Welcome to Black and White Film Testing and Low Cost Darkroom Measurement Techniques 2024

This website offers amateur photographers an alternative approach to the problems of black and white photography based on film sensitometry measurements.

A low cost enlarger densitometer is now available for sale, allowing, for the first time, the opportunity for many amateur photographers to measure film density accurately via their enlarger.

A simple spreadsheet and calibrated test card is available to complement the densitometer. Film gamma and accuracy of exposure can be measured with just one exposed frame.

A second innovation is the use of curve fitting software, available with the photometer, to analyse film test results. This enables many new parameters to be measured and displayed, in particular, continuous curves of film gradient.

Models of film and paper characteristics are used to help the advanced photographer make consistent decisions regarding exposure and processing. From version 13, testing recent ideas in the real world, as opposed to controlled lighting test conditions, has quickly led to the rejection of some of the various parameters that have been investigated over the last few years.

The aim at all times is to expose film correctly, that is the toe is utilised to its fullest extent thus making the most of available film speed and paper dynamic range. Of course this makes greater demands on our exposure techniques as the aim is to have little or no margin for exposure error.

This is made much easier by having access to an enlarger densitometer.

I appreciate that most photographers are not interested in doing their own testing and so some film data is now published in the 'Film Data' section. This is in the form of a simpler spreadsheets derived from the main graphs and data.

An article, Exposure Application, is also available which discusses pitfalls with some light meters, how to avoid them, and difficult lighting problems.

The links and download pages have a number of introductory articles about sensitometry with some of the historical background from the 1960's.

For recent updates see the downloads page.