A few weeks ago I tested two Lomography films, Lady Grey 400 and Berlin Kino 400, and reached what I thought were fair conclusions: Lady Grey looked lovely, Berlin Kino was grainy and lacked contrast. Those judgements were based on digital scans of the negatives.
I caveated the verdicts at the time: drawing firm conclusions about grain from digital scans is tricky, because the scanning process introduces its own digital noise and depends on the resolution you scan at. So I said I would take the same negatives into the darkroom and print them properly. This is that follow-up.
The short version: Berlin Kino looks dramatically better printed than scanned. The darkroom prints are good. The same negatives that I had described as rough and contrast-deficient produce frames I would happily hang on a wall. That is a finding that matters for how you think about a film, and it also raises a wider question about how much of any film’s reputation is actually a reputation about how it scans.
What I did
I set up the darkroom with my Intrepid enlarger (which I have used extensively at this point) and Ilford PQ Universal developer. I had negatives from both films, shot during the original tests, including some portraits and some general scenes.
I printed a selection from each film at consistent paper grade settings to compare like for like, then printed a few again at higher contrast to see how each negative responded to manipulation.
The aim was simple: do these negatives produce the same impressions in print as they did in scan, or is there a meaningful difference?
![PLACEHOLDER: a Lady Grey 400 print on the darkroom bench, fresh from the wash, showing the tonal range and grain character]
Lady Grey 400 in print
Lady Grey printed beautifully. This was the easy part. The negatives had good contrast to begin with (visible on the light box, before they ever went under the enlarger), they came out at grade 2 with very little intervention needed, and the prints look exactly how I hoped they would look.
A favourite from the original shoots was my Rob portrait. Bumped the contrast up a small amount, gave it a fraction more exposure on the second attempt to handle some dust, and got a print I would happily present to him. Clean, sharp, lovely tonal range, the kind of black and white that just works.
So Lady Grey printed matches Lady Grey scanned. The verdict is the same: nice film, good for portraits, no surprises. This is the control case.
Berlin Kino 400 in print, which was the actual test
Here is where it gets interesting.
I started Berlin with the same kind of test strip workflow. Exposure came out around 5-6 seconds, similar to Lady Grey. I bumped contrast to grade 2.5 and made a first print.
The print looked far better than I expected. Not unappealing at all, despite my reservations from the scans. So I tried again, this time pushing contrast right up to the top of the range, to see how the negative responded.
The result was a properly characterful print. The grain that had looked rough on the digital scans now reads as texture. The contrast that the negative lacked, the paper has restored. The frame as a finished print is genuinely good. Not “good despite the film.” Good in its own right.
This is a meaningful finding. The judgement I made on the scans was honest at the time, but it was an incomplete picture. Berlin Kino in the darkroom is a different proposition.
![PLACEHOLDER: a Berlin Kino 400 print at higher contrast, showing the same grain that read as rough on screen now reading as texture]
Why this matters: what showing flaws looks like
There is a specific risk with low-contrast negatives, whether you are scanning them or printing them. When you have to push the image hard (longer exposure, increased contrast) to recover a usable result, you are not just amplifying the parts of the image you want. You amplify everything, including the flaws.
So a fingerprint, a smudge, a piece of dust, a faint light leak, all of those become more visible when you crank contrast up. My Berlin Kino prints have a few of these visible, which is on me for handling rather than on the film. A clean Lady Grey print at grade 2 will hide minor handling errors. A pushed Berlin Kino print at grade 4 will broadcast them.
This is solvable by being a better photographer (and a more careful handler of negatives), but it is worth knowing. Films that need more contrast intervention are less forgiving of mistakes everywhere else in the process.
The grain reassessment
The thing that most surprised me was how the grain itself reads differently in print versus on screen.
