Any way to make analog prints from slides?

removed account4 · Aug 2, 2021

Ryan Oliveira said:
That's what internegatives are.
Will I get similar colors to a saturated slide, like Velvia 50, using a low contrast film like Portra 160 ?

that's out of my league. I don't do much copy work.
I've done my fair share of tri chromes ( through modern means )
and I've done copy work with BW film (copying blueprints and historic artifacts )
but I don't typically rephotograph chromes except with a Dcam.
good luck with your project!
John

Ryan Oliveira · Aug 2, 2021

jnantz said:
that's out of my league. I don't do much copy work.
I've done my fair share of tri chromes ( through modern means )
and I've done copy work with BW film (copying blueprints and historic artifacts )
but I don't typically rephotograph chromes except with a Dcam.
good luck with your project!
John

I'm not actually going to do it, just a thought.

It's actually just simpler to project the slides, which is what I plan on doing.

DREW WILEY · Aug 2, 2021

Very high quality reproduction can be done via internegatives, probably better than ever using current materials. Note that I'm not claiming "easier" than before.

removed account4 · Aug 2, 2021

Ryan Oliveira said:
I'm not actually going to do it, just a thought.

It's actually just simpler to project the slides, which is what I plan on doing.

just for laughs. if you have a red green and blue filter lying around... put some black and white film in your camera and expose 3 frames one with each filter.. don't worry if it is the wrong shade of blue green or red, I use lighting gels and its "good enough" ... ( the way I see it is its supposed to be fun not an anal retentive exercise ) note which are which and scan them and adjust them and open a clean file and drop each negative file into the color channel that corresponds to the filter used and you will build your own modern trichrome image. its really not hard, but pretty easy, and it might become an addiction if you have fun doing it. you'll have complete control over your image and
you might like those versions better than the images you started with.
once I fix the flash mount on a technical camera I use I plan on attaching a large strobe to the camera and making 3D trichrome as a way to use up all my 4x5 sheet film, much more fun than boring 2D images
good luck with your project !
John

Ryan Oliveira · Aug 2, 2021

Thanks !
I've been thinking about a project of a "trichrome camera", with three shutters and three lenses...

I wanted to make it the more tradicional way, instead of scanning the film, I'd reverse process or rephotograph them to get a b&w positive from each, and then stack the three positives together with three sheets of RGB filters, and get a true color slide, to see on a light table !

DREW WILEY · Aug 2, 2021

Ryan, that kind of light table stacking wouldn't work. If you stack even two of the three respective hard RGB filters atop one another, you only end up with black! You need to project the three separately, and align them on a white target like a slide show.

Sergey Ko · Aug 3, 2021

Alan Edward Klein said:
How did you scan the 24x30" print?

I scaned with Epson3200 in flatbed mode I think the prints are not exactly 24x30, close to something about 20x30.

Sergey Ko · Aug 3, 2021

Alan Edward Klein said:
How did you create the print?

I did nothing personally. The print made my friend, the professional lab owner in Vilnius. He print me a lot of of my slides.
I'll upload some more in few hours, I need to reduce for direct upload, or use Flickr

Robert Maxey · Aug 3, 2021

DREW WILEY said:
Tricolor projection of in-camera color separations onto panchromatic glass plates was actually the earliest fashion of routinely conveying color images, Three separate carbon arc projectors were aligned. Those shows must have been horribly slow and hot, but I've had old-timers describe them as the most stunning color photography presentations they'd ever seen. As far as gum over platinum and all that kind of thing, it's currently being heavily practiced by certain individuals and dedicated labs, but has quite a different look from what I've just described.

And if you consider the Bayer Filter used in many, many digital cameras, we are simply updating, in essence, Autochromes.

Bob

Robert Maxey · Aug 3, 2021

Ryan Oliveira said:
For sure, there're no rules....

But if you wanted to reproduce a slide in a print through an analog process, they're not many viable methods.

