Do we need the Zone system if we use VC paper?
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The Zone System was invented by Ansel Adams and Fred Archer in roughly 1939. Way back then, in the photographic dark ages (or perhaps the Golden Age, depending on your viewpoint), there were no VC papers, and so one of the goals of the Zone system was to plan negative exposure and development so that the visualized print could be made on Grade 2 paper. From there, the usual technique to fine tuning the print was to make small adjustments of contrast by using two different developers (e.g. Dektol and Selectol Soft).
Fast forward to 2003. Graded papers no longer dominate the black and white market; instead, we have an unprecedented list of VC papers from virtually every manufacturer. The newest offerings allow a printer to vary the contrast of the material across an extreme range (broader, in fact, than most graded papers offered). Using VCCE heads, dichroic color heads, or split printing, it's easy to get continuous, stepless control of the contrast of the print.
This raises the question - if we can control the print contrast so easily and over such a large range, why should we stick with the film development controls of the Zone system? Why not just give all of our film the same development, and then make any needed adjustments using the controls VC paper gives us? This would eliminate a lot of record keeping, reduce errors, and we wouldn't give up anything!
That's what I wanted to know, and when I went looking for the answers, I found very little information. Quite a lot of what I found amounted to no more than rank superstition.
As time went on, I noticed that in a few cases where negatives had gotten more development than I had intended (e.g. a negative that should have been n-1 ended up in the n+1 batch) I was getting prints that I really liked. I wondered vaguely about whether this was a related issue - maybe harder negatives and softer paper was giving me a tonal arrangement that I liked better. Just after I started wondering about this, I had a chat with Chuck Downs, who told me that Clyde Butcher was seeing the OPPOSITE effect. I was starting suspect that there really was a difference.
Motivated by my vague feelings, I decided simple experiment could tell us a great deal about what's really going on. I headed into the darkroom to find out what was what.
The Experiment
The question I wanted to answer was this: Is there any discernable difference between the prints I'll get if I make three identical exposures, develop one sheet of film to a low contrast and print it on VC paper under filtration that gives me high paper contrast, give one sheet normal development and print on normal contrast paper, and develop one sheet to a high contrast and print on low contrast paper.
For the first phase of my experiment, I made three identical exposures by contact printing a Stouffer 4x5" 31 step step wedge onto 100TMax. One sheet was developed for my standard N-2 time (giving me a low contrast negative), one sheet was developed for my normal N time resulting in a normal contrast negative, and one sheet was given N+2 development giving me a high contrast negative. The three resulting negatives are therefore roughly equivalent to photographing a low contrast scene, a medium contrast scene, and a high contrast scene and giving the all the film normal development. (There are actually differences but for the purposes of this experiment, they probably aren't significant.) All the film was developed in a Jobo CPP-2 in a Jobo 3010 sheet film drum, using Kodak Tmax-RS developer diluted 1+9.
Those three negatives were then enlarged to 8"x10" to produce matched prints - that is, I made prints with the exposure and filtration adjusted so that the steps that the highlights and lowlights fell on matched as closely as possible. All the prints were 8"x10" enlargements of the 4"x5" negatives. One set of prints was made on Kodak PolyMax IIrc paper, another set on Ilford Multigrade IV fb paper. Those papers were chosen because they are the two papers I keep on hand.
There are really two possible outcomes:
1. The prints will be identical (or so close to identical that the differences can be ignored). This would tell us that in the future, we can discard the hassle of using development controls and can instead just make adjustments for negative contrast at printing time.
2. The prints will differ. At first blush, this might seem to be an outcome we wouldn't hope for, but it also holds out the possibility that if the results differ, we've found a NEW way to use the materials for expressive purposes. For instance, we might look at a scene, and think "Gee, I'd like this print to have the tonal arrangement I get when I develop the negative to a higher contrast and print on a lower contrast setting for my VC paper.
