Unsharp Masks - When Not Worth the Effort

[interneg]

Drew - I take it that you're doing this to counteract the need for an extra mask to bump the highlights back up (the fundamental mechanisms being not dissimilar to the way that dye transfer separations ideally want both a contrast mask & a highlight mask)?

[Drew Wiley]

Well, masking for color is a much more involved topic because it depends on the specific color medium. But in that case, the next type of mask one needs to learn is a highlight mask, which protects the highlights of chromes. But when masking neg originals, you're protecting the deepest shadow values instead. I don't want to complicate the immediate thread with details. But if there are just small discrete areas involved, one can simply use a fine-point black Sharpie pen on the registered diffusion sheet instead of lith film. Or, in b&w work exclusively, build up some red dye or even black pencil smudge (messier than dye) to protect larger areas. Lots of possibilities once one has become comfortable with the basics. I never personally have found the need for an analog to lith highlight masks when printing negs, just a little red dye or black ink on the diffusion sheet once in awhile. Color chrome printing generally requires a much more aggressive masking strategy.

[interneg]

Drew - pretty much as soon as I posted the above, I realised you were talking about shadow behaviour control on neg films - it's one of these things you do automatically when making/ altering masks, but when writing at the end of a long day of printing, I can all too easily mix up the types of masks! I actually need to make a few to persuade a couple of negs on to Fomatone.

[Drew Wiley]

If shadow gradation is better separated using a mask, then bringing the deepest shadows back down to DMax in the print via a hard grade or longer print dev time will automatically rein in the highlights and improve their gradation too, and really, everything in between. You can have your cake and eat it too, unlike minus or compensating dev which smashes the whole original tonality flat. People use masking for all kinds of special dramatic effects. That's fine; but what I am interested in personally is taking a neg that already yields a good print and making an exceptional enlargement reminiscent of the tonal subtlety and nuance of what a good contact printer would get on specialized papers, perhaps even better. A basic unsharp mask can do this without resorting to fancy tricks. One still has all kinds of additional tools in the toolbox like dodging/burning, split printing, selective bleaching, staining dev of the original neg, etc.

[Pere Casals]

Just the opposite, Pere. What a "toe cutter" does is exactly that - counteract tendency to a toe formation in the mask itself, so that you get an especially long straight line at low gamma, where this is ordinarily difficult to achieve. The toe-cutter is optional. How printing highlights are affected all depends, but I wouldn't overthink it. If you want to induce a shoulder effect in the combined film printing sandwich, then you can always make a stronger mask. But with simple contrast masking of b&w negs, you have to be careful of too much mask density muddying up the deepest shadows. There's a cure for that; but I want to keep things simple here. l already mentioned my strategy for pyro stained originals using blue light mask exposure. But I recommend experimenting to find what works best for you. If you want an upswept curve to your mask instead, with a long toe, then use somewhat dilute D76 instead of HC110. Dealing with the slight residual magenta stain of FP4, leftover antihalation dye that doesn't get fully washed out, is a minor problem because it's consistent over the entire mask. It slowly fades; but strong UV can accelerate that. It generally amounts to only around .04 density anyway.

OK, but when adding the "toe cutter" restrainer we clear the mask to the F+B density in the scene extreme highlights, so the sandwich is less dense there and we expose more the extreme highlights than when no benzotriazole was added, with a compensating effect, compressing scene extreme highlights.


My "experiments" were done by adding some Rodinal to Xtol to develop the mask, which also has a remarkable toe-cutter effect in the mask.

[interneg]

Pere - I think what Drew is getting at is that you want to minimise the mask's impact on the original negative's highlights (hence the restrainer) but don't want to make the mask too dense either, because that will make the shadow values in the final print look rather unnatural. Essentially it boils down to: don't overdo the masking, otherwise it looks really fake/ obvious. Having BTDT, I'd agree with Drew. It doesn't need a lot of mask density to have a big impact on the final print. And quite often controlled flash/ fogging with diffusion can eliminate the need to make masks.

[Michael Kadillak]

When working in B&W why not just assign your full dedicated commitment to producing a bullet proof negative that occasionally could use just an minimum dodge and burn aesthetic easily managed without all of these tortuous iterations. Sometimes I think there exists some subliminal medal of honor for photographers that spend countless hours in the darkroom masking. Guess what. The viewer of said photograph does not give a #*&% what went into it. Unsharp masks to me look like the image was photoshopped. I am into efficiency and from my perspective if I need to seriously contemplate masking, I dropped the ball either in the execution phase of exposing the image and/or in the darkroom processing it and I take great care and time to learn from the mistake.Yes, I hear from the naysayers that Ansel (and current printers of Ansel's negatives) are relegated to these necessary techniques to derive the necessary tonal quality expected of the final result, but that is what they have to work with. If the market for your work justifies such efforts I guess that the ends justify the means. My instincts tell me that overwhelmingly that is not the case for the majority of us in this eclectic art form. As a result I choose to place the highest priority of the time I allocate to LF B&W photography to enjoying the photography making experience than laboring in the darkroom. The benefit of going all in with this rather simplistic objective is I avoid the frustrations of print tweek #17 and the stress and potential headaches that comes with it. Just my $0.02.

[Drew Wiley]

Michael, what you term a bulletproof negative is just a starting point, and my idea of such a thing might or might not be a neg which prints as simply as possible, but one which bears the most potential. The primary purpose of a mask in this particular conversation is not something remedial, but for sake of bringing out exceptional microtonality and highly nuanced acutance that would be impossible using ordinary technique alone. But yes, not everyone finds darkroom work relaxing. I do. If a masked print looks like it had been Photosopped that's just an indicator of unrefined technique, and has nothing to do with the potential of such technique to do things eloquently instead.

[Drew Wiley]

Interneg, you are correct about what I was implying. Pere, it's interesting to hear about your Xtol tweak.

[Pere Casals]

When working in B&W why not just assign your full dedicated commitment to producing a bullet proof negative that occasionally could use just an minimum dodge and burn aesthetic easily managed without all of these tortuous iterations.

+1

Anyway this is not always possible, requiring additional techniques to get a sound print, or if wanting certain look.

But what you say is important, wet printing starts before shutter release !!!