Fine Print Secrets
How to Become a Better Printer
©Copyright 1997 thru 2008 David Kachel
Article Has Never Been Published. It has previously been used only for workshop instruction.
Having taught quite a few Fine Print workshops I’ve noticed certain consistencies both in the problems students report experiencing prior to attending my workshops and in their remarks about their frustrations while trying to learn to print.
It would seem that most of the difficulties encountered come from two basic sources — students are attempting to learn to print by following flawed rules laid down in books or other workshops — and students have not been taught some of the simple basic concepts that are absolutely necessary to learning to print.
The purpose of this article is to provide you with the necessary conceptual foundation for fine print making along with some basic tools needed to begin. It is assumed you are already capable of making a good straight print and have had at least some minimal experience in fine printing.
In this magazine and many other publications, you will find considerable discussion of fine printing, but little in the way of a concrete definition of what a fine print is. So it is probably best to start there.
For purposes of this discussion, a fine print is one which has two basic qualities:
Unfortunately, both of these qualities are highly subjective. I’ve seen many prints hanging on museum walls which I found to be technically inferior, yet obviously the curator who hung them there, wouldn’t have agreed.
And of course the “emotional impact” of a print varies considerably from one viewer to the next. We’ve all seen prints we “hated.”
However, we can bypass all this “eye-of-the-beholder” discourse by simply stating that for each of us, a print meets the definition of “fine print” when as individuals, we see in the print the two qualities mentioned above. We are after all, making these prints for ourselves first, and the public second.
As photographers and print makers, our problem is not so much how to nail down a bullet-proof definition of a fine print as it is, how to make one that meets with our own approval.
From a practical standpoint, each of us knows what we are trying to achieve and will certainly recognize it when it is done. So the problem at hand is — how to get there from here.
First we need to break the print into some conceptual component parts. Our discussion of print making will make little sense unless we can talk about these different aspects individually. The B&W print exhibits five distinct characteristics: the subject matter of the photograph, its composition, overall contrast, local contrast, and tonal relationships
Although the subject matter of a photograph obviously makes a very large contribution to the final print, the part it plays is fixed at the moment the shutter is released and therefore has no further relevance to a discussion of fine print making.
Save for some few cropping options in the darkroom, the composition of a photograph is also largely fixed at the moment the shutter is released and therefore needs no further discussion beyond labeling it as one of the important qualities of a fine print.
Contrast is a term not as easily nailed down as it would first seem. Technically, contrast describes nothing more than the slope of the characteristic curve. Subjects themselves do not have contrast per se, though we certainly talk about a subject’s contrast often enough. (We’re really talking about the subject’s range of reflectance, not contrast.) Only film and paper have contrast. However, subjects do have local contrast (see below), a fact which adds to the confusion.
When I speak of contrast, I am generally talking about the slope of the characteristic curve of the film or paper in question, as a whole. In the case of fine print making however, contrast most often refers to the range of tones from black to white in the print. (Obviously the former is the cause of the latter, but there is a subtle distinction to be grasped here.) If the blacks aren’t very black and the whites are too gray, we say the print has low contrast. The opposite situation of course would be referred to as high contrast. For sake of clarity, I will refer to this as overall contrast throughout the remainder of this article.
This is a good place to discuss maximum paper black. It is unfortunate that quite a few books and classes teach students to seek out a “maximum black” in their prints or proof sheets. That is, at least a small area of tone that is the darkest black which the paper is capable of producing. Students are often advised to “test” their papers for maximum black. This is a discussion the details of which I will leave for another article, but suffice it to say that for practical purposes, NO GOOD PRINT ever even approaches utilizing the deepest black of which the paper is capable. If it did, the print would be terribly overexposed.
It is often taught that a fine print must have at least a small area of maximum black and another completely white. This is of course nonsense. A fine print must have the tones you desire it to have, and nothing more. Proof of this point can be found in the many beautiful prints in existence that are “high key” or “low key” prints containing only gray tones without true blacks or whites.
