37 years between color prints

[wyofilm]

About a year ago I bought all the necessary components for making color prints: color head, Arista RA-4 kit, color processing tubes, etc. , but never got around to it. Why? Maybe because the one and only time I make color prints, I didn't like it. It was at a community college when I was in high school. There was practically nothing I liked about the process. Fast forward a bunch of years and I found a brochure to the Kodak process we used. It was Ektaflex PCT color print making process.

The way it worked was to expose a negative on a color head enlarger (dialing in the usual types of color corrections). Then inserting the neg into a machine that makes a neg/paper laminate (I guess applying chemistry in the process). All in one step printmaking and chemistry. Once out of 'the machine' (whatever it did) just peel the print away from the negative. Could be used with negatives or slides.

Anyway, here are my first two color prints in 37 years using a process I understand. More enjoyable this time around.
Portra 160 (6x7 neg), Arista RA-4, color tube processing, 75°F. 70Y/40M.

 

[MattKing]

Well done.
Hope you enjoy this second time around.

 

[wyofilm]

Yes. Much better this time. Thanks.

By the way, was the Ektaflex pct process a common one? It easily could have been and I wouldn't have know it.

 

[MattKing]

I don't know how common it was, but the demand for a way to quickly make colour prints was common - think the passport and ID photo market.

 

[foc]

I only read about the Kodak Ektaflex process, I never saw any prints.
I think it was introduced in the early 1980s as a quick and easy process to make colour prints. If I remember correctly, this was before to introduction of RA4 when the EP2 process was still going strong.
For the passport and id market, the Polaroid passport system was very popular with photo shops and studios.
In the mid to late 1980s (in Ireland) I shop a lot of USA J1(?) visa photos. The Polaroid we had couldn't do the US size and we couldn't supply instant US visa photos, so we shot the visa photo in a series of 5 shots with a 35mm camera, showing the applicant's left ear. Because we machine printed our own prints in our lab, we could turn around the visa photos fairly quickly (by 1980s standards).

 

[wyofilm]

I still have some prints from that time. They were just shoved into a school folder and forgotten for decades. All but one of them have suffered to some degree. The one that is in good shape was probably on top of the stack. Thus, the image didn't interact with the backside of other prints. The quality is still quite good. A little googling last night indicated that one of the criticisms of the Ektaflex process is that since it was a diffusion transfer process, the image might not be very sharp. While this might be true, a look at my prints doesn't scream unsharp.

I don't really remember why I was so put off at the time. Maybe because I didn't understand what was going on with the chemistry. I would never have a special machine to make the prints. It wasn't a process I expected to use when I took the class. Who knows. In any event, I would like to have access to the process today to make prints from slides.

Here are the pages that describe the process. Also, the text refers to this process being based on Kodak's instant film. The Ektaflex product was available early 1982. There is no mention of sizes other than 8x10 available, which surprises me. Was a separate processing machine required for each print size?

 

[Vaughn]

One thing that might help in your printing is to make a different type of test strip. Make four different exposures onto the paper using the same exposure time, but change the aperture instead. There will be a slight color shift as the exposure get longer and this method will show different exposures without any color shift. Minor, but might be of value.

 

[wyofilm]

Thanks for the suggestion. I was happy enough to get these two prints made - I had very little time. I was in such a rush you might have noticed that the neg was flipped in the exposure test! I hope to carve out some real time to really dig in.