legitimate result and belongs in the documentation. What the specification refuses is a print that cannot be reprinted from its own map at all — that is one of the four failure conditions, and it is demonstrated by trying rather than by inspection.

Finishing

12. Wash to the SOP. For fibre-base prints intended to last, ILFORD’s optimum permanence sequence is one minute’s fixation at 1+4, a five-minute first wash, ten minutes in the washing aid at 1+4 with intermittent agitation, and a five-minute final wash. For resin-coated, a minimum of thirty seconds in vigorous fresh running water — and do not over-wash, because water works in at the cut edge and swells the base.
13. Dry and flatten by the method you recorded, and do not flatten what is still damp. Part XIX runs its finishing lab as two sittings a day apart for exactly this reason.
14. Spot and trim, and record the spotting medium.
15. Carry an unexposed control sheet through every processing batch, processed identically, and keep it. Stage 6’s residual tests read it, and a test on a print processed last month proves nothing about one processed yesterday in a tired fixer.

Expected observations

Work prints will disagree with the contact proof sheet, and that is normal: a proof is made at one exposure for a whole strip and a work print is made for one negative. The disagreement tells you how far the proof’s exposure was from that negative’s.

The set will drift before you notice it drifting. The commonest form is a slow warming of image colour across a session as the developer ages, on a paper whose colour is sensitive to development. The remedy is the sheet count, not the eye, which is why the count is logged.

A print judged wet will look better than the same print judged dry, every time, in the same direction. That is dry-down, and it is a systematic error rather than a random one — which means no amount of careful local work corrects it, and only your own measured figure does.

A remake from the map will usually be close and occasionally not. Close means within the half-stop-ish spread that a different bath and a different day produce. Not close means a variable the map did not record, and the session log is where to look.

What is happening chemically

Two things, both of which the set-consistency problem reduces to.

A print developer’s activity falls as it works, and it falls in a way you cannot see. Development products accumulate, the bromide released from the paper restrains, and the pH drifts as the buffer is spent — and a paper developer has far less reserve per sheet than a film developer has per film, because a sheet of paper carries a great deal of halide over a large area. That is why the capacity is counted in sheets per litre and why the working-solution life in an open dish is one day: the second mechanism is aerial oxidation, and an open tray is a very large air-liquid interface.

Fixing removes silver halide and leaves silver-thiosulfate complexes behind in the paper base. Paper absorbs the fixing solution into its fibres in a way film cannot, which is why the print figures are so much tighter than the film ones. ILFORD publish the boundary as a silver concentration: below 2 g/L for fibre-base prints where a high level of image permanence is required, which is about forty 8 × 10 prints per litre; and below 0.5 g/L for prints needing maximum stability for long-term storage, which is about ten. They add that throughput can only be a guide, because it depends on the proportion of exposed to unexposed area in the prints. Two baths solve the arithmetic by making the second bath one that has fixed almost nothing.

Data to record

Into the lab notebook and one printing map per print.

Per print — the printing map, versioned: negative identifier and its run; paper make, product, surface, weight and box code; developer, its dilution and its age; filter or filters and the order of a split pair; aperture; magnification; base exposure; every local move with its area, its increment in stops and its filter; the dry-down correction applied and where the figure came from; and the version number.

Per session — the session log, one line per batch: date; bath temperatures at the start and end; developer bottle and age; sheet count against capacity and the point of replacement; fixer rotation state and running sheet count; paper box code; judging station; and departures.

Per print — the finishing record: wash route; drying method; flattening; spotting medium; trim size; and the presentation format it was made for.

And the reflection densities, where you can measure them: base white and maximum black under Part XV’s paper-anchor convention — read 24 hours after the sheet is dry to the touch, at five places on each area, mean and spread recorded, relative to your tile serial. Where you cannot measure them, record them as outstanding and use the visual method below; an estimated Dmax entered into the library is worse than a missing one, because later work cannot tell the two apart.