The distinction between overall contrast and local contrast can be a bit subtle. However, grasping this concept is vital to acquiring the ability to make a fine print. If you don’t understand the distinction, you will never be able to master fine print making.
Local contrast is that contrast observed between adjacent areas of a uniformly textured and illuminated object. For example, a textured wall in side-lit sunlight. Or the same wall in full shade.
In the case of the side-lit wall, the most protuberant parts of the texture receive direct sunlight, while the rest of the wall is illuminated only by light from the blue sky, resulting in fairly high local contrast. The wall in full shade has no such distinctions in illumination between different parts of its texture and therefore has much lower local contrast.
Local contrast is completely independent of the overall contrast (more correctly, reflectance range) of the subject. For example. If the entire subject of a photograph were the side-lit wall mentioned above, local contrast obviously would be very high, but overall contrast would be quite low because the wall is the entire subject and the reflectance range between the darkest and lightest parts of the subject is quite small. In other words, a two-stop difference between the sunlit and shaded parts of the wall texture is quite a lot for local contrast, but a two-stop range of reflectance for an entire subject is very little indeed. A photograph of just the wall might look terrible (low overall contrast), while a photograph including the wall along with other subject matter, might show that the wall looks just fine (from a standpoint of local contrast). For a more in-depth discussion of local contrast, see "The Primacy of Local Contrast."
If you want to be ignored in life…be a photographer. If you want to be ignored and scorned… be an exceptionally good photographer. If you’re really a glutton for punishment, be a photographic genius. In the latter vein, here’s a name you never heard before: Carl Chiarenza.
One of the most prized possessions in my photographic library is a book of Carl Chiarenza’s photographs. I understand it is the only book he has ever published. The title is, “Landscapes of the Mind.” It is out of print and ridiculously difficult to find. Don’t bother looking. If you attend one of my Fine Print workshops you will get to see it. In my opinion, this alone is worth the price of admission to a workshop. To see these photographs, even as reproductions, is to experience a moment of enlightenment—no, I’m not talking about a religious experience, but rather about the flash of understanding of fine-art photography that seeing these photographs produces. Viewing them, one can instantly come to an understanding of what B&W fine print making is about.
The subject matter of these photographs for the most part is nothing but crumpled paper! In other words, for all practical purposes, there is no subject matter to these photographs at all! The photographs are constructed almost entirely from the other characteristics of a photograph mentioned previously: composition, overall contrast, local contrast and, now we get to the point—the relationships between tones in the photograph.
By tonal relationships I mean the juxtaposition of different tones throughout the photograph. To explore this for yourself, get three pieces of cardboard, one black, one gray (a gray card does nicely) and one white. Arrange them next to each other in all the possible permutations. Note how the apparent tone in each card seems to change depending on the tone of the adjacent card. This effect can also be noted as the physical size of one tonal area gets larger or smaller as compared to another.
Next, make a straight print from one of your negatives. Then make several prints, substantially lighter and darker than the first. Now try a trick borrowed from John Sexton. Tear all the prints except the first, into distinct segments of the subject and piece them back together with the original in different combinations. First try pieces from the darkest print positioned over the same area of the first print, then lighter pieces. You’ll notice that as you change the relationships between tones in the print, the print takes on very different characteristics. This exercise will help considerably in understanding what tonal relationships are about. More on this subject later. Now to the secrets that will help make you a better printer.
Before you can do anything else with a photograph, you must get the local contrast in important areas of the print right. If you do not, the photograph as a whole will never be acceptable.
Each photograph, there are no exceptions, has areas of subject matter that are more important to you than others. These are the areas to which your eye first migrates when you view the photograph. Usually they number only one or two, but there can be several. These areas I refer to as Key areas of local contrast, or the Key Contrast Core. They are areas of primary visual interest and all have one aspect in common — if local contrast in these areas is not right, nothing you do to the rest of the photograph can save it. The photograph simply will not work. It will not be visually appealing. And in many cases, neither you nor the viewer will be able to put your finger on exactly what it is about the photograph that doesn’t work. You’ll just know that it is not right.
