Topic: Printing colour negatives onto mono paper.

[chris667]

Hiya

I've got the darkroom together, and I have everything to do prints! I have the enlarger (actually, two enlargers, as after I bought one someone gave me one), and all the other gubbins. All I need to do is chivvy Gwin to make the curtains to black the room out, and I'm in business.

I have decided that I am sticking with getting my lab to develop and scan XP2 for me. I know I could develop black and white at home and I have all the kit but the scans are great! Easier to look at than contact prints, and not that much more expensive. I'm keeping a little independent business going too.

This leads me on to what I was thinking about. I have a lot of colour print film, bought at £1 a roll. It's long expired, and some of the colour shifts are nice, but it doesn't work for a lot of subjects. I've never been able to make prints I liked from colour negatives onto monochrome paper. So I'm thinking I could take the scans of these negatives, take all the colour away, turn them into negatives and print them onto acetate. I could contact print them!

Any pointers? I have a laser printer here, but it's not great at printing photos. Happy to pay someone to print this rather than buy a large box of acetate that might not be the right thing. I have no idea what I'm doing!

[Francois]

Prepare yourself for a grain storm!
Printers are optimized for viewing without magnification. You will obviously enlarge the spots of toner beyond what they were designed to.

But it could turn out to be interesting in the end. But I feel printing to 35mm film size would be a bit too small....

[chris667]

I was thinking more of printing the negative to the size of print I want, then making a contact print of the negative. I have started making little books of 6"x4" prints as a sort of exercise.

Might be an interesting effect though - so watch this space!

[SLVR]

if you are using single grade paper then it should be ok but I've been told that with multigrade paper, printing color negatives might not be the greatest idea.

Since the paper gets its grade from shades of yellow and pink, the areas of your image with the same colors could shift the contrast locally in those areas. Potentially giving weird effects.

Ive never tried it myself but it seems you are open to neat and strange effects so why not give it a try. It could be fine or it could be weird, I've never tried it myself so I cant say for certain what might happen.

good luck!

[Francois]

You could definitely print the images at the final size and just contact print them. That's a common practice for all alt.processes.
Usually, they use inkjet transparencies as the printers can print more subtle nuances than a laser. But as far as I'm concerned, I see no problem with using laser.

I've tried printing color negatives before and even with fixed grade paper, it's a real nightmare. Prints always come out flat no matter what. And everytime there is a color close to red on the negative, it prints a perfect white.

There was only one paper designed specifically for that purpose and it was Kodak Panalure. The paper was nice in a way but had to be handled in total darkness as it was panchromatic.

[Pete_R]

The idea is sound. In my experience, an ink jet does a better job of printing negatives on to acetate but the laser printer I tried once was pretty crappy - yours may be better. But make sure you use the correct type of acetates for your printer. Acetates for lasers are different than those for inkjets. If you get it wrong you might end up with a sticky mess inside your laser. There's usually a right and a wrong side to print on as well.

You may need to experiment with getting the right density of negative for whatever paper you are using. You might also need to adjust the curves to get the right contrast. For that reason it would be easier if you could print your own as it will be trial and error to get the best negative.

Probably not relevant if you are printing onto photographic paper using a white light source but I found, with alt processes, that the colour of the negative had a big effect on the final result. The negative doesn't have to be black and white if you use an inkjet, I found negs for cyanotypes gave a better contrast if they were printed in green ink.

[Francois]

The fun thing with printers is that they are quite predictable.
You can print a step wedge, print it and scan the print to make a custom adjustment curve in Photoshop. That way you can get the most of the available density range and just have to set the exposure time.

Check the alternativephotography.com website for a lot of tips on making digital negatives.