How many work prints for your toughest print job?

[invisibleflash]

Wet or digital...what is the most work prints you had to suffer through to get the final print?

[paulr]

I don't remember the number of sheets of paper, just the time. I had maybe three or four negatives in the 1990s that forced me into protracted wars in the darkroom. Usually it involved difficult shadows or difficult highlights. I printed on Fortezo, which was beautiful stuff, but had a very long toe and shoulder. If you had a negative with compressed values in the shadows or highlights it could be frustrating to try to get the values right. This image I returned to three times. At least one of those times I spent three days in the darkroom. The shadow values are compressed, with important detail quite close to zero density. When I went back and scanned the negative to make a carbon pigment inkjet print with Piezography process, getting the values right was almost trivially easy.

In color, I've only had one real fight. It was with the only show that I've had printed by someone else. I was working with a hasselblad and film, scanned, all the esthetic work done by me on on a computer with a color managed system, and sent to my friend who's a professional printer. On one of the images with a lot of green folliage, the greens came out outrageously different from what etiher of us saw on the screen. The problem may have been that neither of us had large color gamut monitors, but I don't know for sure. We had to print the old fashioned way, by trial and error. But at new-fashioned prices. It probably took us six tries to get it right. That's a small number by darkroom standards but a big one otherwise. I was not as picky about print quality with this color work as I was with the black and white stuff ... when the colors were off, they were way off. The other nineteen prints we made were easy, and we nailed with just one or two attempts.

[Mark Woods]

I have a negative that it took me three years to get a print that I was happy with. There were breaks in between, of course, where I would think about what it was that I wanted to accomplish. The first print I showed sold in 20 minutes.

[vinny]

I stop when my trash can is full. It seems that even when I think I've got it, the dry result doesn't meet my expectations a week later.

[BradS]

I'm not a very skilled darkroom worker and I really have no energy nor interest in achieving "perfection" so, if I cannot make a satisfactory print in three or four tries, I usually figure I didn't do a very good job on the front end of the process and move on.

[jnantz]

it was a long time ago ,
maybe 15-20 sheets of paper ...
if i knew then what i know now
it might have been reduced to 7-10 sheets ..
weird burning and dodging is a pain.

[Kirk Gittings]

As many as it takes to get it right.

[polyglot]

I'm not a very skilled darkroom worker and I really have no energy nor interest in achieving "perfection" so, if I cannot make a satisfactory print in three or four tries, I usually figure I didn't do a very good job on the front end of the process and move on.

Yeah, this is me. Longest I've spent on a print is about 3 hours and maybe 10-15 sheets. Past that point, I accept that my shooting and/or developing sucked and move on to to the next in my backlog of negs that really deserve to be printed.

[Mark Woods]

Kirk, I agree. I've been there. The "front" end is only half of the process (if that). The print side is a whole other world. Sometimes one makes an exposure and realizes there are many more possibilities of visual expression.

[bob carnie]

Probably around 10 sheets, after that subtle nuances is all that get worked on .
Very Heavy or very Thin negatives give the most headaches as they are usually not the norm in my darkroom.

Wet or digital...what is the most work prints you had to suffer through to get the final print?