Printing

Development transforms the latent image into a visible negative. Printing transforms that negative into a positive image — a photograph you can hold in your hands, hang on a wall, or pass to a friend. The darkroom print is not merely a reproduction of the negative; it is an interpretation, shaped by dozens of decisions the printer makes about exposure, contrast, cropping, and local tonal adjustments. Many of the greatest photographers — Ansel Adams, W. Eugene Smith, Edward Weston — considered printing to be at least as important as the act of taking the photograph.

In this lesson, we will explore the entire printing process: from the mechanics of the enlarger to the subtle art of dodging and burning that can transform a good negative into a great print.

The Enlarger

An enlarger is, at its core, a projector designed to work with photographic negatives. It projects an enlarged image of the negative downward onto a baseboard, where a sheet of light-sensitive photographic paper receives the exposure. The basic principle is the same as a slide projector, but with the image projected downward rather than forward, and with precise controls for focusing and sizing the image.

The enlarger head contains several components stacked vertically. At the top is the light source — traditionally an incandescent bulb, though many modern and rebuilt enlargers use LED or cold-cathode light sources. Below the lamp sit condenser lenses (or a diffusion chamber, depending on the enlarger type) that distribute the light evenly across the negative. The negative carrier is a flat holder that clamps the film strip and holds a single frame perfectly flat in the light path. Below the carrier is the enlarger lens, which focuses the projected image on the baseboard.

The enlarger head rides up and down the column, a vertical rail attached to the heavy baseboard. Moving the head higher projects a larger image (greater magnification) but requires more exposure time because the light is spread over a larger area — the inverse square law at work again. Moving the head lower produces a smaller print with shorter exposure times. A focusing knob adjusts the lens-to-negative distance to bring the projected image into sharp focus at whatever height the head is set.

Condenser vs. Diffusion Enlargers

The two main types of enlarger illumination — condenser and diffusion — produce noticeably different print qualities.

A condenser enlarger uses paired glass lenses to focus the light source into a concentrated, directional beam. This produces sharp, contrasty prints with pronounced grain and fine detail. However, condenser enlargers also mercilessly reveal every dust particle and scratch on the negative, as the directional light casts hard shadows from surface imperfections. They also exhibit the Callier effect — the denser areas of the negative scatter more of the collimated light, increasing the effective contrast of the print by approximately half a grade compared to diffusion printing.

A diffusion enlarger uses a translucent panel, mixing chamber, or cold-cathode tube to scatter the light evenly before it reaches the negative. This softer illumination minimizes the appearance of dust and scratches and produces smoother tonal gradations. Diffusion enlargers are gentler to work with and more forgiving of less-than-perfect negatives. Most modern enlargers, including the widely used Beseler and Durst models, use diffusion illumination. Color enlargers with built-in dichroic filter heads are inherently diffusion designs.

Printing Paper

Photographic printing paper is coated with a silver gelatin emulsion, just like film, but optimized for a different purpose. While film needs to record a wide range of tones (a large dynamic range), printing paper needs to display tones within the narrower range that can be perceived under room lighting — from the deepest black the paper can produce to the white of the paper base itself. This range is typically about 1:50 to 1:100 (roughly 6 to 7 stops), compared to a negative's 1:1000 or more (10+ stops).

Printing paper comes in two physical types. Fiber-based (FB) paper consists of the emulsion coated directly on a baryta-coated paper substrate. Fiber-based prints have a depth and luminosity that many printers consider superior. They are also more archival — properly processed fiber prints can last centuries. The tradeoff is that fiber paper is more difficult to process: it absorbs chemicals into the paper fibers, requiring much longer washing times (30 to 60 minutes versus 5 minutes for resin-coated paper), and it tends to curl as it dries, requiring flattening or dry-mounting.

Resin-coated (RC) paper has the paper base sealed between two layers of polyethylene, which prevents chemicals from soaking into the paper fibers. This makes processing much faster — shorter wash times, quicker drying, and the prints lie flat. RC paper is excellent for work prints, contact sheets, and everyday printing. Most beginning printers start with RC paper and move to fiber-based paper for exhibition-quality prints.

Contrast Grades and Multigrade Paper

Printing paper must match the contrast range of the negative. A flat, low-contrast negative needs high-contrast paper to produce a print with a full range of tones. A contrasty negative needs low-contrast paper to tame the extremes.

Traditionally, paper was manufactured in fixed contrast grades from 0 (very low contrast, soft) to 5 (very high contrast, hard), with grade 2 being "normal." A printer kept several boxes of different grades on hand and chose the appropriate one for each negative.