Local contrast is controlled by the grade of paper on which you are printing. No amount of dodging and burning or any alterations in exposure will change local contrast. Only a change in paper grade can do this. Since local contrast is of primary importance and can be changed only by changing paper grade, this means that you MUST print your negative on the grade of paper which renders these key areas of contrast best, regardless of the effect that paper grade has on the rest of the print, and the amount of wrestling you must do to bring the negative into line on that grade of paper.
And, since the paper grade on which you will print is one of the very first decisions to be made in the printing process, this means that before you can do anything else, you must get local contrast in these key areas correct. This is the VERY FIRST STEP in fine print making—get local contrast right before you do anything else.
The foregoing flies in the face of conventional wisdom which says that you must print on that grade of paper which matches the density range of your negative. Though seemingly logical on the surface, this conventional approach causes insurmountable problems on a fairly regular basis. The likelihood that the same paper grade will both match the density range of your negative and provide the best local contrast in key areas of importance is very low indeed. And while you can adjust your printing (through dodging and burning) for a mismatch between your negative‘s density range and the exposure scale of your paper, you cannot fix local contrast once you have decided to print on a grade of paper which is not suited to the proper rendition of that local contrast.
How do you get local contrast correct in those key areas? The answer to that question leads us into the next topic…
The only reason this is secret #2 instead of #1 is that you must determine local contrast first. Otherwise this topic is just as important—maybe more so. Here’s what the go too far rule is all about:
When you focus the lens of your camera, you never go directly to the point of sharpest focus. You must instead run back and forth over this point several times in order to recognize where it is. You know it is the point of sharpest focus only because you have been able to see less sharp points on either side of it for comparison. You could not possibly focus a lens adequately if you were forced to move the lens only one time, in one direction. It does not matter how many years experience you have in photography, you still must focus your lens in this trial-and-error way. You will never be able to tell where sharp focus is, unless you can also see where it is NOT.
The same is true in print making. You will never reach the point where you can look at a print and be able to determine if the exposure and contrast of that print are the best they can be. Just as in the focusing example above, you must have something to which you can compare. You must be able to see where exposure and contrast are NOT adequate in order to know where they are adequate. Hence, the go too far rule.
This means that with every negative you print, not matter how much your natural tendencies lead you in another direction (and they will), you must go too far in every possible direction.
You cannot know that the print you have made exhibits optimal local contrast unless you have in your hands for comparison, prints that are obviously too flat and obviously too contrasty. Therefore, no matter how certain you may be that your print exhibits adequate contrast, you must make prints that are both higher and lower in contrast. You should do this in half grade steps until you arrive at a print in which you are certain that contrast is too high or too low. Always be sure to test in both directions. You must have both extremes for comparison.
Do the same with exposure as you do with contrast. Make sure you have prints in which the exposure was too much and too little. This is a bit easier to do than with contrast, but is just as important. You cannot know that exposure was correct unless you have a range of test prints (whole prints, not strips) that are definitely too dark on one end of the range and too light on the other.
Follow this go too far rule throughout the printing process. When you dodge or burn an area, keep adding to the dodge or burn times until you reach a point where you have gone too far. Only then can you successfully determine which preceding dodge or burn time was the correct one. In absolutely everything you do in the print making process, burning, dodging, contrast, exposure, flashing—go too far in every possible direction. If all this sounds like a lot of extra work, it isn’t…
This is necessary work, not extra work. If you don’t do it, your prints will not be nearly as good as they will if you do it. It’s that simple. This is what the big guns in photography do when making a print. If you do it too, your prints will be a lot better, very soon. If you don’t acquire this habit, your prints will never get where you want them to be, because you cannot tell when a print is right unless you have prints that aren’t right, in every possible direction, to which you can compare it!
Always determine exposure based on the most important shadow details, not on the highlights. If exposure is based on highlights, and shadows should be too dark, the only way to lighten them is it resort to dodging, which has a very limited effect (See secret #6), or to use a lower grade of paper, which will ruin the important areas of local contrast.
If exposure is based on important shadows instead, highlights can be burned in if necessary, without limit.
