Film Developing: Ultra Black Paper

Series Summary

As digital photography takes over, traditional film processing is gradually being phased out. No longer do people get the thrill of watching a photo develop right before your eyes in a darkroom. They just pull them up on a computer and there they are. But photographs printed the old-fashioned way are somehow still magical. The tones, especially for black and white photos, are much richer than those from digital images. This is the reason why traditional printing continues to have a stronghold in the art world. A job well done in the darkroom can't be beat! In this series of free photography videos from our experienced photo printer, you will learn how to use advanced papers and chemicals to give your photos a professional look. A professional photographer will show you how to use Ultra Black paper to get rich black tones. You will also learn about the differences in Afga, Forte, T-MAX and Ilford paper. Should you buy chemicals in bulk to save money or will they go bad before you have a chance to use them? How often should you clean your darkroom trays? Find out the answers to these questions and more in this informative series.

Video Transcript

"One thing as you move on doing darkroom work you're going to see that your limitations, you're going to realize that you can go beyond them in a way. And what I'm going to talk about right now is different papers and different developer combinations. One developer that I really like using is a developer called Ultra Black and it's in liquid form. That's pretty much the developers I'm going to talk about right now in this segment. These developers tend to be more expensive and sometimes these liquid developers can be sort of hard to get shipped to you for certain shipping regulations, but you can almost always figure out a way to get them to you. The Ultra Black paper is a pap-, the Ultra Black developer is it effects the paper in a way that your black is extremely rich. And when used with certain cold tone papers like some of the Ilford papers and some of the papers manufactured under the name Berger really make a beautiful, beautiful print, and when you combine them in different dilution times you can actually change your print from looking almost to a blue black to almost a warm black. So extremely versatile paper developer."