Analysis

The set-consistency problem, as a list of variables

What breaks a set, in the order it usually breaks it

1. 1Developer age within a sessionActivity falls with sheet count and with time in an open tray. Controlled by the count and the replacement rule, not by the eye.
2. 2Developer dilution and temperature between sessionsHeld constant and recorded. A degree of temperature is worth a measurable change in development, which is why every solution starts within 1 °C of the working figure.
3. 3Development timeConstant, to completion, for every sheet. Pulling a print early to lighten it is the fastest way to make one print that does not match the others.
4. 4Paper batchOne box if you can. Where a box changes mid-campaign, re-anchor: reprint one finished work from its map on the new box and compare before printing anything new.
5. 5The judging lightSame lamp, same illuminance, same surround, same distance. Two sessions judged under different light produce two sets.
6. 6Drying and flattening methodAir-dried, heat-dried and glazed prints are not comparable objects, and heat shifts image tone with some paper and toner combinations.
7. 7The interval before judgingJudge dry, and for a density comparison, 24 hours after dry to the touch. A print judged at two different ages is two different prints.

Every item on this list is recorded on the map or in the session log. That is the whole method: the set is held together by the record rather than by attention.

Reading the set as a set

Lay every candidate print out together, under the judging station, at the recorded distance. Then do three things, in this order:

Find the one that does not belong. There is nearly always one, and it is nearly always a print you like. The question is not whether it is good; it is whether it does work the set needs doing. Decide to reprint it — differently, for the set — or to drop it.

Check the categories. At least one contact print, at least one enlargement, and the two of them not the same work. Stage 5 will add the toned print and the alternative-process print, and the specification’s rule is that the four categories may overlap but may not be satisfied by fewer than four separate works. Make sure Stage 5 has candidates to work with.

Then subtract. A portfolio is made by removal, and this is the first of the two places the capstone asks you to do it — the second is Stage 6, where the set is cut to six to ten. Removing a good print because it does not serve the body of work is the specific skill the rubric’s coherence criterion rewards at its top band, and the documentation has to name which print and why.

Where reflection density cannot be measured

If you have not built Part XV’s reflection attachment, three comparisons on this page need a substitute: set consistency, the dry-down correction and the before-and-after of Stage 5’s toning.

The method is a visual comparison against a dried reference, and its terms have to be stated because its precision is not the instrument’s. Keep one dried reference print — the first finished work — as the anchor, and judge every later print against it side by side, edges touching, under the recorded judging station, on a neutral surround. Record the judgement in words and in stops, which is the currency printing works in: “a third of a stop lighter in the mid-tones than the reference, the same at the black point”. The eye is very good at deciding which of two adjacent surfaces is darker and very poor at absolute judgements, so this method works only with the reference physically present.

What it cannot do: give you a number comparable with anybody else’s, resolve a difference smaller than about a quarter of a stop, or support a dry-down figure. Say so in the record, and record the affected rows as measured-by-comparison rather than as densities.

Troubleshooting

What you see	Where it is diagnosed	The discriminating evidence
Blacks that will not go black	The print that will not go black and print faults	A maximum-black test strip on fresh developer. If it goes black, the bath is the fault; if not, the paper or the safelight
A general grey fog on the base white	Safelight, or an enlarger light leak	Run the fog test again on this box of paper. A box that has been open in the room for weeks is not the box the test was run on
An unintended edge gradient	Enlarger uniformity or baseboard alignment	The uniformity map from commissioning. An uneven baseboard produces a gradient that looks exactly like an edge burn
The set warms across a session	Developer ageing, on a paper sensitive to it	The sheet count. Replace on the rule and compare the sheets either side
Prints from the second box do not match the first	Paper batch, or the developer at a different age	Reprint one finished work from its map on the new box, in the same session as a print from the old box
The remake is consistently darker	The bath, not the map: a fresher developer, a warmer tray, or a fixer that has changed	The session log’s temperature and sheet-count rows for both sessions
Stains appearing days later	Fixing, not washing	The fixer’s rotation state and running count for that batch. Kodak name improper fixing as probably the major cause of stains

Clean-up

Empty the trays into their separate containers in the order developer, stop, fixer — never the reverse, and never one into another. Rinse each tray and its tongs and stand them apart; a fixer tray used for developer the following week is a fogged session. Wipe the wet side, then the dry side, then the floor. Wash the frame’s glass and dry it, because a fingerprint on contact glass is a mark on every print made after it. Return unused paper to its box, closed, in the dark.

