Film for masking

Can anyone recommend a readily available 4x5 sheet film and/or exposure and development techniques that would be suitable for contrast masking?

Wayne: "Can anyone recommend a readily available 4x5 sheet film and/or exposure and development techniques that would be suitable for contrast masking?" Hi Wayne, these are the notes I made when our group made unsharp masks - I am sure there are others who can contribute as well.
We use FP4+ film in 5x7 sheets, as we can get at least a couple of medium format negs on that, or a 4x5 neg; develop the masks in Kodak HC 110 film developer.

With the room light on:
Put a framing L-shaped cardboard, to use as a guide, inside the contact frame. (Later, we will be placing the unexposed film against the in-side edges of the L-shape.) Centre the part of the contact frame which will hold your neg right under the enlarger lens.
Tape the previously developed film negative (for which you need a mask) on top of the contact glass, notches to the bottom right corner for emulsion side down, in the same position as you will be placing the unexposed film.
With the room light off:
Place a sheet of unexposed 4x5 FP4 film against the inside two edges of the L-shape, below the glass in the contact frame, notches to the bottom right corner for emulsion side up. Expose for 3 seconds at F32. Remove film and place in film box. (we do several sheets of masks at a time)

Developing the Unsharp Mask
With the room light off, transfer the film sheets from the box into the 4x5 development tank. Finish the development process with the room light on.

Pre-mix the developer: 12 ml of HC 110 developer and fill to 1600 ml with water.
Pre-mix for the 2nd wash: 1600ml of water with approx 1/3 of an eyedropper of photoflow.
Fill the stop, fix and pre-soak jugs to 1600 ml.
Using a 1600 ml 4x5 sheet film tank:
1 minute pre-soak; 3 minutes Developer, 30 seconds stop bath; 5 minutes fixer, 5 minutes 1st wash. Discard the wash water. Add the premixed 2nd wash water/photoflow mixture and soak for 1 minute. Hang to dry.

Later, on a backlit slide box, match the unsharp mask with the negative, tape them together. Others use pin registration systems.

Thank-you for your information. It definately helps me. Well, I have plenty of experimentation to do, but I'm off in the right direction. :)

I've used TMX with plain ID-11 but can't recall the exposure/development details - I'd have to look at my notes. In post-exposure Ctein recommended TMX and provided the details for a colour neutral developer (uses readily available chemicals) which is probably what I'll use when next I need to mask something. I believe you can download a pdf of the book from his website.

Both TMX100 and FP4+ are excellent masking films. How you do it depends completely on
what you are trying to achieve. Chome masking, color neg masking, and b&w neg masking
are all somewhat different and all depend on the specific print medium as well. Several
developers work well but my favorite is very dilute HC-110, but again, the exact DMax,
contrast, and color balance of the exposing light under the enlarger are all application
dependent. Ctein used a developer he named Muir Softshot, but has also successfully
experimented with my own developer which I tweaked for very critical dye transfer masking
and gives a straighter line clear down into the toe of the film.

Oh I should add ... if you are serious about this you'll want to acquire some sort of precision punch system and matching pin-register contact printing frame. For just learning
purposes you can simply register and tape over a light box. Ordinary 76 developer can be
used for basic experimentation, but and you might want to aim initially at with a DMax no greater than .30 and work your way from there with printing experience. If you don't have a densitometer you can just compare density visually using a graphics step tablet.

Hi Wayne,
As Drew Wiley mentinoned a dmax of 0.3 is what we aimed for. The image on the mask if very light, looks almost non-existent, but it works wonderfully when sandwiched with the neg.

That's what I figured. Lith masking film was recommended to me, but that doesn't seem to be readily available. So controlling contrast and exposure through development would be the logical(?) progression.

My use would be masking for color enlarging. I have a particular negative in mind that I think would benefit from it.

Lith film is no good for general masking. It's made for high contrast. Contrast masking is just the opposite and requries a very soft gradual scale. What lith film is used for is highlight masking, which is an advanced tool you can use once you master basic contrast masking. Take things a step at a time. Learn what a simple mask will do first. The easiest
way to diffuse the image in contact its with an intervening sheet of 3-mil or 5-mil mylar
which is frosted on both sides. You can get this at better art stores and cut in down into
film-sized sheets.

Lith film makes the best masking film as it gives a very wide range of contrast, is fine grained, and relatively inexpensive. However, due to changes in the printing industry it is getting harder to find. I have found http://www.ultrafineonline.com/ulhicoorlifi.html to be a good replacement for my previous favorite Arista Lith film. I develop it in various dilutions of Dektol.

