Split Grade Printing

The picture above was shot on my iPhone of a print I made this weekend.  The image above is how I had seen the image and it is how I pictured the final print looking.  To be clear the line in the middle of the column was actually there and is not a scratch on the negative!

The problem I encountered was that the negative has a massive dynamic range which gave me way too much contrast.  I needed to mute the blacks but still give punch to the highlights and mid tones.  I needed to do some split grade printing!

Fortunately for me, one of my favorite YouTubers just happened to have a video on how to split grade print (linked below) which walked me through the process.  I thought I would show my own experiences through it.

The picture above is the first print I made (after the test strips of course).  I determined that I needed 10 seconds to display the sky and give sufficient weight to the highlights. But it rendered everything very dark. Now I could opt to do some dodging and burning, but this would have been very difficult and taken ages.  I could have exposed for less time, but the print would have been too soft.  

Ilford has multigrade paper which is designed to work with their filter system.  Here you use the filter before the negative (they have different style filters for above and below the negative but they work the same way) which allows you to control contrast of your image. 

Now I typically use these to add some punch to a print or to soften it a bit. Most of my work only requires the use of a single filter making it nice and easy.  So I began trying only one, softer filter.

In the image above I only used a 0 filter to soften the contrast down.  I used this at 15 seconds (a full 5 seconds more than the very dark print above) and now I have all the detail that I want in the trees and lower portion of the image.  My issue is that I lacked a bit of the punch I needed in the middle tones and highlights.  

So I decided to add a 3 filter after laying the 15 seconds of 0 filter.  So I put a new sheet and ran 15 seconds under 0 filter, and without moving the negative or the paper, I changed the filter to a 3 filter for 5 seconds.

This gives me the cloud punch I wanted, a bit more contrast to the column but keeps the blacks under control.  

While the iPhone images are not perfect, I hope you can see what I was after.  The final prints came out very nicely.  I made a few copies of the image to add a bit of vignetting and a bit more time on the clouds and was done. 

A new skill learned, tried and now I will open a bottle of wine and enjoy the print.

I would like to give a special shout out to "Shoot Film Like a Boss" for the very informative video.  I have been watching his videos for the past few months and really love what he puts out.  I highly recommend his channel!