The Dye Transfer Process

[Drew Wiley]

You can chime into Jim Browning's Dye Transfer Forum. It's a stiff learning curve because you have to improvise most of your supplies nowadays. There are still a few commercial dye transfer operations, but naturally keep the necessary materials for themselves. All the necessary masking and color separations can still be done in the darkroom, and probably be done better than ever, but using different films from that in the older how-to sources. Or those steps can be done digitally. Dyes are still obtainable. Transfer paper can be hand-mordanted, just like it was in the earlier days of the process. But the clincher is matrix film, which is no longer commercially available. It is still being made for one lab in particular, but not for general sales. The exposure and registration equipment can be cobbled together all
kinds of way by anyone seriously interested. If you want good results easily, stick with inkjet. But when a dye transfer print is done right, there's nothing else like it.

[Bill_1856]

NOT EVEN CLOSE! Obviously you have never had the pleasure of viewing a dye transfer print.

It seems to me that YOU don't know how good inkjets have gotten.
I made Dye Transfer prints for years ever since I was in high school, but gave them up several years ago when it became obvious that there were better (and easier) ways to do it. Even Ctein has switched.

[Drew Wiley]

Ctein switched because he was running out of critical materials (he worked with the comparatively rare pan matrix process from color negs), and frankly, just because he wanted to do something different. When he showed me a whole series of parallel prints he had printed both ways, well yeah, 60% of them were about
equal; but then there were about 40% where the dye transfer version really stood out. One of the big differences is that inkjets are made from inks (duuh), and lack the transparency of dyes. On the other hand, lots and lots of mediocre dye prints were made when that work the conventional way of printing chromes. I tend to think good inkjets looks inferior to even well-made chromogenic prints, but that's half personal taste, and the other half, just sick of seeing so many of them, I suppose. The mere fact Dye Transfer has been successfully commercially revived shows it still has market appeal. And completely apart from that fact,
it has the appeal of a hands-on craft - like, "I actually made that myself", and not "I pushed some keypad buttons while hooked up to my high-fructose corn syrup
IV".... Pardon the personal bias, here. I'm obviously sick of computers. ... Superb results can be obtained all kinds of ways.

[Drew Wiley]

I should add another important distinction. With dye transfer, it is really difficult to control the highlights, but you can get luxurious shadow reproduction. With inkjet it's just the opposite - you can adjust the printing curves in advance, but the very nature of the blacks is muddy and discontinuous. Not every image works well on
every media. One just learns with whatever. I pretty much mastered Cibachrome, and it was certainly an idiosyncratic process in terms of color accuracy and contrast. And I hope to spend some more time with dye transfer once I retire, but am not under any illusions that I'll make more than a handful of classic keeper images. There are easier ways to do that.

[Andrew O'Neill]

I have a dye transfer print by Ctein. It's beautiful.

[Curt]

I saw a color carbon print of Freida Kahlo at the George Eastman House and was totally blown away. Up until that time I thought only a dye transfer print could look like that. Renaissance painters have them all beat though!

[Jim Noel]

It seems to me that YOU don't know how good inkjets have gotten.
I made Dye Transfer prints for years ever since I was in high school, but gave them up several years ago when it became obvious that there were better (and easier) ways to do it. Even Ctein has switched.

Ctein switching is no recommendation in my view. I will compare a properly made dye transfer to any digitally produced image any day. Digital imaging has a long way to go to equal the process. and yes, I have a friend who constantly upgrades his printers (plural) to the latest available including beta testing for one of the major manufacturers.

[invisibleflash]

I had read a lot about the dye transfer process that Bob Pace had written, but I never knew that he sounded like a character from The Sopranos until I watched that video.

He was very nice. I worked with him in the 1970's.

[Kirk Gittings]

A good Inkjet print will equal a Dye.

Actually it is fairly rare but I agree with Drew on this. I have over the years (because I live in NM and knew Eliot Porter a bit etc.) have seen tons of his dye transfers. Some are exquisite but most I thought were "ehhh" even back in the day. So I would have to say that the best inkjets exceed EPs average dye transfer, but don't reach his best. So my advice.......unless you are just into a laborious painful, expensive, process or want to try and match the best work of a historic master (who spent a lifetime mastering the process when there was readily available materials) stick to mastering inkjet (which very few do no matter what equipment you have-and beta testing? Iv've done it-not a mark of anything in particular except doing a manufacturers work for them for free).

Also DT on display is not hugely lightfast either as some collectors of EP sadly learned.

[invisibleflash]

Ctein switching is no recommendation in my view. I will compare a properly made dye transfer to any digitally produced image any day. Digital imaging has a long way to go to equal the process. and yes, I have a friend who constantly upgrades his printers (plural) to the latest available including beta testing for one of the major manufacturers.

Ink jet = or surpass a dye transfer in IQ. And DT's fade like hell. Ink jet will out last a DT by eons.

http://fadetesting.tumblr.com/

RE:Ctien? An egomaniac.