Clients sometimes ask for the shadows to be opened. I understand the ask. They were in the room. They remember the chair. The chair, in the negative, is a rumour.
I print so the rumour stays. A face needs a stop more than a wall does. The wall can go. If the face goes, I have failed the sitting, not the meter.
If I can see everything, I have metered for a catalogue, not a picture.
In the darkroom the safelight makes this easy to believe and hard to do. Everything looks warmer than it will in daylight. I keep a dried print on the wall from last winter, ugly and honest, and I look at it before I pull a new one.
The files, when I scan, are for the book and the proof. They are not the picture. The picture is the one that dries on the line and still has its dark.