I am thrilled to have my first purpose-specific darkroom ever (in a basement rather than a temporarily converted bathroom), however I am having some problems with my new setup. The enlarger is only medium format (an Omega C760; I do contact prints with my 4x5s and am looking for a larger one) but I want to ask here because I only ever get fantastic advice on this forum. For context, I shoot black and white in 35 mm, 6x6, and 4x5 and use mostly Ilford papers and chemistry, for now using RC paper.

First, the symptoms

1. Whites are not coming out white. What I expect to be white instead has a slight grayish hue.

2. It seems like specifying a higher contrast resulted in lower contrast. I think this means that the proportion of light bouncing from a light leak relative to light from the enlarger might result in something like this.

3. RC paper seems to have a slight yellow tint immediately after processing


Second, some ideas for underlying problems. I will try to solve each in turn, but wanted to see if people had intuitions about which could cause which problem. Also I wanted to check if there's a larger space of problems I should be thinking about.

1. There's pretty bad light leak from the enlarger from just over the negative tray— possibly as a result of it getting hit while moving. The enlarger is next to a white wall so there is some amount of reflected light. I'm going to try re-aligning the enlarger head and if that doesn't work throw up a baffle.

2. The paper is old -- 3 years or so, and was in a place where it reached 90F for two consecutive summers. It also went through a TSA x-ray for checked bags

3. The fixer was re-used from earlier in the month when I developed some LF film (just 4 sheets)

4. There's a tiny bit of light coming from a power strip (nb, I do all my film handling in a pop-up box, so I'm not going for complete darkness; there's also a tiny amount of light coming in from under a baffle far from where I do anything with paper)

Thanks!