Lith film is not pan for one thing. This makes it useless for color masking and a distinct
liability when masking pyro negs due to the stain of the original image. It's not particularly
predicatable batch to batch. Dektol gives a fair amt of residual fog. This approach might
be acceptable for certain personal uses, but it's a pretty bad starting point for any objective learning of masking skills, esp if one wants to ever get to second base. The key
to high quality contrast masking is to have a very low contrast dimensionally stable image
registered with a straight line as far down as possible, and a minimum amt of base and edge fog. Even old time Pan Masking film had a horrible toe to it. It was basically Plus-X
minus the antihalation layer. With FP4 and TMX and certain very dilute tweaks of HC-110
you can be properties much closer to ideal, plus use correction filtration relative to color
response (which in fact is a factor often in even black and white masking).

Wayne - there are some distinct tricks for getting good contrast masks for color neg work.
But before you ever get to that point ... if you haven't already done so, make a master
neg of something like a MacBeath color chart and gray scale. Do this under exactly correct
color temp and exposure conditions. This will save you a lot of headaches later on. Then
use a color temp meter to also determine what settings on your colorhead basically bring
it to approximately "daylight" as opposed to strongly tungsten warm-balanced. You'd need
to cool the light. Once you get there, you can add something like a Hoya O (light orange)
filter under the lens to "see through" the orange mask. If you also want to correct for the
depressed green sensitivity of pan film also add a Hoya XO or lt yellow-green. This will
allow your pan film to see the color neg film color-neutral. Quite a different game than
masking chromes.

I've used tmx 100, fp4, efke 25, and lith film. All of them worked very well.

Andrew - none of those films have anything in common. Ekfe 25 is orthopan, so won't separate well with a deep red or magenta mask, and it's very high contrast. Lith films are
mainly blue sensitive and somewhat green sensitive, so can't objectively balance color film
at all. Have you ever done color film masking? I've done it for dye transfer, Cibachrome,
and color neg, plus b&w - up to eight different masks for a single image. I have thousands of dollars of very specialized equip on hand for specialized masking and color sep work, some of it unique. So I'm not guessing.

Let me clarify that last post a bit - Lith film is ortho - it's essentially blind to the predominant orange cast of a color neg. And what little color might get thru is only a very
narrow part of the spectrum (mainly cyan - so the complement, red, is the only category of color in the original scene that get's masked). You'd end up with some very other-wordly
results if you managed to get past the neutral density issue at all. True pan film, on the
other hand, can be selectively filtered not only for overall corection, but also for selective
correction.

This gets confusing. It seems there's more than one way to skin a cat here. Kodak recommends their PAN masking film for contrast reduction, whereas other publications I have read, recommend lith film. And I beleive another Kodak publication recommended lith. Only connection being that they're high contrast.

Also heard recommendations for lith in B&W contrast reduction as well.

For a contrast increase, they recommend Speration Negative Film for the interpositive. Which I assume is also PAN as they recommend adding a 60B + 30M, to counter the base tint.

OK Wayne ... first of all, that Kodak literature is very out of date, and none of those three
films have been made for a very long time. Their lith film, like most, was ortho, so used only
for highlt maksing, which is different from contrast masking, though sometimes used in
conjunction. True pan high contrast masking was done with Tech Pan. So nowadays we need a completely different tool kit as far as films are concerned. More recently Arista APH
II was available as an excellent Ortho lith film, and it could be adapted for general black and white film masking, but not for general color contrast masking (It was about 75% blue
sensitive, 25% green, and 0 red). And indeed, once the basic concepts are mastered,
there are plenty of ways to skin the cat, and that's the fun and creative aspect of this.

Now to add to the above, Wayne... For color neg maksing you want a very gentle mask
with a low DMax but good gradation or tone separation the entire range of the original.
If the mask is not proportional over the whole range, you'll end up with a color shift between the extremes. And too harsh a mask and you'll blow out the high values. With
Cibachromes sometimes a mask of up to .90 might be used, and with dye transfer all kinds
of things come into play (and you'll still see these kinds of specs in old literature); but with
RA4 work from color negs, you want something much softer, and preferably with a straight
line so that all the values in the original receive equal treatment. You also need neutral
color response, at least until you learn what deliberate corrections you might want to introduce afterwards. I've made thousands of masks for all kinds of things, but started out
just as simply as you are. So just try to get to first base first, and see if you like it.

Ha ha. Drew, I think it's safe to say that the literature is VERY, VERY out of date. ;) But provides a little primer for me anyhow. Thanks for all your help. Time to either digest all the information, or start wasting film. Or combination of both. Heh.

Masking color neg film was almost unheard of until quite recently. In the
good ole days if you wanted a snappy print it would be done from chromes onto dye transfer then later Ciba, so almost all the suggestions
relative to masking were somehow involved with these kinds of things.
And there were a few nearly hypothetical things published for making color separation negs from color negs. Color negs like Vericolor were supposed to be used for soft portrait images etc. Nowadays we have some exciting new toys like Portra and Ektar which respond well to both
constrast reduction and contrast increase masking, and RA4 has become
convenient and affordable, so it's gonna be fun!