Well, I have made hundreds of color internegs and duplicate slides. All it takes is a little ingenuity and a few dedicated tools. A slide duplicator is one way; the bowen Illumitran is another. Google either of these devices or look on some web auction site and you can put something workable together.

Bob

Robert Maxey · Aug 3, 2021

Nicholas Lindan said:
Going through old family photographs from the 50's I came across some prints with excellent color reproduction - made from slides and 2x3" in size. The quality was nothing like the miserable prints available in the 60's and 70's. If you wanted a good print from a slide in the malaise era you had to pay for a 6x9cm internegative and a then get a regular-ole color print.

On the back of the prints in the family collection it said "Kodachrome Print." Not at all sure how they did it, you can put a Kodachrome emulsion on paper but you couldn't process it. The color fidelity said Kodachrome all through it.

Kodak also made duplicate slides with/from Kodachrome - again stunning colors, nothing like an Ektachrome dupe.

Kodachrome has an interesting history and at one time, Kodak made Kodachrome prints a different base. There was a special version of Kodachrome made for/distributed by Technicolor. This was made specifically to help keep contrast lowed during duplication. And the name Kodachrome was used long before the Kodachrome Paul Simon implores people not to take away.

I truly miss this film.

Bob

Robert Maxey · Aug 3, 2021

DREW WILEY said:
But simply making color separations in the lab instead from a single chrome is a lot more practical, but still a lot of work.

When you start thinking about making seps, understand it can be far more difficult than many realize. Dye Transfer printers know full well, that one often needs to make a variety of masks as well.

Bob

DREW WILEY · Aug 3, 2021

There is a significant difference from making internegs commercially and precision ones worthy of the highest quality color prints. One takes a few seconds, the other might take a week or more per image, and would be outright commercially unaffordable. Just depends on your personal requirements. Old slide duplicating gadgets are abundant, whether high quality or outright junk variety. Traditional duplicating films are a thing of the past, so you'll have to handle contrast via flashing, though I personally take the more elaborate and selective masking route, better suited to large format originals.

Autochromes? ... now that was a beautiful process. I prefer the original more unpredictable version. But yeah, the overall look could be digitally generated, meaning not in a pixelated fashion, but via actual tricolor separations from initial digital capture, then going alt printing from there.

DREW WILEY · Aug 3, 2021

Hi Bob. During my Ciba years I learned a lot of shortcuts, a few of which became applicable to DT masking. I've known individuals using up to six sheets of film per separation. That would get insanely expensive in this day and age. I won't go into details here, because Ciba is now largely extinct, and the remaining DT practitioners have various personal methods. And there are also certain ways to tinker with dyes to offset some of the mask quantities, but that relies on a large selection of dyes on hand, which is nothing I'm interested in this late in life. The third trick is to generate a master printing duplicate, with most of the contrast and hue corrections already built in, that can be used for more than one kind of color printing medium. I've had great luck using those for sake of contact internegs, and then printing those onto RA4 papers. But I've also used them for Ciba printing and generating DT color separations more efficiently. Mostly from 8X10 originals, and a lot of work, but well worth it. I originally decided on that route back when it was difficult to get color sheet film on stable estar base, and had trouble keeping triacetate originals in register with their masks. Doing it more rapidly within a single week or so, to create a master duplicate which could be kept on file, turned out to be a good decision.

But a particular one of those involved 13 sheets of 8X10 film, by far a personal record; but the result in either Ciba or C-print - wow! It has a vibrancy and depth to it that no inkjet ever would.

Sergey Ko · Aug 3, 2021

Some photo more, the 20x30 print scans digitally printed from Fuji Velvia-50:

FujiGA645zi Fuji Velvia 50 by Sergey Kozlov, on Flickr

removed account4 · Aug 3, 2021

Robert Maxey said:
When you start thinking about making seps, understand it can be far more difficult than many realize. Dye Transfer printers know full well, that one often needs to make a variety of masks as well.

Bob

took 6 hours to set up dye transfer for 1 print and then 20 mins for each print to be made..
lot of work.