A photograph is most commonly built up from the center outwards. This is because negatives tend to be denser toward the edges. Usually, this means that the starting exposure will be based not only on the important shadow details, but also will be likely to favor the center of the photograph.
Here I should introduce the term base exposure. Base exposure is that exposure which takes place before any burning occurs. It is usually the same as the exposure you would give to an umanipulated, straight print
Even when you follow the go too far rule, sometimes it is very difficult to judge whether contrast or exposure are right. And it often seems that making corrections in one direction or another can lead you into a dead end where, although it seems a print ought to look better, it does not. The reason for this is a very little known characteristic of B&W print making.
It is very common for a print that is simply too light or too dark to appear to be too low or high in contrast. If you then change the contrast of the print instead of changing its exposure, you will not be able to get it to look right. Likewise, a print that is too low or high in contrast, can appear to be simply too light or too dark. If you then change the exposure of this print instead of altering contrast, it too will never look right.
If you are aware of this relationship between exposure and contrast, you can head the problem off before it becomes too serious. The further along in the print making process you happen to be, the harder it is to spot and correct these problems.
When you have a print that seems too dark, simply try a lower paper grade instead. If that doesn’t work, try a higher grade. Make sure (go too far) that the problem you are confronting is in fact one of exposure and not contrast before proceeding. Do the same for prints that seem too contrasty or too flat. Being aware of this problem is 75% of the cure. And after you’ve experimented a few times and successfully uncovered the problem with two or three prints, you’ll be adept at seeing when contrast is likely to be masquerading as exposure and vice versa. Remember, don’t wait until you have doubts. Go too far! Experiment always.
As you create a fine print, you will in all likelihood be building up a complex series of burns that produce the tonal balance and the tonal relationships you desire in the print. Burns add exposure to the areas you intend to burn, but they also add a little exposure to areas you don’t intend to burn. This can’t be avoided. It just is.
As you work you may make a dozen or more test prints, each with a little more burn here, a few seconds extra there, adding first to this corner, then that. After a number of trials, you will have added subtle but significant amounts of burn to the overall print. Soon, you are making a much darker print overall than you ever intended. But since this is a slow and subtle build-up it is very common not to notice.
Something else is taking place as you are constructing your burn scheme. You are very likely lowering the overall contrast of your print! One of the things that takes place while you burn is that much of the light striking the paper is reflected back from the surface of the paper onto the underside of the cardboard you are no doubt using to make your burns. From there, the light is reflected back onto the surface of the paper as a uniform fogging light. If the underside of the cardboard you use for burning is black, this problem is minimized, but if it is a lighter color…
Depending on how long your burn time is, the proximity of the cardboard you use for burning to the photographic paper, and how bright the reflections into the cardboard from the paper are, you may or may not have a considerable amount of extraneous light striking your printing paper. Even if the underside of the cardboard is black, there is still the potential for this problem, though to a lesser degree. The result of this fogging light is the same as that produced by flashing, and although flashing is a wonderful tool when you do it on purpose, it is not such a great thing when it happens accidentally.
The bottom line here is this. When you approach the end of the fine print construction process there is an excellent chance that both the contrast and the overall exposure of your print will be slightly different from what you intended when you started out and because the changes have taken place in small steps and over several hours at least, it is very unlikely you will have noticed these changes.
Therefore you should be aware of these potential and highly likely problems, look for them while you are printing and expect to slowly back off on your base exposure time as you print. You may also have to add small amounts of contrast at the same time.
In addition to losing contrast and gaining exposure, it is also possible that your initial determinations of contrast and exposure will be made invalid as your printing process proceeds, due to the ways in which you decide to interpret certain tones in the print. As you make some tones darker and others lighter, the overall contrast and exposure needs of the image may change. Therefore, not only is it possible that contrast will decrease and exposure increase while you print, it is also possible that the contrast you’ve chose will become too much, and your exposure become too little in relation to the ways in which you’ve altered your interpretation of the image. Fortunately, you never have to try to determine which is which. You need only remember this rule: At the end of the printing process, Always assume you are off target! Most of the time, you will be.
