Sean Esopenko

First Colour Prints

July 18, 2011

This weekend I printed my first few colour prints.  I enlarged a bunch of 35mm film to 9×14 inches to get a feel for the roller transport unit and gain some experience with white balancing.  I decided to move on to some 4×5 negatives and print full-sized 16×20′s.  Boy am I happy with the results!  They’re very large, very sharp and the dynamic range is excellent.  The shadows go deep and dark but there’s still plenty of detail to be seen.  While the “dynamic range” may not be as deep as what I see from glossy inkjets from my Epson R3000 the tonality is stupendous.  There are no dot patterns to be seen either, just smooth tonality, even among the finest of details.

The tonal range seems to fall perfectly compared to the troubles I’ve been having with inkjet prints, too.  Part of the reason for the chromogenic RA4 prints looking the way they are is because What You See is What You Get (WYSIWYG).  I make adjustments and alter my approach and I see the results in the final print.  I’m not spending hours and hours on an image, viewing it on the monitor, then lamenting over the print not looking similar to what I see on the monitor.  Removing that intermediary viewing stage makes me concentrate on the final, printed image and I feel the results are great when I’m forced to do so.

While the print on the left required about 6 proof prints to get what you see the print on the right was printed immediately after with the exact same settings.  The results were pretty close to well balanced with a slight bit too much cyan.  Determining the density (brightness/darkness) was easy but colour balancing is turning out to be much more difficult than I thought.  I still need to come up with a good & fast workflow for determining a good colour balance quickly.  At least I have a “starting pack” determined for Ektar 100 4×5 shot in mild shade.  Note taking is much more important when enlarging colour, I’m finding, compared to enlarging B&W.  Overall it’s much more difficult.

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