Making Inkjet Negatives For Alt Processes

[Andrew O'Neill]

Something that I've been doing for a number of years, now...

[paulbarden]

I wish there were options for tuning the digital negative for printing on the Canon system. It seems that nearly 100% of the information out there is for Epson hardware only, so that leaves me high and dry. Oh well.

[Andrew O'Neill]

I wish there were options for tuning the digital negative for printing on the Canon system. It seems that nearly 100% of the information out there is for Epson hardware only, so that leaves me high and dry. Oh well.

I guess the person who developed QTR, worked only with Epson printers... Canon printers are more than capable, too. Dan Burkholder has decent information online, I believe.

[paulbarden]

I guess the person who developed QTR, worked only with Epson printers... Canon printers are more than capable, too. Dan Burkholder has decent information online, I believe.

I'll look for Burkholder's info, thanks.
For the entire history of the development of digital negs (printed on Pictorico or equivalent) all of the information presented has been for Epson equipment. It goes further back than the QTR technique.

[jnantz]

I wish there were options for tuning the digital negative for printing on the Canon system. It seems that nearly 100% of the information out there is for Epson hardware only, so that leaves me high and dry. Oh well.

Paul: a friend I went to school with didn't bother with all the imported curves &c, he just made a good positive in PS and inverted it for all the processes he was doing ( salt+albumen prints, cyano, kali, zia and other "types" ). I don't know what sort of printer he had but for years my digital negatives have been with consumer grade ( 65$ ) epson640 expression, and a ( 90$ ) brother laser printer .. I was using 1/2 my friends' method and 1/2 with curves ( and didn't see much of a difference ) and people using the fancy printers the school offered sometimes grumbled that my cheap and by the seat of my pants methods and even cheeper printer made things as well or better than the expensive epson hardware that was offered .

might as well try and see how it works..

[Barry Kirsten]

I second this. For years I've tried to learn the process with less than the 'accepted' QTR/resin inks/high end hardware setup that's favoured by many. Now I work a lot simpler. I produce a nice positive image in Darktable or Gimp etc, invert and flip it horizontally, then it's almost done. I usually apply a rough curve derived from experience, then print the transparency using my two Epson dye-based printers (A4 and A3) . When I produce my first cyanotype etc I get a good idea of how close I am and what other tweaks might be needed. I think I get a lot of pleasure working this way, without the hassle of all the head-busting stuff and fretting about gear and inks I don't have. Until a friend described how simple this process should be I'd battled with it for years and nearly given it all up.

[bob carnie]

I will add my. two cents on this topic. I first purchased QTR and had Ron Reeder come to my shop and he produced a calibrated wedge for us that I used for over 9 years with great success. I just had my friend create a new profile using Boutwells system and am today using it.
At the same time I had a chart made from the 100 step wedge file by a local friend and lab on over sized transparency film that he uses for gravure purposes and he had profiled it using spectrometer and balancing procedure.

I can conclude in my small sample size that if you are savy enough to have the input digital file LAB numbers match the output LAB numbers on the transparency film and subsequently make a print on silver or palladium that accurately reflects these original input LAB numbers then you have a calibrated negative.
Therefore in my small sample size experiments I would predict that any printer and any transparency film can and should be able to be calibrated by any operator who is familiar on an expert level of making profiles for any print media.

I will continue to make my negatives on my 24 inch printer, but our needs are for 30 x 40 colour and BW separation negatives and our small research has kind of proven to me at least that the old adage If it looks like a negative , has proper step wedges , and prints like a proper negative , then it is a negative.

I am suspect of those who suggest not to calibrate the transparency film as in all the tests that I have ever done , the first go around is never correct and LAB numbers in input are quite different than the output and need to be adjusted to linearize the curve so one can accurately estimate where , shadow , midtone and highlight values are going to land.

[Andrew O'Neill]

I've been working this way for many years, dumbing it down as I go. At the end of the day, we stick with what works for us.

[paulbarden]

Paul: a friend I went to school with didn't bother with all the imported curves &c, he just made a good positive in PS and inverted it for all the processes he was doing ( salt+albumen prints, cyano, kali, zia and other "types" ). I don't know what sort of printer he had but for years my digital negatives have been with consumer grade ( 65$ ) epson640 expression, and a ( 90$ ) brother laser printer .. I was using 1/2 my friends' method and 1/2 with curves ( and didn't see much of a difference ) and people using the fancy printers the school offered sometimes grumbled that my cheap and by the seat of my pants methods and even cheeper printer made things as well or better than the expensive epson hardware that was offered .

might as well try and see how it works..

Hey John. Well, I did try this two years ago and all I got for my efforts was a LOT of Pictorico film and ink wasted. I got a couple of somewhat printable negatives (working with salted paper) but none ever came close enough to what was possible with a correctly developed "in camera" negative on FP4. And so, I gave up on digital negs - too expensive, unpredictable, and far too much technical jumping-through-hoops for my liking. (the whole point of making POP prints is to avoid having to include a computer in my workflow!)

@Andrew: I did look up Burkholder's tutorials on making digital negs, but its all behind a (fairly expensive) paywall. Investing another $77 to force me in front of a computer to make suitable negatives isn't the least bit appealing. I'm not at all confident that I will end up with a simple process that will get me a good negative from my Canon printer. But thanks for the suggestion.

[sanking]

I agree with Bob Carnie when he writes, "I would predict that any printer and any transparency film can and should be able to be calibrated by any operator who is familiar on an expert level of making profiles for any print media."

Good digital negatives can be made with most printers, but for optimum results they need to be calibrated for a specific process. Most people who make digital negatives today use QTR because this raster image processor allows the user to control density from 0-100% of all of the inks in the ink set. Spectral density systems (Burkholder, Nelson, Mrhar) allow you to determine the optimum RGB blocking color of your printer, but with limited control of the individual inks in the printer ink set.

One of the pioneers in the promotion of the use of digital negatives for alternative printing is Dan Burkholder. Dan published two books on making digital negatives, Making Digital Negatives for Contact Printing, published in 1998, and The New Inkjet Negative Companion - Digital Negatives Made Easy, 2013. Others who have made important contributions in the field of digital negatives include Mark Nelson, author of PDN (Precision Digital Negatives for Silver and Other Alternative Processes), 2004; Ron Reeder, who pioneered the use of QuadToneRIP for negative making; Peter Mrhar's Easy Digital Negative system; and Richard Boutwell's QuadToneProfiling system. More recently John Isner created a system called Calibrating Digital Negatives with BTNS, which seeks to capture the feel of Phil Davis' BTZS analog system. Isner's methodology is very powerful, but like QTR requires a number of speciality measuring tools.

It is possible to make digital negatives without any measurement tools, but the knowledge and use of tools such as scanners, densitometers and spectrophotometers and spectrocolorimeters make the work faster and more precise.

Sandy