RA-4/Colour Darkroom Printing

What is RA-4/C-Type Printing?

• Introducing our RA-4/Colour Darkroom Printing Workshop! Here at The Black and White Box, we are the only colour darkroom for hire in the country, kinda crazy right, and we want to share that with you!
• This is the name for printing from C-41 negatives in the darkroom, using a silver halide process. There are two times of C-Type printing. There are machines/minilabs that can project a digital negative onto a RA-4 paper to produce a print. And then there is manual RA-4 printing, this is where you use an enlarger and negative to directly print onto the RA-4 paper. Manual darkroom RA-4 printing is what we will be offering customers to do themselves!

Cost 

• We are doing an introductory offer of $100 reduced from $120 for a one on one workshop,  and once you’ve done that you are welcome to hire out the darkroom for $30 an hour which includes all chemistry, This covers chemistry and the space for yourself however you will have to supply your own paper or buy it from us here. There are no fixed times for the ra-4 workshop; our workshop is super flexible to you and your needs! Anyday and anytime that suits you, we’ve got you covered. 

Colour Printing Workshop

• If you do not know how to do it already, then we recommend you to contact Lorenzo for the induction/small introduction workshop. We provide the chemistry, and you can purchase the paper here; all you need to bring is 1+ Roll of already processed C-41 35mm or 120 film.

How it’s done

• The only way RA-4 printing is viable in a time sensitive manner is using a roller transport processor. This is a small table top machine which has small tanks and rubber pressurised rollers which take the paper through all of the baths. The beauty is it allows you to feed the exposed paper in dry, and then 5 minutes later it comes out dry!
• Having a machine like this is the only way we are able to offer colour darkroom printing to the public. Doing it in trays or in drums is possible however far too time consuming
• This processor can go up to 12 inches on the short edge, so 12 x 16 would be the largest we can easily go

Jobo CPP2

• For any prints larger than 12″ on the short edge, this is where the jobo comes in handy. In this we can do the bigger sizes like 16″ x 20″ 20″ x 24″ and anything in between. Here we will load the prints into a drum instead of being fed into baths

Paper Choices 

• The paper we will be stocking in the darkroom will be the Fuji Crystal Archive II and the Kodak Endura. These are both companies flagship top of the line C-Type Papers.

How to book 

• Sound like a bit of you? To book this workshop, or any of our other introductory courses, head to our workshops tab.