Carbon Prints (pigments) from enlarged positives

[Alan Townsend]

About 30 years ago, I experimented with carbon prints from enlarged positives. Last winter, I did a few more tests, with fair results. Then, I decided to focus on enlarged negatives, so put printing from positives on hold. So I'm sharing this to help others.

We all know regular carbon prints that use very dark pigments in dichromted gelatin on a tissue that are transferred to a piece of sized white paper. Since I do everything backwards , I tried printing using a white pigment in dichromated gelatin on a tissue transferred to a piece of black sized paper. It worked well after adjusting formulas and thicknesses a bit. Pretty straightforward. Since this was obvious, I assumed this had been done before.

I used zinc oxide powder, which is archival and inexpensive as well as having anti-fungal properties with gelatin. Cadmium oxide is preferred for oil paints since zinc oxide is incompatible with them, but it would likely also work but be more expensive. Need to use isopropanol to break surface tension when mixing with gelatin, just like carbon powders. I used a black gesso type of acrylic for the black sizing on the paper, which was a watercolor type.

There are several advantages to this style printing.

1. Light transmission through the tissue is much better, greatly reducing exposure times and making visual exposure determination via the printout image much easier. This also makes halation at the tissue a problem if a white plastic like Yupo is used. I used a clear polyester sheet for the tissue, and black construction paper for anti-halation. Black Yupo would be good if it exists.
Gelatin separates from mylar really easy.

2. Prints directly from an enlarged positive, much easier to make than a negative. I haven't nailed the optimal density range needed for the positive yet, but it is higher than standard carbon prints I believe. Contrast control is also different and works the same with changing dichromate concentration. Pigment concentration has less effect on contrast then with dark carbon printing. Plain old ortho litho film works fairly well under the enlarger and processed D23 at 1:7 for 2-4 minutes with constant agitation. X-ray film would likely be a better choice.

3. Better depth and presence is possible, I believe, although I have not perfected this yet. This favors thicker gelatin. Unlike all other prints, other than Ambrotypes, light illuminating the prints is single pass only. The background is black or dark, so light does reflect back through the emulsion as it does with all other processes to my knowledge. The whites are raised up physically with thicker gelatin on the print surface, with the blacks deeper behind, which is more natural.

I'm building cameras and taking pictures this summer, so may not get back to darkroom work until winter. I also need a densitometer to proceed.

Are there other printers out there that have experimented with this? I would think so, but haven't heard of any, but I've been out of the loop most of my life. Actually, I kinda like working alone.

[Drew Wiley]

You'll be in good company. A number of people on this forum specialize in it, teach workshops, and have even published books. I'm not one of them, but do admire the visual results of the process, and do like reading about the technique per se.

[Ron McElroy]

You might want to join this Carbon Printing group. Lots of information there: https://groups.io/g/carbon

[Vaughn]

I have seen a couple images of carbon prints using white pigments. I always thought it would be be a cool thing to do and have run through what would be needed as a mental exercises. I was wondering about the UV blocking of the white pigments -- interesting to hear that it is less than carbon. Zinc oxide is used to block UV from noses!

I am use to having the blacks stand out -- reversing that would be interesting.

[Drew Wiley]

Many "white" pigments will discolor over the long-term, and they tend to be rather large particles. And I guess the holy grail of carbon transfer would be figuring out how to put the tones back in their naturally perceptible order - blacks receding instead of the other way around, counterintuitively. With color carbon, it's even a trickier challenge apart from a screen process direct carbon approach, like Fresson. But if we can appreciate the world upside-down on the ground glass, why not this? I wonder what Stephen Hawking would write if he were still alive - perhaps a mathematical formula for an inverted black hole?

[Vaughn]

Difficult to tell on the computer screen, but the more I think of it and as I look at some of my carbons, having the black being a thicker layer than the highlights does not look at all unnatural. Not all blacks recede, in fact few do in the grand landscape as the atmospheric distance turns distance blacks into grays. The true blacks are up close.

Looking at my prints, the raised blacks help to create the sense of volume -- and the highlights can still dance above them.

I was considering using white pigments for images of light objects on a black background -- still lives. In those cases, using black pigments can put the lighter objects visually and literally in a 'hole', so to speak.

11x14 carbon print
Two Redwoods
Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park

[Tin Can]

I like Andy

He is not secretive

Making A Carbon Transfer Print With 14x17 X-RAY Negative!

https://youtu.be/dOmcpxtVD4U

[Alan Townsend]

I spent most of today reading back through messages at: https://groups.io/g/carbon/topic/whi...84548855748955

These relate to white carbon tissue printing. There is a nice example, and the details given by Sidney Kapuskar:
I did some testing a while back. For my personal taste, the impact is less striking than black carbon tissue on white - I guess it also depends on the type of image subject used.

You'll need a positive and all linearization steps are reversed (as you would carry out for a regular positive inkjet print).
I experimented with titanium white ink. Sensitizer concentration was reduced to about 0.5% and my exposure time reduced to about a third from my black glop times.

This was from about two years ago. Almost all the posts in the last two years relate to printing using "digital negatives" where it doesn't really matter, and since there are no profiles for a reversed negative, it's too much work coming up with one.

Personally, I don't like digital imaging very much except for proofing. It was the reason I dropped the photography hobby 25 years ago. It's simply too easy. Point and shoot, click, then click and drag for a while. Anybody becomes a fine art photographer. I need films and chemicals. With my digital imaging today, I analog my digitals using my Calumet to photograph an HDTV screen. then I can print them normally as photographs. Put another way, I photograph my digitals to analog them.

Works for me

Alan who does everything backwards, Townsend