Contact print
From Nikonians Wiki
Contact prints are the simplest way of printing a developed negative. The negatives are laid emulsion side down flat on unexposed photographic paper, illuminated for the requisite amount of time, and then the paper is developed. No enlarger is used, and the size of the print is identical to the size of the negative.
Contact prints produce small but highly detailed images with excellent colour or grey gradation. They are usually examined with a loupe or magnifying glass, and are thus ideal for evaluation of all the images from a roll of film, prior to decisions about which images to print, and how to crop them. With large format and, to some extent, medium format negatives, a contact print may be used for the final image.
Although mainly used for negatives, a contact print can in principle also be made from a positive image.
The three advantages of contact prints are
- Documentation -- the negatives can be stored in files alongside the contact prints, which makes it easy to relocate and re-evaluate images at a later date.
- Evaluation -- the exact qualities of the negative can be evaluated with much greater confidence than an enlarged print, where faults can be either in the negative or in the enlargement process
- Cost and speed -- contact prints can be made much faster than individually enlarging each image. In principle, contact prints should be cheaper than a set of prints. However, in reality, only specialist labs now print contact sheets, and a set of colour prints from a high street lab may be cheaper. For this reason, contact prints are now much more common for black and white, which high street labs generally decline to process. For self-development, contact sheets speed the process dramatically, especially when the photographer has a shot a series of images, perhaps bracketed, with the intention of only printing one or two.
- This page was last modified on 1 August 2009, at 12:18.
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