Let’s open a new can of worms- “best color for the enlarger’s table surface?

[Doremus Scudder]

Randy's idea for the baseboard color is in the right direction. I'd make it matt yellow (OC safelight yellow) however. It would be a little brighter than gray and any light reflected from it would automatically be safe There's a reason all the Saunders easels were yellow.

Pere makes a good point as well about reflections. Matt black around the enlarger is good, but safe yellow or red will work too as does judicious baffling around the enlarger head and negative stage.

Jim Jones' choice of white for the rest of the darkroom is also mine. Everything except around the enlargers is bright, cheery satin white. Great for bouncing safelights from.

Best,

Doremus

[adelorenzo]

I make my counter tops out of melamine. My local building store only carries white, so that's what I use. Although my enlarger has masking blades so I don't need to worry about light spill beyond the easel. I've never really thought that this would be an issue.

[Fred L]

All the enlargers I have used have predominantly been white baseboard. The walls around the enlargers are greyish (close to 18%). Like Anthony, my enlargers (Devere and V35 Focomat) have masking blades, so that cuts down on any light hitting the baseboards. So basically, I'd go dull white if I had to repaint them.

[ic-racer]

White, so you can project on the baseboard for many reasons dealing with setup and maintenance and pre-printing setup, mixing box evaluation, lens coverage, alignment etc.
The time one would want black or dark is if you have a vacuum baseboard and you need to see the edges of the paper against a dark background.
I had this piece of melamine that I gave to a friend for use as a DeVere 8x10 baseboard.

[Pere Casals]

Matt black around the enlarger is good, but safe yellow or red will work too as does judicious baffling around the enlarger head and negative stage.

Good point, for a BW enlarger a safe color would be preferable in those walls, to see better, it's in the case of working RA-4 that the black is more necessary.

[Drew Wiley]

I relaminated even my Durst baseboards with black Formica. Somehow, the concept of a darkroom would warrant dark things within it. If stray light hits a pale baseboard , it can bounce off this, then hit and reflect off the polished stainless rods and columns. That's why Durst has a dark bellows curtain on the lower half of the 8X10 enlargers. You could add your own for the 138 series. I've tested for this. The problem is real. Most printing paper is too slow to cause headaches; but if you sometimes enlarge onto regular sheet film like I do, some extra care is warranted. All my walls and counter surfaces adjacent to enlargers are also black. Light gray would be fine in the sink room, using correct safelight of course. I made the mistake of taking AA's book advice to paint those walls tan, and hate the effect. I have to take test strips into a different room without that bias to accurately judge the effect of toning. One of these days I'll repaint behind the sink. 18% gray is too dark for convenient color assessment. It's for exposure calibration. And I'm very skeptical of gray cards or paint being on target in that respect unless they came from someone like MacBeth or XRite. I've batched up my own truly neutral 18% gray paint using an industrial spectrophotometer. It's a tricky task. Not a single gray card I tested back then was even close. The mid gray patch on my MacBeath Color Checker Chart was spot on.

[Drew Wiley]

I'm surprised that no worms have been thrown at me yet, not even a web link by Pere containing a picture of Damien Hirst's darkroom all covered with glow-in-the-dark giant polka dots. But yeah, yellow Saunders easels. I use them myself, but only for black and white prints. Otherwise, for color work, I remove the masking blades and repurpose them on black vacuum easels. The most nitpicky case is dye transfer matrix film, which must be exposed through the back. Ideally the black surface should be fully deep matte black, and not even semigloss, or it might reflect back enough light onto the emulsion to cause problems. But matte black paints scuff badly, so I'm going to experiment with semi-permeable (to air) deep black thin sheets of paper in between the emulsion at vac easel surface. That project is on the backburner. But one I did complete this year was to make a miniature pin-registered vac easel suitable for
8x10 film, using thick black Garolite (fiber-reinforced phenolic), then sanding it matte. Works wonderfully for this application. But in sizes sufficient for moderately large prints, Garolite flatness can itself be affected by humidity, even
if slowly. So I'd have to laminate it to something even thicker and stiffer, and alas, cumulatively heavier (thick Garolite is darn heavy to begin with, and eats up carbide blades and bits like it was made or rock).

[Mark Sampson]

Note that the drop table and baseboards for 4x5 Omega D4-5-6 series enlargers are all a flat white finish (or a very light neutral gray). They have enough surface texture to be non-specular.

[Peter De Smidt]

My De Vere baseboard is whitish. That Saunders yellow is ugly, but to each their own.

[Pere Casals]

Most printing paper is too slow to cause headaches; but if you sometimes enlarge onto regular sheet film like I do, some extra care is warranted.

In theory (not accounting LIRF) medium sensitivity is irrelevant for that, if a medium has lower ISO then you have to expose a longer time, so the effect it's the same. What matters is the image_forming_light vs stray.

This is easy to measure with a luxmeter. Safelight closed, we cast a shadow in the projection and we meter there, then we also meter in the dense areas (highlights in the scene). From that we now the effect of the light bouncing in the walls. A certain amount of stray light may not be bad, even it may work like a benefical mild pre-flash. But projecting on a 1m print will illuminate well a white wall in the enlarger's back !!

______

Regarding that the base table color is irrelevant if we mask the negative to project only on paper, and usually we also have an easel on the base board. What is reflecting is the paper, not the table under the easel.