Question: how dark is dark enough?

I'm about to revive my darkroom, which has been sitting gathering dust
now for a couple years. (That dust is gonna be a big problem, I know.)
So I'm wondering if the place I have in mind for it is dark enough.

It's the bottom half of my live/work space which has no windows, at the
opposite end of the room which opens into the upstairs. I sat down there
for a while tonight to see how dark it was; after a few minutes, I could
just barely make out faint lightness at the other end of the room, but
could see nothing definite.

So I'm wondering if there's a rule of thumb about how dark is dark
enough. You know, something like the "sunny 16" rule about what can be
seen with the naked eye.

Yeah, yeah, I know I could make some test exposures with paper, but you
know what? I just don't want to. I'm not planning on making any
gallery-quality prints, just want to print the last couple of rolls of
film that I shot. So if you have any rough guidelines, I'm all ears.

My impression is that it's plenty dark enough, so long as I work fairly
efficiently and don't leave paper exposed to ambient light for too long.


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