Originally Posted by
Drew Wiley
From a practical standpoint, if you compress the shadows during exposure, that's like a one-way street. Not a versatile negative. But if the neg has good separation in the shadows to begin with, you can always modify the result printing, any number of ways. In other words, overexposing the film a bit is generally more helpful than underexposing it. Shadow separation occurs when the exposure is boosted up onto the straight line portion of the film, rather than remaining on the toe; but different types of film differ on how far down the scale this begins. Some have much longer toes than others. But I'm speaking in principle here. Ultimately, we use these choices aesthetically, for how we wants things to look. But that's hard to arrive at without some distinct printing experience. So my advice would be to achieve a versatile negative rather than one which straight-jackets your printing into limited options. All of this becomes quite easy with a bit of practice.
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