Hello,
and thank you very much for the tips. It’s not all that straightforward, is it? Would it be an option to simply use colour film and make black-and-white prints from that? I mean, there’s that pesky orange mask.
Best regards,
Andreas
Hello,
Unfortunately, it’s not just the orange mask that’s a problem; the colour image itself isn’t particularly suitable for prints on black-and-white paper.
Black-and-white paper is (in the simplest case of fixed-grade papers) essentially only sensitive to blue light – a fact that is exploited, for example, in darkroom lighting.
However, your colour negative also contains green (which was red in the original), yellow (originally blue) and red (-- green) areas. The paper does not ‘see’ these, however, as it has little speed in responding to these colours.
The result is a rather odd conversion of grey tones (essentially, only what was blue in the negative – i.e. the yellow shades of the original – is reproduced) and the loss of image information, as structures in some coloured areas are not reproduced.
With multigrade paper, things get really interesting, as the gradient there is controlled by the light colour. You end up with some parts of the image rendered extra-hard, some normal and others extra-soft (and half the image information is still missing, as yellow/orange to red are not reproduced).
That is why, ‘in the old days’, some suppliers offered panchromatic black-and-white paper that was sensitive to all colours (and therefore had to be processed in complete darkness or under darkroom lighting designed for colour papers). Unfortunately, all these products – such as Kodak Panalure – have been discontinued.
Regards
Christian