Storage

Wet prints waiting for a batch wash go by the SOP — flat in clean water, not stacked in the fixer, and for a stated maximum time.

Finished prints, once dry and flat, go interleaved and flat in a box until Stage 6, away from the room where any toning will be done. Do not mount anything yet: Stage 6 makes the mounting decision on conservation grounds, and one class of print in this portfolio will need a different board from the others.

Test strips and work prints are kept, at least until the set is finished. They are the evidence for how a base exposure was arrived at, and the first thing you will want when a remake disagrees.

Disposal considerations

The developer stream is alkaline and carries the developing agents’ aquatic classifications. The fixer stream is the important one here: a print campaign puts far more silver into it than a film campaign, and it is retained for recovery rather than discharged. The stop bath is acidic and is the stream that must never meet either of the others in a container, because acidifying a thiosulfate gives sulfur dioxide and a cloud of sulfur — and the reaction is worse inside a capped waste bottle than in the open. The washing aid is an ion-exchange bath carrying displaced thiosulfate and goes with the fixer.

Local regulation governs disposal, and this page gives no jurisdiction-specific instruction. Check your local regulations; the disposal page explains why the answer is jurisdictional and what the course can and cannot tell you.

Questions

1. Your set is on MULTIGRADE at 1+9 and you have made thirty-eight 8 × 10 fibre prints from one litre. What does the published capacity say, what does your own session log say, and what do you do?
2. A print made in March and remade from its map in November comes out half a stop darker. List the candidate causes in the order the session log lets you eliminate them.
3. You formulated D-72 in Stage 2 and want to use it for the set. What print capacity may you quote, and what must you do instead?
4. Explain why the specification asks for both a contact print and an enlargement, in terms of what enters the image path in each.
5. Your judging station reads 900 lux at the print. What is that good for, what is it not good for, and what second check does the specification require?
6. You have eight finished prints and one of them is the best single picture you have ever made, and it does not belong in the set. Argue both decisions in two sentences each.

Further experiments

Measure your own print developer capacity instead of quoting a published one. Print the same negative from the same map every tenth sheet through a litre and read the results against the first one. The point where the difference exceeds what you can see under the judging station is your own capacity, under your own criterion, for your paper — and if you formulated D-72, it is the only capacity figure you can honestly have, because no print capacity is published for D-72 in either source the course holds, while the same 1949 table carries print rows for D-158 and D-163.

Test the batch claim. If you have two boxes of the same paper with different codes, print one finished work from its map on both, in one session, and compare under the judging station. ILFORD claim batch-to-batch consistency for at least one fibre paper; this is what testing a manufacturer’s claim looks like, and either answer is worth having.

Print one picture at three drying methods. Rack, blotters and warm air, from one map in one session. Read the three dry, 24 hours after dry to the touch. The differences are your own measurement of a variable most printers change without noticing.

Run the remake test twice more. Once at one week and once at three months. The spread across three remakes is the honest precision of your printing map, and it is a number no manufacturer publishes and nobody else can give you.

Check your understanding

Question 1. You mixed D-72 in Stage 2 and want to use it as the print developer for the whole set. What may you quote as its print capacity?

• The 1949 handbook's figure of 24 sheets of 8 × 10 per 160 fluid ounces
• ILFORD's figure for MULTIGRADE at 1+9, since both are paper developers of the same class
• Nothing: no print capacity is published for D-72 in either source the course holds, so the honest route is to measure your own and quote it as your own measurement under your own criterion
• Half the negative capacity, since paper carries about twice the halide of film per unit area

Show the answer and why

Answer: Nothing: no print capacity is published for D-72 in either source the course holds, so the honest route is to measure your own and quote it as your own measurement under your own criterion

The 1949 table carries capacity rows for D-72 on negatives at two dilutions, and print rows for D-158 and D-163 — and no print row for D-72 at all. That absence is the finding, and the same table having print rows for its neighbours is what makes it an absence rather than an oversight in the reading. Borrowing ILFORD's figure would be applying a number measured on an undisclosed formulation to a different one, and the last option is arithmetic on a relationship nobody has published. Measuring your own is straightforward — the same negative from the same map every tenth sheet — and gives a figure you can defend.