MattKing · Aug 3, 2021

Sergey Ko said:
I scaned with Epson3200 in flatbed mode I think the prints are not exactly 24x30, close to something about 20x30.

I have to ask - is that 20 x 30 inches, or 20 x 30 centimeters?

Luckless · Aug 3, 2021

This feels like a thread that might help me make some useful decisions, and maybe give other people ideas. I've shot a bit of colour slide film, and am still debating how much I want to use it over my black and white work and 'that other colour option'.

So far I've been leaning towards using the slide film to make colour and shadow/highlight separation layers on modern B&W film, and using those to 'eventually' make colour prints of one kind or another.

Currently thinking colour carbon printing as the most obvious choice - If I am going to put time and effort into a manual hand made print that skips over using a computer, then I want something with a finished product that is visually distinct enough from sending scans to a modern printer to justify the time and effort of doing it by hand. And so far colour carbons seem to be the only thing that meets that need while not relying on any materials that seem overly expensive or likely to drop off the market entirely in the near future.

Still have a few inter-stage issues to solve if I want to 'print big' [Current space & enlarger caps me out around the 20-22 inch mark on the short edge of a print with reasonable handling], such as whether or not going to a paper-negative solution once I get my initial colour layer negatives separated from the original slide is viable with carbon prints, and whether or not I should do the first stages on reversals or print them to an extra inter-negative stage for the process.

I suspect that the entire plan is fairly silly and an excessive volume of work just to produce a single print [and how many prints can be reliably made from the final interstages is possibly questionable], but it sounds like fun, and will probably teach me loads of neat ways to screw things up. And isn't that the main reason to do something like this vs just throw the project at a computer and let it do everything for me?

DREW WILEY · Aug 3, 2021

Kodachromes came up. I was once shown in my office a whole stack of 5X7 Kodachromes taken of famous actors and actresses by Hurrell's studio. They were still as vivid as if taken yesterday. But during the same sessions, a Curtis tricolor camera was also used for sake of simultaneous color separations onto 5X7 panchromatic film. These would in turn be used in dye transfer printing for sake of large advertising prints better detailed than if just small Technicolor movie separations had been used. The sad thing is that they were all on early acetate film base, and were now shrunken hopelessly out of register with one another. Trying to remaster dye transfer prints with them was attempted by a certain individual, but he almost went nuts. It was only after new digital methods became available to snap the separate sheets into precise alignment that good inkjet prints came out instead. Doing it DT would have required the pricey stage of remastering the separate negs themselves in aligned dimensional fashion using a film recorder. There was some legal contention over who actually owned the rights to those images, so the prints themselves sadly never were put on sale.

Robert Maxey · Aug 3, 2021

Luckless said:
This feels like a thread that might help me make some useful decisions, and maybe give other people ideas. I've shot a bit of colour slide film, and am still debating how much I want to use it over my black and white work and 'that other colour option'.

So far I've been leaning towards using the slide film to make colour and shadow/highlight separation layers on modern B&W film, and using those to 'eventually' make colour prints of one kind or another.

Currently thinking colour carbon printing as the most obvious choice - If I am going to put time and effort into a manual hand made print that skips over using a computer, then I want something with a finished product that is visually distinct enough from sending scans to a modern printer to justify the time and effort of doing it by hand. And so far colour carbons seem to be the only thing that meets that need while not relying on any materials that seem overly expensive or likely to drop off the market entirely in the near future.

Still have a few inter-stage issues to solve if I want to 'print big' [Current space & enlarger caps me out around the 20-22 inch mark on the short edge of a print with reasonable handling], such as whether or not going to a paper-negative solution once I get my initial colour layer negatives separated from the original slide is viable with carbon prints, and whether or not I should do the first stages on reversals or print them to an extra inter-negative stage for the process.

I suspect that the entire plan is fairly silly and an excessive volume of work just to produce a single print [and how many prints can be reliably made from the final interstages is possibly questionable], but it sounds like fun, and will probably teach me loads of neat ways to screw things up. And isn't that the main reason to do something like this vs just throw the project at a computer and let it do everything for me?

