I made the first print with the enlarger yesterday, and it works very well. perhaps too well. By that I mean the LEDs are too bright, to make this print I needed to stop down to f/45 on the lens, reduce LEDs to 50% brightness, and it was still only a 7 second exposure for Ilford multigrade fiber paper. To be precise it was 5.66 seconds with 535nm green light, and 1.41 seconds with 450nm blue light.
Because of this, I'm thinking I'll either add a less efficient diffuser, or add a neutral density filter when doing standard silver gelatin printing. Ideally I'd like around 6 added stops of density to reduce brightness. There's an issue with colors not displaying properly at low brightness, which is why I'd rather add density that way rather than electronically dim them, though that is an option for now, and may work fine in the future if I can figure out that problem. Thinking about it, I think density is the way to go, as when using multiple colors I want to have the full range of 256 dimming values when balancing them.
Anyway, heres the 16x20 print I made yesterday, it'll be possible to go 4 times that size, but I don't have any paper that large (yet).
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks