Cibachrome replacement?

bvy · Sep 15, 2013

Mainecoonmaniac said:
Do they still make interneg film at least?

I think we're going in circles. The short answer is no, though PE has suggested using Portra 160 for interneg, and pulling it during development to tame contrast. Maybe he can elaborate (again).

Mainecoonmaniac · Sep 15, 2013

Thanks for the clarification!

Photo Engineer · Sep 15, 2013

No interneg films. I have lots of Portra based internegas here with some Ektachrome and Kodachrome comparisons. It will take me a few days to resize them and put them up here though.

Sorry.

PE

DREW WILEY · Sep 16, 2013

The best dupe film ever was Astia 100F sheet film, even better than CDU or EDupe. But it's now in short supply and officially discontinued.
Making a precise dupe requires masking skills anyway - but then you can produce a printing master exactly matched to your paper contrast.
And I "suspect" that Portra 160 is capable of being a decent interneg film, but am still experimenting off and on - a low priority on my project
list. I've done a few big prints that way but still need to fine-tune things. Again, unsharp masking is the best way to precisely match the characteristics of the original chrome to the intended output characteristics of the interneg. But certain idiosyncrasies in hue characteristics are inevitable, esp if you are trying to tame something like Velvia. Quality-wise, it's a lot easier to print RA-4 directly from color negs.

Roger Cole · Sep 16, 2013

Poisson Du Jour said:
C41 is also vastly cheaper than Ilfochrome ever was. Fancy printing a 3m pano on Ilfochrome? A cool $3,400.
Pros using analogue still do shoot transparencies, Roger. They won't touch C41 because it doesn't have the punch. I may occasionally use Portra 160 in pinhole, but never seem to gravitate back to negs the same was as Velvia glowing on the lightbox.

Some pros, sure. I think in advertising it persisted until digital took over and is still used by some. There's also the advantage of just slapping a chrome on a lightbox and viewing it.

But I was thinking of a friend who ran a custom lab catering mostly to "pros" (loosely, and advanced amateurs) in Knoxville back in the 80s and 90s. The bulk of his professional business was weddings and that was 100% (or close enough) neg film until it went digital and killed off his business.

I find Ektar 100 has plenty of punch but no, you're right, it still isn't Velvia.

DREW WILEY · Sep 16, 2013

I figure I can print Cibas as well as anyone alive (or dead)... done enough of that ... And yeah, I can probably fool anyone into thinking an
Ektar print onto Fuji Supergloss is a Ciba (except an experienced printer themselves. The white border would be an instant giveaway). In terms
of color accuracy and ease of correction when printing, the Ektar wins hands down (and I even did portraits on Ciba, so know how to control
it if anyone does). What I miss about chromes is the ability to simply slap it down on a lightbox and instantly arrive at first base. But with about
80% less supplementary masking to do in the case of color neg originals, it isn't all that big a deal to make a few more test strips.

Roger Cole · Sep 16, 2013

Even the border isn't a 100% giveaway. Someone, I forget who, used to market an easel (for 8x10s only I think) that let you expose the image, then mask the image area and flash the border to give white borders on prints from chromes (or, alternatively, black ones on prints from negs - personally I always liked the black borders.) If you could find one of those or make something like it..

Dinesh · Sep 16, 2013

DREW WILEY said:
I figure I can print Cibas as well as anyone alive (or dead)...

You're my hero!

DREW WILEY · Sep 16, 2013

Roger - more often they simply invert the borders when laser printing onto Supergloss. I actually liked the black borders of Ciba, esp with a
black overmat. But a compound easel could also be used to reverse the borders of Supergloss and make them black. I just bend with the punches, and do not deliberately try to make color neg shots identical to Ciba - but to make them better! There are somewhat different tricks
involved, but overall, it is quite a bit easier and certainly less expensive to print color negs. But the notion that it can't compete with chrome
printing in terms of clean saturation and contrast is now no longer true - and one doesn't need any kind of Fauxtoshop fakery to do that!
When Ciba first came out, the marketing noise what how easy it was to do at home. And at an elementary level it was. But I guess anything
that makes the current generation wiggle beyond their high-fructose corn syrup IV drip line is considered just too much work today.

Photo Engineer · Sep 16, 2013

Roger, I made a simple mask that allowed me to make black or white borders for my prints.

As for having slide and internegs here, I have some but they are in the 1 meg+ size and need resizing before uploading to this thread. Sorry.

PE

Roger Cole · Sep 16, 2013

DREW WILEY said:
Roger - more often they simply invert the borders when laser printing onto Supergloss. I actually liked the black borders of Ciba, esp with a
black overmat. But a compound easel could also be used to reverse the borders of Supergloss and make them black. I just bend with the punches, and do not deliberately try to make color neg shots identical to Ciba - but to make them better! There are somewhat different tricks
involved, but overall, it is quite a bit easier and certainly less expensive to print color negs. But the notion that it can't compete with chrome
printing in terms of clean saturation and contrast is now no longer true - and one doesn't need any kind of Fauxtoshop fakery to do that!
When Ciba first came out, the marketing noise what how easy it was to do at home. And at an elementary level it was. But I guess anything
that makes the current generation wiggle beyond their high-fructose corn syrup IV drip line is considered just too much work today.

I printed it (and more type R because it was cheaper) "at an elementary level" meaning I did no masking. I either printed relatively flat slides or just printed the detail in the important stuff and let highlights blow out, shadows go black, or both. For many images this worked fine for my purposes. Not, of course, for all - if the areas out of range were not too far out and were a size and shape that could be dealt with via dodging and burning of course I'd do that, which also helped. (For those who never did it and haven't thought about it - "dodging" and "burning" have the opposite effect from that in negative printing. Dodging makes the dodged area darger, while burning makes the burned area lighter.)

Three steps, 75F +/-2 degrees (but in practice wider than that if you adjusted the printing for the developer, the bleach and fix went to completion) meant it really was very easy from a process standpoint, at least compared to the higher temperatures and more steps required for R2000 or whatever the chems were called. I used Unicolor for that which used lower temperatures, longer times and a warm pre-soak. That also worked fine.

DREW WILEY · Sep 16, 2013

Roger - masking was necessary to Ciba not only to control contrast but to correct the inherent color reproduction idiosyncrasies, unless of course, you happened to like the less than realistic results. Sometimes it is smarter to let your gal lead the dance than to trip over one another's feet. The exception was blue verus yellow saturation, which had to be controlled by the degree of bleach acitivity, which I simply
lowered the RPM to achieve more saturation, or higher RPM for less. There were all kinds of weird tricks I learned over time. Printing color negsis a much more subtle process, but supplementary masking is still a valuable tool - probably not necessary for basic commercial or portrait applications - but for really fine-tuning results, invaluable. It is particularly helpful now that the choice of paper RA4 contrasts is a little more limited. But I will say that the Fuji Supergloss product is marketed with a little more contrast in both the highlights and shadows,
and up to a certain scale of magnification will wonderfully render "normal" Ektar negs vividly. Too bad they only offer it in big rolls now.

Roger Cole · Sep 16, 2013

Well, I've no doubt you were and are in an entirely different leaque from my hack level Ciba. I got results I liked for my purposes, most of the time, if I started with a good slide. I'm sure they could have been a lot better.

gliderbee · Sep 16, 2013

I still have an untouched set of Ilfochrome chemicals and a pack of 25 8x10 sheets that I bought from fotoimpex quite some time ago (I should check). There's no expiry date on the chemicals; how long do they stay well? Should I transfer the solutions in brown glass bottles?

Stefan

Verstuurd van mijn GT-P7510 met Tapatalk

Photo Engineer · Sep 16, 2013

Drew, did you ever manage to get detail in reds? That is one of the most difficult tasks in any pos-pos print. They usually vanish.

PE

DREW WILEY · Sep 16, 2013

Detail in reds, well yes ... but subtle hue differentiation within anything categorized as a true red (vs orange) is another story. By the time of
Ciba II ("self-masked") and later Fujichromes (and alas, ownership of a true additive colorhead), I had pretty well tamed it. But by then I had
also learned a lot of specialized masking techniques. But I've only done about four Cibachromes in my life where red was the dominant color in
the composition, and each time it was a fairly faithful representation of the chrome. ... Masking with color negs is soooo different... more like
gentle power steering rather than slinging an iron ball at a brick building! The most common Ciba mask for a scene containing both saturated
green and red was made on pan film with a deep magenta 33 Wratten. Then you could vary this a bit one direction or another by resorting
to a 34 violet or 29 red the other direction, etc. This pegged the G vs R saturation (an oversimplified explanation)... then you pegged the
Y vs B via bleach activity, which altered the behavior of the "self-masking" feature. The procedure with older Ektachrome 64 or Kodachrome
was slightly different. ... sounds kinda complicated, but it was actually a lot of fun. With current Kodak color neg films the masking game is
mainly just up or down contrast control, though one still has to establish a neutral first base position or there will be a hue bias. The big trick
there was to develop an extremely low contrast straight line mask - and I do that with very dilute HC110 and TMX sheet film, with a pinch
of benzotriazole toe cutter. The result is quite a bit better than the old Pan Masking film.