Modern multigrade (or variable-contrast) paper, such as Ilford Multigrade V or Kodak Polymax, revolutionized this system. These papers have two emulsion layers — one sensitive to blue-violet light (which produces high contrast) and one sensitive to green light (which produces low contrast). By filtering the enlarger light, the printer can dial in any contrast grade from 0 to 5 in half-grade increments, all on a single box of paper. Ilford's Multigrade filter set is the most widely used system, consisting of numbered filters from 00 to 5 that fit beneath the enlarger lens or in a filter drawer.

Making a Test Strip

The first step in printing any negative is determining the correct exposure — how long the enlarger light needs to be on to produce a properly exposed print. Since you cannot see the effect of the exposure until the paper is developed, you use a test strip to find the right time efficiently.

To make a test strip, you cut a piece of printing paper into a strip about 5 cm wide (doing this under safelight, of course — printing paper is sensitive to blue light but safe under amber or red safelight illumination). Place the strip on the baseboard so it covers an area of the projected image that includes a good range of tones — ideally some shadows, midtones, and highlights.

Using a piece of opaque card, you progressively expose different sections of the strip. A common method is to expose the entire strip for 5 seconds, then cover one-fifth with the card and expose for another 5 seconds, cover two-fifths and expose again, and so on. This gives you bands of 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25 seconds of exposure across the strip.

Develop the test strip in paper developer (such as Ilford Multigrade Developer or Kodak Dektol) for the standard time (typically 60 to 90 seconds), stop, fix, and examine it under white light. One band will look best — good detail in the highlights, rich shadows, and pleasing midtones. That is your exposure time for the full print.

The Printing Workflow

With the exposure time determined from your test strip, the full printing process follows a systematic workflow:

1. Setup. Place the negative in the carrier, emulsion side down (so the image reads correctly on the baseboard). Insert the carrier in the enlarger. Turn on the enlarger lamp and compose the image on the easel — an adjustable frame with blades that hold the paper flat and create clean white borders. Adjust the head height for the desired print size and focus the image carefully using a grain focuser, a small magnifying device that lets you see the actual grain structure of the negative on the baseboard.

2. Expose. Turn off the enlarger. Under safelight, place a fresh sheet of paper in the easel, emulsion side up. Set the lens aperture (typically f/8 or f/11 for sharpness), set the timer, and expose.

3. Develop. Slide the exposed paper into the developer tray, emulsion side down, then quickly flip it. The image begins to appear within 15 to 30 seconds — first the highlights, then the midtones, gradually deepening toward the shadows. This is the moment that hooks every darkroom printer: watching a photograph materialize from a blank white sheet. Develop for the full recommended time (do not pull the print early if it looks dark enough — cutting development short produces mottled, uneven tones).

4. Stop. Transfer the print to the stop bath tray for 15 to 30 seconds. Use tongs or gloves — never put your bare fingers in the developer and then the stop bath, as contamination degrades both solutions.

5. Fix. Transfer to the fixer tray for the recommended time (1 to 2 minutes for RC paper, 5 to 10 minutes for fiber-based paper). The fixer dissolves any remaining light-sensitive silver halides, making the image permanent.

6. Wash. Wash the print in running water. RC paper needs only 5 minutes; fiber-based paper requires 30 to 60 minutes, or can be treated with a hypo clearing agent (such as Kodak Hypo Clearing Agent or Ilford Washaid) to reduce wash times to 10 to 20 minutes.

7. Dry. RC prints can be squeegeed and air-dried on a rack or line. Fiber prints need to be dried carefully to minimize curling — they can be placed face-down on fiberglass screens, hung from clips, or dried in a heated print dryer.

Dodging and Burning

A straight print — one exposed uniformly for a single duration — rarely represents the best possible interpretation of a negative. Almost every fine print involves some degree of local exposure control: selectively lightening or darkening specific areas to draw the viewer's eye, reveal shadow detail, or tame bright highlights.

Dodging means holding back light from an area during the main exposure, making it lighter in the final print. The tool is simple: a small piece of card or a circle of wire-mounted cardboard, held between the lens and the paper during part of the exposure. The dodging tool is kept in constant gentle motion to avoid leaving a visible edge. A photographer might dodge a face in shadow, or a dark foreground that would otherwise block up to featureless black.

