You could do minor color balancing of a print form a negative that was off when doing it the old-school way. You did it while setting the C-M-Y filters on the enlarging head. When I made color prints from color negatives with my gear, I was the only one saying if the color was correct. I hand no machine to tell me that it was good. And a well color balanced negative did not mean I'd get a well color balanced print. It was trial and error, slow and laborious often to get a good color print. I'd guess at a C-M-Y settings and make a print, let it dry, look for color casts and guess at what new C-M-Y setting and the amount that would correct that. No fun. Big labs have a calibrated machine that automatically does that much like pushing the auto color balance button in software on a digital file. Sometimes that works and sometimes not so well. A lot depends on what colors and/or neutral colors are in the scene.
Then I finally got a semi-automatic color analyzer to help me but you had to make a bunch of prints that you picked one as "correct color" and then set the analyzer to use that as a reference for each film you used. That improved my output but still often required multiple attempts. Then my enlarger's lightbulb brunt out. The new replacement bulb meant I had to go through that long, dreaded recalibration process again. Making color prints was not nearly as fun as doing BW prints where selecting different grades of paper, their warmth, textures and toning was all part of how you'd express your final vision.
Last edited by tuco; 01-10-2016 at 01:35 PM.