HP Large Format Photo Negative Application

[Doug Clevenger]

Has anyone looked into the work regarding the making of large negatives using HP printers - I bumped into the following articles when trying to do some research about using the Epson 2400 printer to convert digital photographs into large negatives to do platinum prints :

http://h41131.www4.hp.com/us/en/press/hp-introduces-large-format-photo-negative-application-for-fine-art-quality-professional-photo-editions.html

http://www.pmpnonline.com/apps/blog/show/4454033-from-digital-to-platinum

Even though these are talking about using a $4000 printer to produce the negatives, it is certainly a new wrinkle to research (nice alliteration).

Any thoughts?

[Neal Chaves]

I have an HP 4000 Laserjet with 100MB of printer RAM. It can print 8X10 at 1200 DPI. I tried making some negatives on laser transparency film. I figured I could make 16X20s at 600 DPI from them, but they were too flat. Definitely not what you want for platinum printing. For the right subject matter, the HP 4000 (which can be purchased quite reasonably used) does make a nice B&W print on watercolor rag paper that has an almost platinum look to it.

[SergeyT]

I have an HP 4000 Laserjet
I'm sorry, but what does it have in common with the HP Designjet Z3200 Photo Printer (subject of the article) beside the HP logo?

[SergeyT]

Some discussion was held on this site earlier, plus some info is here: http://www.luminous-landscape.com/forum/index.php?topic=45662.0

[Kent Berquist]

Bump.

Are the any labs/printers offering HP digital negatives?

Kent

[Doug Clevenger]

"Over the past decade, specialist printmakers have
been struggling with the process to produce largeformat
negatives for platinum prints. The crucial
element that has persistently eluded them is easy
and reliable control over tone and contrast. But
that control has now finally been achieved with
the new Large Format Photo Negative application
from HP. Erwitt was privy to this new solution before
official release and has produced platinum prints.
HP was lucky. One of its color scientists, Angel
Albarran, who is a photographer with a passion
for alternative printing processes, discovered that
green Original HP Photo Ink just happens to have
a very linear response to ultraviolet light. As the
density of this green ink on a negative increases,
the amount of light that makes it through to the
coated paper decreases in a very predictable way.
Albarran developed the Large Format Photo Negative
application to exploit this linear response, providing
accurate differentiation among tones right through
the grayscale spectrum. The result is that well-defined
details automatically show up in shadows, mid-tones
and highlights, and there’s also a clean white on
the final prints. Printmakers can now forget about
digital tone adjustments before printing, unless they
particularly want to darken or lighten part of the
original image. "

It seems that there is a new way to look at how to produce the large negatives for our platinum prints.