The Darkroom Cookbook, 5th Edition

Thoughts About Traditional Photography

The darkroom is the final tool for bringing your photographic vision to full flower. It all begins in the camera when you expose a negative. But it doesn’t end there; the negative is a malleable entity. It can be bleached to remove excess density if it's too dense. If you desire, you can carefully bleach back portions of a negative to remove bothersome items and increase density and contrast in the negative via intensification, and various types of masks can be employed to alter the look of the print. At one time or another, I have used all of these options and others for my “final” negative.

But once you arrive at your final negative, the contrast you choose, the length of exposure, the degree of burning ...