Darkroom Tip: Yellow, Orange, Red: Every Filter Costs You Light

On black-and-white film a coloured filter passes its own colour and blocks the complement. Yellow renders a sky about the way your eye remembers it, orange deepens it and cuts haze, and red drops it to near-black so clouds tear off the print. None of this touches colour film usefully — this is a B&W technique.

The bill comes as the filter factor: roughly +1 stop for yellow, +2 for orange, +3 for red, varying by exact filter and film. Meter without the filter and add the compensation yourself, or meter through it with TTL and trust that — but never both, or you'll pay twice.

Log the filter per frame in Analogly's Roll Log. When a negative comes back inexplicably thin, an uncompensated red filter is very often the answer.