The Results
Making the test prints was a bit of a hassle (it's surprisingly difficult to get the exposure and contrast just right so that all three prints match in the highlights and lowlights). Creating the three prints took up the best part of a fairly long morning in the darkroom, but I really wanted the prints to match as closely as I could manage, because I suspected that if the prints don't match, it would be easy to drown any real differences resulting from the changes in development and print contrast in the random differences between the prints.
However, in the end, I came up with three prints that I felt were well matched. Here they are:
N-2 development, grade ''4" print
N development, grade "2" print
N+2 development, grade "0" print
These scans have been done with the scanner controls all set the same, to eliminate the possibility that the scanner has introduced differences that don't appear in the original prints. The scans are deliberately not adjusted to reach a maximum white or maximum black, to try to get the details of the prints to show even on uncalibrated monitors.
Naturally, it's tough to compare the prints on the monitor, so I'll supplement the images with both text and some diagrams to try to highlight the differences I found.
Tonal Distribution
Let's start with the biggie - Tonal distribution. I believe that if you closely examine the scans above, you'll see differences in the tonal distribution of each print. Remember, the original scene (the step wedge) was exactly the same for each print, so any differences we find are from the changes in development and print contrast.
From visual examination, the print from N-2 development and the print from N development are identical in tonal distribution. The contrast of the highlights and lowlights, and the contrast and tone of the mid-tones, are all the same.
Comparing these two prints to the N+2 development print, however, gives us a different story. In the N+2 print, the highlight contrast appears to be higher, the shadow contrast appears to be lower, and the mid-tone contrast appears to be very slightly higher with the tones substantially darker. (Compare step 16 among the three prints).
Reading the densities from the three images and charting them, we find that the chart tells us the same thing our eyes did. Here's the chart:
The blue and magenta curves are for the N-2 on grade 4 paper and N on grade 2 paper prints, respectively. The curves are virtually identical, telling us that the prints which appear to have the same tonal distribution really do.
The yellow curve, however, has substantial differences. In the highlights, it breaks from the minimum density (paper base white) much more sharply than the other curves - much higher highlight contrast. The slope of the curve up into the mid tones is higher (steeper) than the other curves as well, so that the mid tones are substantially darker. After we reach the mid-tones, the contrast rolls off, so that the lowlights of the print have substantially less contrast.
The next question is "Can you generalize these results to other VC papers?"
To answer this, I repeated the experiment with Ilford Multigrade VI fb paper. I won't show the scans of the prints; it's too difficult to learn much from examining the scans, and far easier to examine the charts derived from the prints. The resulting curves are shown in the following chart:
The changes in the curve shape have minor differences from the curves for PolyMax IIrc, but overall the general trend is the same, with the N and N-2 curves being nearly identical, and the N+2 curve having more highlight contrast, darker mid-tones, and lower shadow contrast.
Other Differences
There are other differences between the prints. For PolyMax IIrc, the N+2 on grade '0' paper print, for instance, seems to be a little bit cooler in image tone than the other prints. It would be interesting to examine the prints for tonal smoothness, grain, and sharpness, but at the low magnification I used, it's hard to assess those print properties.
Conclusions
Based on this simple experiment, it's clear that there's an interaction between the film and paper that produces different results when film development is varied and then the contrast of VC paper is adjusted to compensate. For both Kodak PolyMax IIrc and Ilford MG IV fb, there's no discernable difference between reduced development of the film and normal development of the film, but a quite pronounced difference between normal development and increased development - increased development (with the paper contrast adjusted to compensate for the increased negative contrast) results in more highlight contrast, lower mid-tone values, and reduced shadow contrast.As a practical matter, this can be used as one more creative control - if you would like the scene rendered with more highlight contrast, less shadow contrast, and darker mid-tones, you can plan your development so that you get a much harder negative, then print with the VC paper filtered to be much softer than usual.
Several questions remain - do this results apply to other films as well? TMX in TMax-RS developer produces a very linear film characteristic curve. If the film curve changes shape with changes in development, then there would also be the effect of the change in film curve to factor in. Different VC papers have different tonal distributions, and different changes in curve shape as you adjust contrast. It seems unlikely that the results here can be generalized to other films, film developers, etc.