Question 2. Why does this stage insist the whole set be fixed as though every print were going to be toned, when only one of them will be?

• Because a hardening fixer would make the prints harder to wash, and washing is checked in Stage 6
• Because you do not know which print will be toned until the set is laid out, and Kodak state that improper fixing is probably the major cause of stains in toned prints and that a hardening fixer makes the emulsion less receptive — so the decision has to be made before the information exists
• Because two-bath fixing is required for all archival prints regardless of toning
• Because the toner would attack a print fixed in a single bath

Show the answer and why

Answer: Because you do not know which print will be toned until the set is laid out, and Kodak state that improper fixing is probably the major cause of stains in toned prints and that a hardening fixer makes the emulsion less receptive — so the decision has to be made before the information exists

The sequencing is the whole point: fixing happens weeks before the toning candidate is chosen, and a print fixed the wrong way cannot be re-fixed into the right condition once its emulsion has been hardened. Kodak give both halves of the reason — improper fixing as the major cause of stains in toned prints, and a hardening fixer making the emulsion less receptive. Poorer washing is a genuine consequence of a hardening fixer and is a good reason on its own, but it is not the one that makes this a scheduling decision. The last option asserts a mechanism the course does not establish.

Question 3. A reader has no enlarger and no prospect of one. What does the specification allow, and what does it refuse to pretend?

• The contact-print half of requirement 8 is fully available, including the map, the test strip, the dry-down correction and the remake test; the enlargement half has no substitute, so it is declared as a gap with the obstacle and the route named
• Requirement 8 can be satisfied entirely by contact prints, since a print is a print
• The capstone is unavailable without an enlarger
• Requirement 8 is waived and the portfolio is reduced to four works

Show the answer and why

Answer: The contact-print half of requirement 8 is fully available, including the map, the test strip, the dry-down correction and the remake test; the enlargement half has no substitute, so it is declared as a gap with the obstacle and the route named

The course's accessibility rule is to give a route and state its cost, and here the cost is unusually clear-cut. Everything that makes a print repeatable — the map, the test strip, the dry-down correction, the session log, the remake from the map alone — works on a contact print under a mapped lamp. What has no substitute is what the enlarger contributes: magnification, its own optical contribution, and local control at a distance. So the honest position is a completed half, a named gap, and a declared substitution; and the rubric is written so that a named limitation does not cost the honesty band, while a silent one does.

Question 4. You cannot measure reflection density. The specification still asks you to hold the set consistent. What method does it give, and what are its stated limits?

• Judge each print in isolation under a standard lamp, and record an impression
• Use a published dry-down percentage and correct every exposure by it
• Keep one dried reference print and judge every later print against it side by side, edges touching, under the recorded judging station, recording the difference in stops — which cannot give a number comparable with anybody else's, cannot resolve much better than a quarter of a stop, and cannot support a dry-down figure
• Estimate the densities from the negative's densities and the paper's published exposure scale

Show the answer and why

Answer: Keep one dried reference print and judge every later print against it side by side, edges touching, under the recorded judging station, recording the difference in stops — which cannot give a number comparable with anybody else's, cannot resolve much better than a quarter of a stop, and cannot support a dry-down figure

The eye is a good comparator and a poor absolute meter, so the method has to put the reference physically beside the sample; without it the judgement is an impression and the first option is exactly the failure mode. No published dry-down percentage exists in this course's corpus for a developing-out silver gelatin paper, which is why Part XVIII refused to invent one and why the second option is unavailable. And the limits are stated as part of the method rather than as a caveat, because a comparison recorded as a density would be claiming a precision it never had.

Check my answersClear