It’s the end of the year, so time to wrap up my 2025 goal. I’ll definitely keep printing in colour, but this will be the final “RA-4 Colour Diaries”post, for a while atleast. If you missed the earlier posts, you can access them here: This post (part 4) is all about making prints of different sizes (enlarging, contact printing and printing 110 negatives) as well as speeding up my workflow and trying more film stocks. Enlarging prints After the success of the sunflower print, I printed another sunflower from the same set of negatives. This time I was able to...

My next step in learning colour printing was to try a negative that was going to be a bit more difficult to get the correct colouring. Partly because the subject is predominantly one colour, and partly because of the film. I chose a photograph of a sunflower, taken on 35mm Flic Film Elektra. This film is respooled from Kodak Aerocolor IV, originally designed for aerial photography. The film is described by Kodak as not having “integral color masking, direct interpretation can be made from the negative. Objects are recorded in colors complementary to their natural colors. This film incorporates an...

Following on from my previous post, where I got my setup in place, I started to make my first colour silver gelatin print. For this first print I’m using Crystal Archive Glossy, Medium Contrast, Resin Coated paper. In B&W printing you need to determine the correct filter grade and the correct timing for the print. This is pretty much the same for colour printing, but there are three colour filters that can be adjusted. The basic steps to getting a colour print are: Sounds simple right? Yes and no. Let me explain. Making the Exposure (Timing) Test The first step...

My goal for 2025 was to teach myself to make colour optical prints in the darkroom, a goal that actually started in 2020 after I read an article on the Emulsive website about RA-4 printing. I already had a Durst M601 enlarger with a colour head that I’d never used, so I didn’t need much more to try it myself. Having not much else to do, I checked our ebay for a paper drum. I found a Patterson Thermo-Drum 1216 in the UK for a reasonable price (shipping hadn’t yet gone through the roof) and ordered it. Unfortunately, once it...