Test sheet: Compare tonal scales (Basic)

What's on the sheet

The tones most commonly used for coloured digital negatives, printed side by side as step wedges, plus two reference columns:

• Black, because that's what most people print with and it's the thing anything else has to beat.
• Now — whatever tone is currently selected in the app, so the sheet can answer "is any of this better than what I already do?" It follows the picker while the window is open; change the tone and the column changes with it.

Every column is the same wedge: full tone at the top, clear film at the bottom.

Reading it: the part people get wrong

Read each column as a whole, top to bottom. The winner is the column with the most evenly separated steps across the full range — not the one with the whitest top patch.

If the top few patches blur into a single white, that column has crushed its highlights. It is blocking plenty of light and giving you fewer usable tones for it. Blocking the most light and giving the best tonal range are different things, and you want the tonal range.

This is exactly the judgement no screen can make for you, and the reason the sheet exists at all.

The two black columns look identical. They're supposed to.

Black (using black ink) and Black (using color ink) ask your printer for the same darkness two different ways: one as a plain even black it can lay down with black ink alone, one mixed from the coloured inks.

On screen they're near enough identical, and on the negative they will look identical too. The difference is how much UV each one blocks, which only appears in the finished print — which is precisely why it's on a sheet rather than something we could have told you.

How to read any of these sheets

All four work the same way, and none of them can be judged on screen:

• Print the sheet onto transparency film, exactly as you print a negative — same printer, same film, same settings.
• Contact print it onto your sensitized paper, with your own light source and your own exposure.
• Process it as usual, dry it, and read the answer off the paper.

The blank bottom row is clear film. No ink at all. It exposes fully and prints your darkest tone, so it's the reference every column above it is read against.

Column headings are printed in clear, on a darkened band. Clear is the only "ink" guaranteed to print dark, so the labels stay readable on the finished print rather than disappearing.

Judge it dry, not wet.

When you're done

Set the winner as your Scale color in the Make block, or from the Tonal Scale menu. Then, if you want the tones placed precisely inside the range you've just chosen, measure a correction curve — in that order, because a curve describes the colour it was measured with.

If nothing beat black, that's a real result and worth having. Print with black.

Want to look beyond the tones in the picker? The Advanced sheet walks the whole colour wheel.