how would i use a colorstar 2000 analyser? i am new to the darkroom?
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Posted: July 13th, 2009 under Uncategorized.
Tags: Colorstar 2000, Darkroom Experience, Limited
Comment from Darrius
Time July 16, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Are you doing color printing in the darkroom? Don’t know of many that do this - its much more difficult than black and white, and if you’re new to the darkroom, then I doubt you have either.
I never did color printing, but I know Color analyzers are supposed to determine what color filtration and presumeably the exposure to use for a particular print.
Lets start with b&w…when you print b&w, you’re supposed to make teststrips, exposing your paper by 2 to 5 second intervals, and then developing that strip, trying again until you find just the right time to expose your paper so that you get a “good” print - a nice range from black to white. You also play with contrast filter, that adjust what how much the range is from the blackest to the whitest part of the image.
With color, things get more complicated. You not only have to decide how long to expose the paper, but what numbers to dial for the filters for cyan, magenta, and yellow in order to get a good color balance. That involves lots of test strips too…on two dimensions…testing for right color/and right exposure…
Thats why fancy equipment was developed, like analyzers, to try to cut down on all that testing time and wasting papers for test strips.
According the forum I provide in my source, it seems color analyzers aren’t deemed to useful for some people… they prefer using a simple b&w enlarger meter to automatically determine the exposure time, and have them worrying only about the color balance, which they prefer to do manually.
I’ve worked on b&w for quite some time now, but never used meters to determine paper exposure time, but if they work, they would cut my darkroom time by half for sure… a lot of the time spent for making an image is testing for the right exposure time and the right contrast.
I don’t know if yours has it, but some colorstar analyzers come with a spot probe so you can use it also for simple b&w exposure measurements, if that’s what you’ll be doing instead of color.