Burning is the opposite: giving extra exposure to specific areas after the main exposure. The printer uses a card with a hole cut in it (or simply cups their hands to create an opening) and exposes additional light onto the area that needs to be darker. Burning is commonly used to darken skies, deepen the corners of a print (to hold the viewer's eye in the frame), or add richness to highlight areas that would otherwise appear washed out.

Ansel Adams was a master of dodging and burning, and his printing notes reveal the extraordinary complexity of his interpretations. His famous print "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico" required extensive burning of the sky and dodging of the luminous crosses in the cemetery — the straight print looked nothing like the masterpiece we know. Adams wrote that the negative is the score and the print is the performance, comparing the relationship to that between a musical composition and its interpretation.

Contact Sheets

Before deciding which frames to enlarge, most darkroom printers make a contact sheet (or proof sheet) — a print of every frame on a roll at actual negative size, made by placing the negatives directly on a sheet of printing paper (8x10 inches for a full roll of 35mm, or for a roll of 120 film) and exposing through them with the enlarger set to evenly illuminate the entire sheet.

Contact sheets serve as a visual index of the roll. You can evaluate composition, expression, sharpness (with a loupe), and sequence. Photographers use grease pencils or markers to annotate the contact sheet — circling frames to print, marking rejects with an X, noting cropping ideas. The contact sheet is the editor's primary tool, the bridge between shooting and printing.

For medium-format film — the 6x6 cm negatives from a twin-lens reflex, for example — contact sheets are particularly useful because the images are large enough to evaluate at 1:1 size. A 6x6 contact print is essentially a small but perfectly sharp finished photograph. Many photographers of the Rolleiflex era, including Vivian Maier, left behind extraordinary contact sheets that reveal their editing process and the outtakes surrounding their most famous images.

Toning

Toning is a chemical treatment applied to a finished print that alters either its color, its permanence, or both. The two most common toning processes are selenium toning and sepia toning.

Selenium toning (using Kodak Rapid Selenium Toner or equivalent) converts the silver in the print image to silver selenide, which is far more stable than metallic silver. A brief selenium treatment (1 to 3 minutes in diluted toner) provides archival protection with minimal color change — just a subtle deepening of the blacks and a slight cool-purple shift in the midtones. Many fine-art printers selenium-tone every print as standard practice, regardless of whether they want the color shift, purely for the archival benefit.

Sepia toning converts the silver image to silver sulfide, producing warm brown tones that evoke the look of antique photographs. Sepia toning is a two-step process: the print is first bleached (which converts the silver back to silver halide), then redeveloped in the sepia toner, which converts the silver halide to silver sulfide. The degree of bleaching controls how much of the image shifts to sepia. Partial bleaching produces a split-tone effect with warm highlights and cool neutral shadows, which many printers find particularly beautiful.

Other toning options include gold toning (which shifts tones toward blue-black and is extremely archival), iron blue toning (producing prussian blue tones), and various combination toning sequences that produce complex color effects by exploiting the different sizes of silver particles in shadow and highlight areas.

The Emotional Experience of Darkroom Printing

There is something irreplaceable about the darkroom experience. The amber glow of the safelight. The smell of chemistry — the slight bite of the stop bath, the faintly sweet developer. The total focus required when making an exposure, counting seconds, moving the dodging tool. And then the moment of truth: sliding the exposed paper into the developer tray and watching the image slowly surface from the white void.

No digital process replicates this. The image appears gradually, like a memory surfacing. First the darkest tones — the outlines and deep shadows. Then the midtones fill in, giving the image shape and dimension. Finally the subtle highlight details emerge. After about 45 seconds, the full image is visible, and you can see whether this print is the one — or whether you need to go back to the enlarger and try again.

Many photographers who have worked in both darkroom and digital printing describe the darkroom print as having a physical presence that inkjet prints approximate but do not quite achieve. A silver gelatin print on fiber-based paper has a tonal depth, a subtle luminosity in the highlights, and a richness in the blacks that comes from actual metallic silver particles suspended in gelatin on a baryta-coated paper base. The image is not on the surface; it is in the paper.

Whether you ultimately pursue darkroom printing or prefer to scan your negatives and work digitally (which we will cover in Lesson 19), understanding the printing process enriches your photography. The concepts of dodging and burning, contrast control, and tonal interpretation all translate directly to digital editing. The language of the darkroom is the language of photographic seeing.

In the next lesson, we will step back from technique and explore the Zone System — a framework for connecting what you see in the field to what you want in the print, bridging the entire chain from metering a scene to producing a finished image.