Hi....I recently shot a beautiful roll of pictures of my sister. I had good lighting and followed the correct development times for TMAX 400 film which is what I used.

Well, the negs are quite dark, but have some detail. I made a proof sheet using a 5+ filter and that brought the contrast up -- but not high enough to give me acceptable, pure white/black/gray contrast. In short, they look terrible.

I was wondering if anyone knows of a way to further up the contrast, any other printing methods, etc. etc. I read somewhere that you could take sheet film and expose the original neg onto the sheet film, then process that, and then contact print it onto photo paper. Has anyone ever done this? Would that make it possible to get good contrast?

Please, if anyone knows anything..these are beautiful pictures and it would be a shame to not be able to print them (though in my experience it may be the case).

Thanx in advance.

-- Erin C. (ericon_22@hotmail.com), November 24, 1999

Answers

Erin,

There are a number of ways of making acceptable prints from bad negatives. Unfortunately, it's a challenge we all face more often than we care to admit. Without actually seeing the negatives it would be a bit difficult to offer printing suggestions.

When you say "quite dark", do you mean negatives that are too dense ("bulletproof negatives", usually resulting from gross overexposure and/or over development), or negatives that are lacking density with very little detail on the negative ("very thin negatives", resulting from underexposure and/or underdevelopment)?

However, if you are interested in attempting to make a new, enlarged negative from the original, to attempt to improve the overall density curve, I would refer you to the following: The Palladio Co., Inc., 2400 200 Boston Ave., Medford, Ma. 02155, 800-628-9618.

These folks offer a digital negative enlargement service that could possibly help retrieve your valuable negatives, and make them more printable, either as a contact print or by enlargement. And if you are interested in doing this yourself, using traditional darkroom methods, they also have one of the best and most informative catalogues/instructional manuals describing the negative enlargement process in detail. Give them a call, they might be able to help.

Good luck, Sergio.

-- Sergio Ortega (s.ortega@worldnet.att.net), November 25, 1999.

Reshoot. Best way.

-- Bill Mitchell (bmitch@home.com), November 25, 1999.