Prest_400 · Sep 16, 2013

Perhaps with some extra advertising around and with the support of Hybrid printing it could get enough volume for it. As of masking, it could be taken care of in the Hybrid step and taming the material.
Ilfoflex is mentioned in the thread, but I only seen it listed once on a lab that also offered Ilfochrome. Fujiflex is around, less common than the more standard RA4 papers however.
Marketing is a curious thing. Sure Neg-Pos processes are better in a technical way but if a big bunch of people believed in the qualities of the material and some effort was put for a smoother hybrid stage, bang, you get the market.

DREW WILEY · Sep 16, 2013

Hybrid wouldn't help resurrect Ciba. That was already an option, well before its commercial demise. The print material was inherently quite expensive. Then the nature of the dye bleach process was very corrosive and led to significant maintenance and health issues at the big labs which handled it in volume. Ciba was very well known, so marketing per se wasn't ever the issue. The paper didn't keep all that well. Within six months you'd start getting serious crossover issues, so you needed to use it up promptly once it thawed. And here at least, the death blow was delivered at the national distribution level once sloppy handling took over. There's nothing quite like a thousand dollar box or roll of photosensitive polyester delivered to your lab with a big gash or dent in it, and then being told it will be another six months for the replacement to arrive! Anyway, it was impossible to fully tame Ciba. If you wanted to achieve outstanding results, you had to realistically
learn what it was specifically good for, and what it wasn't. ... and in the meantime to have enough common sense to avoid the bleach fumes!

destroya · Sep 16, 2013

just once in my life, i want to have a shot made into a cibachrome print.

Tom1956 · Sep 16, 2013

You know something? I wonder if the computer, digital photography, and all of that were to disappear from the face of the earth; would it be possible to secure a wide enough customer base to manufacture these kinds of materials? It's not even the same culture as it was in the 70's and 80's, even the 90's. How could you hope to bring a Wal-Mart culture back to this kind of thing? If you took a truckload of model airplane kits and distributed them in, say--a housing project, to distribute to the boys, would any of them get assembled?
I do not think it is possible. It's just gone, and that's all there is to it.:confused:

Roger Cole · Sep 16, 2013

Yes, there would be enough demand that what wasn't remembered or recorded somewhere would be re-invented. But it's a totally theoretical question.

Wal Mart used to run very busy one hour labs. There's a huge demand for snapshots, which would revert to 3x5 (or so) prints if the web and smart phones disappeared.

DREW WILEY · Sep 16, 2013

Wal-Mart culture?????????????? That's an economy-destroying disease I wouldn't want to see proliferating any more than it already has. But
Ciba materials were pretty difficult to make to begin with. By contrast, an even more involved premier process has already been revived in
hybrid mode, namely dye transfer printing. The huge difference is that it uses independent sheets of a special black and white film called matrix
film where the emulsion is applied in a single layer, and not a nitpickily multilayer coating like Ciba. Serious craft will never die. When today's
lazy smart?phone addicted geeks grow up, all their teenage kids will rebel and want to work with their own hands. If we have to, we can even
go back to cave painting.

Photo Engineer · Sep 16, 2013

Many color materials will soon be "un re creatable"! There will be no engineers left alive with the overall engineering competence. You guys keep forgetting this. After all, we don't yet know how the pyramids were built!

PE

Photo Engineer · Sep 16, 2013

Drew;

Details in red are made by variations in cyan! Cyan is the bottom layer and is difficult to control! Thus, all print processes suffer from what is called "Cyan Undercut" in which cyan dye is lacking in reds leaving them low in detail. This is particularly true in pos-pos processes.

I thought you might have run into it before. I've seen many Ciba/Ilford prints with this, especially the ad with the gal in the red jacket or sweater, I now forget the scene. It has little to do with masking as that deals with unwanted absorption, not outright imaging errors.

PE

Tom1956 · Sep 16, 2013

Photo Engineer said:
Many color materials will soon be "un re creatable"! There will be no engineers left alive with the overall engineering competence. You guys keep forgetting this. After all, we don't yet know how the pyramids were built!

PE

We need to come up with the technology to remove the brains from these engineers and power them up in mechanical bodies, so we can get them to toil for us all indefinitely. Or would that fit in the category of "no good deed goes unpunished". Just joking. Thanks for your work PE, while it lasted. At least some of it still exists and may never be totally lost.

Cibachrome replacement?

Privacy & Transparency

Privacy & Transparency