When you’ve reached your final print. Make a print with more exposure, another with less, one at a slightly higher grade of contrast, one at a lower grade. This procedure will show you whether or not you’ve gotten off track, and by how much. (I’ll settle the mystery for you now. You will be off track!) Remember to go too far with these tests too, or you’ll be fooled.
This last group of tests will very often make the difference between a good print and a great print. (And they’re the hardest tests to force yourself to do, because you’re so close to the end of the process.)
Prints look very different under different light intensities and colors. Never judge your print under just one kind of light source. When you know you are nearing the end of the printing process, always take the trouble to carry a print into another room or to a different part of the darkroom to see what it looks like under another type of lighting. The greater the variety, the better. When the print looks good under more than one set of lighting conditions, you’re probably close to home. If it looks good under just one source and awful under another, it is usually trying to tell you something! Don’t ignore it. Make some drastic changes and do some go too far experiments.
If you have a base exposure of 25 seconds, the longest amount of time you can dodge anything is obviously 25 seconds. This makes dodging not an especially useful tool. In particular, if you have two or more areas to dodge, there isn’t much time you can devote to dodging either one of them. But there is more to the topic of dodging than just its limitations…
Dodging is a tool you should need very, very seldom (this does not of course include my "Dye Dodging" technique, which is much more versatile.) When you need it, nothing else will do, but you should hardly ever need it at all. If you are dodging almost every print or dodging a lot on individual prints, something is wrong with your printing technique and you should take a careful look at it to see where it can be improved.
By definition dodging is the removal of unnecessary exposure. Well, if the exposure is unnecessary, it should never have taken place at all. Either the base exposure should have been shorter, or one or more of the burns should have been shortened or eliminated. Sometimes it is necessary to dodge an area during the base exposure so that it can be burned back in with a larger surrounding area in order to make the surrounding area darker than it originally was without a net darkening of the dodged area. But this kind of exception is unusual. Let the need for frequent dodging be a warning to be suspicious of your printing technique.
Here is the chain of events you should be going through to make a fine print. This isn’t everything of course. Nothing can substitute for face-to-face hands-on training, but this will help a lot in the absence of personal instruction.
It is always necessary to settle the question of local contrast before you do anything else. But to do this, you must first establish an approximately correct overall exposure time for your negative on grade 2 paper. (Always start with grade 2 paper, no matter how certain you are it is the wrong grade. It helps a lot to have a constant point of reference with every print you make.) I will often do this step using half sheets of paper so I can economize at least a little. Don’t worry if your exposure time isn’t dead accurate yet because our main concern here is a beginning exposure good enough to let us begin to judge local contrast. An exposure that gives a good looking print overall is sufficient. (i.e., what a commercial B&W lab would call a good print.)
Then make a full sized print at that exposure on grade 2 paper. (Don’t waste your time with small strips of paper. They are a false economy and usually result in additional waste of time and paper, not savings.)
Now make identically exposed prints (full size) on several grades of paper (half-grade steps are best) both above and below grade 2. Make sure to go in both directions, no matter how convinced you are that one direction is a waste of time. Keep making additional prints until you reach both a lower grade and a higher grade that are obviously too far—both too flat and too contrasty. Compare the key areas of local contrast in all the prints and decide which one exhibits the ideal local contrast for that particular subject. This is the grade of paper on which this negative must be printed until circumstances dictate otherwise.
Occasionally you will see that several different grades of paper render the local contrast of a key area well, and it is difficult to decide which grade to use. Don’t panic. It is generally the lowest grade that renders the key area of local contrast well that is the one to use. But when you have doubts, it is very easy to decide. Just look at other important areas of the print and at overall contrast to determine which of your several options will work out best. If you are still in doubt, don’t worry. Doubt means that whatever mistake you might make will be a small one and you will have ample opportunity later in the printing process to discover and correct that mistake.
Now that preliminary establishment of local contrast for the key areas has been established you must move on to balancing the print and zeroing in on a more accurate base exposure.