Please take no offense, but it seems to me you are making this project much more complicated than it needs to be. I am not exactly sure what your goal is at this point. You seem to want to add lots of things that are not required.

If your goal is a print based upon a three color separation/transfer system, start by studying these things: making dye transfer prints, making color carbon prints, proper separation negative making, how to make proper masks, how matrix film works, how carbon printing works and make lots of tests.

Be aware that most of what you will need is not available, but in a way it is because you can make what you need. I am facing some of the same issues you face because I must make my own films, like Vectograph film. This is complicated, but doable.

Lots of work, indeed.

Luck to you,

Bob

Robert Maxey · Aug 3, 2021

Ryan Oliveira said:
Thanks !
I've been thinking about a project of a "trichrome camera", with three shutters and three lenses...

I wanted to make it the more tradicional way, instead of scanning the film, I'd reverse process or rephotograph them to get a b&w positive from each, and then stack the three positives together with three sheets of RGB filters, and get a true color slide, to see on a light table !

Be aware, you might have an issue when you stack your red, green and blue filters. CYM(K) is used for printing and RGB works well for projection, but not so good for your idea. Stack three filters together and have a look at what I mean.

Bob

Robert Maxey · Aug 3, 2021

DREW WILEY said:
Autochromes? ... now that was a beautiful process. I prefer the original more unpredictable version. But yeah, the overall look could be digitally generated, meaning not in a pixelated fashion, but via actual tricolor separations from initial digital capture, then going alt printing from there.

Add digital, however, and they are no longer Autochromes. There is only one way to make an Autochrome. But here is the thing: the process is something many here could try. I've looked into making a modern version using nanoparticles and one of Corning's amazing glasses. That is on a distant back burner however.

Bob

DREW WILEY · Aug 3, 2021

There are so many potential ways to make a color print that it's becoming difficult to even name them all. So much has been tried before, and now we've got hybrid options too. I don't have enough time left to become a serious alt printer, even though just for sake of mental fun I've come up with all kinds of ideas, including certain hypothetical ways to modernize color carbon printing. I have a good background in industrial pigments, and for awhile had an inside R&D track. But I state, "hypothetical", because a number of chemists are working along the same lines trying to achieve totally permanent nano-pigments. But coming up with a true CMYK process set is proving to be quite a challenge. If I wanted to get in the game, I do know of micro-ground pigments superior to what inkjet offers. But "distant back burner" pretty much sums it up for me too. And I really don't want to get involved much with dichromates; known too many seriously ill people from that.

afriman · Aug 3, 2021

Perhaps it is worth pointing out that even Cibachrome was not necessarily an easy process. Cibachrome "master printers" would often go to extraordinary lengths to obtain optimal results. These included pre-flashing, extensive use of masks, a lot of careful dodging and burning in, and even tweaking the chemistry.

In that respect, I think Ilford was somewhat misleading in advertising it as a "bullet-proof", almost infallible process that was super-easy and almost guaranteed good results, with wide tolerances regarding temperature and colour filtration. Sure, it could be that if you carefully chose low-contrast slides and were not too fussy about burnt-out highlights. But good luck printing slides with even moderately high contrast.

DREW WILEY · Aug 3, 2021

It's all relative. I have an old Kodak sales brochure or ad touting how easy dye transfer is for the do-it-yourself home darkroom worker. Well, it was easy back then compared to color carbro. Then Ciba came along. Within the first day I was making nice prints on Ciba. Of course, my technique steadily improved as I learned more and more tricks. Like many things, you could take it as far as you wanted in terms of commitment. More routine chromogenic of C-printing evolved parallel to much of this. People rarely did supplemental masking and so forth, though it was a known option. But I have learned to significantly improve if necessary RA-4 chromogenic prints in that manner. Guess it all depends on how one feels about tactile darkroom work per se, whether they enjoy it or would rather be sitting on their butt punching buttons instead.

Any way to make analog prints from slides?

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