I felt like I was going crazy trying to subjectively judge prints, so I decided to do a massive run of “control” tests using nearly every 5x7 paper I own with a 4x5 step-wedge and processing in Liquidol 1+9 for 1m30s. A water stop bath was used and fresh TF-4 fixer, fixed for either 30s or 1m depending on paper type. This is the results for each paper type. Each paper type, unless “double exposure” was printed for 10s at a consistent enlarger height, at f/5.6 with a 6x6 mask and 80mm lens. Double exposure was simply printed for 20s instead. The step-wedge was in 0.15 stop increments. The “range” of each paper is with the lowest number being absolute black with no visible difference in lower values, while the top number is absolute white with no visible difference in higher values. I did not measure any of these for density, this is based solely on visual inspection. Each paper was rinsed before development. In initial tests I saw no difference between rinsing and not, but after drying, the test sample (Ilford Warmtone RC) had a visibly lighter step 7 and visibly darker step 8 when not rinsed Otherwise tonality and range was identical. I’ll eventually do a test run without rinsing, but I do rinsing most of the time with developer experiments to remove incorporated developers from the equation, so it’s still useful for me. Enlarger used has a lower contrast diffusion style light source.

Update! I now include scans of these prints. Note they aren’t exactly accurate to actual appearance of the prints. Specifically some are much darker in person than they appear in the scan, but I wanted to use consistent settings for all. Scanner was an Epson v600, using IT8 calibrated color reference, black/white curve was set to perfectly flat and post-processed in photoshop to have a black point of 19 and a white point of 252. Due to ridiculous reasons, I lost a few of the prints with these step wedges, so that’s why not all of these include scans. Order is 1st scan is grade 1, 2nd scan is grade 2.5. The red line is where visible differentiation stops in normal viewing. The blue line is where differentiation stops when shining a light through the back of the paper

Ilford Warmtone RC

Grade 1 range: 4 to 16 (12)

Grade 2.5 range: 6 to 16 (10)

Shift difference: Begins to get darker in grade 2.5 at step 9. Step 7 is almost visibly black (can just barely tell 6 is darker) and significantly different from the very dark grey produced at grade 1.

Overall impression: A standard good Ilford paper. In liquidol it looks just barely warm and closer to neutral. Contrast control tends to have a stronger effect on the lower shadows while not touching midtones very much.

Ilford MGV RC