The reason you were told above not to bother with more than an approximate exposure at the beginning is that virtually all fine prints have a lot of heavy burning applied to them. Since we know that burning increases overall exposure too, there is no point in going to a lot of trouble to determine a starting base exposure when we know that exposure is going to change substantially as we proceed anyway. The base exposure is something that is usually altered continuously throughout the process of building a fine print.
Previously I mentioned “balancing” a photograph. This is a good place to explain what I mean by that. What most people think of as being the things they do to make a final print, I refer to as “balancing.” This is the dodging and burning you do to bring the print into line—to balance it out—to make sure the photograph doesn’t get progressively lighter toward the edges or that certain parts aren’t slightly too dark or too light to fit in with the rest of the print. Balancing usually involves a number of fairly broad and substantial burns, and among other things, includes what Ansel Adams referred to as edge burning.
As you add these burns that will balance out the photograph, your base exposure will of course require alteration. (Usually it needs to be shortened.) It is at this stage, while you are balancing the print, that you need to zero in on a more accurate base exposure. It is not at all uncommon to begin printing with a starting base exposure of 30 seconds for example, and end up with a final base exposure closer to 15 seconds. This should give you an idea just how much things can change while you are adding burns to a print.
After local contrast and base exposure have been determined and your print has been effectively balanced (the process can take hours up to this point), it is time to look more closely at the aesthetic interpretation of your photograph. In other words, at its tonal relationships.
How you proceed depends on the approach with which you are most comfortable. Many people work well with Sexton’s technique of tearing prints made at substantially different exposures and piecing them together like a jigsaw puzzle to see which tonal relationships are going to work out best. I’ve had many students who have been pleased with this approach and it has worked for them. Be certain to put print numbers on the backs of all the pieces or you WILL lose track of which piece came from which photograph.
I prefer another approach, only because I find the jagged white edges of the torn prints too distracting for me to be able to make sound judgements. I simply make whole prints with some areas lighter and some darker to see which ones work out the best. My approach takes a little longer and perhaps even uses more paper, but works better for me. If you don’t mind the jagged white edges, you’ll probably find Sexton’s approach the easiest.
Adjusting tonal relationships in a photograph is nothing more than a big game of what if. What if I made this darker, what if I made that lighter, etc. This is the place to let go of all your inhibitions, try everything that occurs to you, no matter how impossible it may seem, and explore what you can get out of your print. Go wild and leave no stone unturned. It is often here that mere competence turns into genius.
Earlier I mentioned the work of Carl Chiarenza. Seeing this work makes it immediately apparent just how important tonal relationships are to a B&W photograph. They are everything. Spend as much of your time at this stage of the printing process as necessary. This is definitely the most important part of the entire print making craft. If you do not produce tonal relationships that speak to your viewer, your photograph will not work. The relationships between tones in a photograph are so important, that Chiarenza realized a photograph can almost survive on tonal relationships alone. And he proved it with his photographs.
Once you have established the tonal relationships you want in your print you are nearly done. At this point you should consider whether or not you wish to apply any dye dodging. See the article mentioned previously.
You will recall my mentioning earlier that by the time you get to your final print, chances are excellent that you will have altered the contrast and overall density of your print from what you had originally intended and that since these changes will have been slow and subtle, you are not likely to be completely aware of them.
Therefore you must consciously and religiously check for these changes before you settle on a final print. Once you think you have “arrived” at your final print, make several more prints at slightly higher and lower grades of contrast and at slightly greater and lesser exposures. Just follow the go too far rule again with both paper grade and exposure. (By now, you’ll know exactly what and how to do it.) You will be very surprised, because if you do this religiously, you’ll find you change both exposure and contrast at least slightly on more than half of the photographs you thought were final prints.
Once you’ve done this final double-checking of exposure and contrast, you’re done. You have your final print in your hands and only need to make some additional copies.
If you’ll follow ALL of the guidelines given in this article, you’re almost guaranteed to see a significant improvement in your prints, in a very short period of time. This approach has worked for just about every fine print student I‘ve ever had, and it will work for you too.
1997
David Kachel