On scan, the Berlin Kino grain looked like noise. Granular, distracting, a thing the image was fighting against. In print, the same grain reads as texture. It fills the same role that the soft-focus from a Veriochrome or similar character lens does. It covers the absolute sharpness of the subject with a slightly impressionistic veil that, depending on the subject, can actively improve the image.
For a portrait of someone with rough textured skin (Rob, with his beard and weather-worn face) the grain becomes part of the texture, working with the subject. For a portrait of someone with smoother skin, the Berlin Kino grain perhaps takes over too much and Lady Grey’s cleaner rendering would suit better.
Quite by accident, the films I had used for each happened to suit the subjects: Berlin for Rob with all his texture, Lady Grey for cleaner faces. Looking at the prints, I could not have planned that better.
The bigger question: are digital scans misleading us about films?
This experiment raises something worth thinking about generally.
A lot of how we talk about films these days is mediated by digital scans. The film community on YouTube, Instagram, blogs (this one included), is showing each other digital images of negatives, judging the films based on those images, forming opinions and recommending things to each other.
But scanning is its own process with its own characteristics. It introduces digital noise. It depends on the scanner or camera-scan rig. It depends on how the operator processes the resulting file. A scanned negative is a translation, not the negative itself.
A darkroom print is much closer to the negative. There is still intervention (paper grade, exposure, dodging, burning) but the medium is the medium the film was designed for. Berlin Kino was developed by Lomography to be printed on photographic paper, not to be scanned to a JPEG.
This means it is genuinely possible that we are systematically underrating films that scan badly but print well, and overrating films that scan cleanly. Berlin Kino is potentially one of those underrated films. Worth thinking about for any film you have written off based on scans alone.
The Lightroom question
This connects to an ongoing argument in the film community about whether it is “acceptable” to make Lightroom adjustments to digital scans of negatives, or whether that constitutes a betrayal of the analogue process.
Here is the thing: in a pure analogue darkroom workflow, you absolutely do manipulate the image. Paper grade is a contrast control. Exposure time changes overall density. Dodging and burning change local tonality. You are constantly making decisions that affect the final print.
If I can push Berlin Kino through grade 4 paper in the darkroom to add the contrast it lacks, that is not a betrayal of the analogue process. It is just how darkroom printing works. Why, then, would tweaking the contrast slider in Lightroom on a digital scan of the same negative be different?
I would argue it is not different. Both are post-capture interventions that take a negative and shape it into a final image. The medium changes (paper versus screen), but the principle of “intervene to get the image you want” is identical.
Worth bearing in mind. Had I pushed the contrast on my Berlin Kino scans in Lightroom, I might have arrived at the same favourable verdict for that film weeks earlier. The “analogue purity” argument can stop you from getting the most out of your negatives.
The practical conclusion
I am genuinely chuffed with the darkroom experiment. The Berlin Kino prints will be the ones I remember from this whole exercise, more than the scans.
The films stand where they stood: Lady Grey is a clean, well-behaved black and white film that suits portraits and reliable shooting. Berlin Kino is rougher and grainier but produces characterful, textured prints in the darkroom that suit specific subjects. I would now recommend Berlin Kino more confidently than I did at the end of the scanning tests, with the caveat that it shows its best in print.
For anyone who has Berlin Kino sitting unused after being disappointed by scans, take them into the darkroom. You may find yourself surprised by what they can produce.
Setup notes
For anyone wanting to try this themselves:
Ilford PQ Universal is a fine general-purpose paper developer and what I use for most of my darkroom printing. Reliable, predictable, dilutes 1:9.
Ilford Multigrade RC Pearl 8x10 was the paper for these prints. RC (resin coated) dries fast and behaves predictably, Multigrade gives you variable contrast via filters or a colour-head enlarger, Pearl finish has a slight texture that suits portraiture without being too matte.
The Intrepid enlarger I have used elsewhere on the site. Compact, well-made, works for 35mm or 120, suits a small home darkroom setup.
Affiliate links to all of these are in the video description if you want to support the channel.