Colour Digital Negatives

[gr82bart]

Anyone ever try this? I asked this before on APUG, but I thought I'd try again here.

Regards, Art. (Or is called a Digital Colour Negative?)

 

[Bob Carnie]

Art
Colour Digital Negatives were made in the late 80's and throughout the 90's with the Kodak Premier Imaging systems as well with Image Setters.
I believe Larry G over on APUG has an image setter I am not sure if he is making negatives with it.
The film used generally was Kodak Colour Film and usually 8x10. One could image 4 up on an 8x10. You get the idea.
This process became non essential for the Labs that invested in the technology once the Lambdas and Lightjets came along, allowing the labs to print directly onto paper , the end selling product.
I am sure you should be able to find an output service lab, in the US that does this with colour and black and white negative. a bit of sniffing and you will find one.

 

[Helen B]

Duggal in NYC list LVT film neg output in their current price list. I have no experience of it though. A 4x5 is $90 and an 8x10 is $200.

Were you thinking of using an inkjet printer rather than film?

Best, Helen

 

[donbga]

Anyone ever try this? I asked this before on APUG, but I thought I'd try again here.

Regards, Art. (Or is called a Digital Colour Negative?)

Art,

What do you want to do with a color digital negative?

Don Bryant

 

[gr82bart]

What do you want to do with a color digital negative?

Hi Don,

I was thinking of making a colour print with it. I know this sounds completely crazy. I was even thinking of making a colour positive and doing some Ilfochrome contact printing. From a cost standpoint there isn't any real merit, especially when you can get the digital output directly to a Lambda or Lightjet.

More curious than really serious about it.

Regards, Art.

 

[donbga]

Hi Don,

I was thinking of making a colour print with it. I know this sounds completely crazy. I was even thinking of making a colour positive and doing some Ilfochrome contact printing. From a cost standpoint there isn't any real merit, especially when you can get the digital output directly to a Lambda or Lightjet.

More curious than really serious about it.

Regards, Art.

It is crazy Art from a process point of view.

Of course if you want to do it just for fun then I can understand that sort of, though I'm not clear what is to be gained.

Good luck,

 

[jd callow]

i've made them on a Lightjet 2080, Rhino LVT and a Solitaire 16. The negs come out nice, but the chromes from these things are nicer and what they were built for. The lightjet is the best of the bunch.


The reasons these things existed was so that people could output chromes for print. This was especially important for national advertising campaigns. Ford could have one photo corrected and approved produced without variance 1000 times for 1000 publications. They were used wherever dup'ing was used. Once a scan had been made and prepped, you simply snet the file to the film recorder and walked away. The Lightjet and Solitaire were much better at this than LVT's. The solitire used maron-carrol (sp?) film modules. This meant that you could attach long roll 35mm, 70mm, 5" or 9" rolls. The lightjet worked like a laser printer on steroids. It had film cassettes that could be loaded with 4x5, 5x7, 8x10 or 11x14 film. The LVT that I used, had a drum that would take one sheet of film at a time -- generally 8x10. This made it infinitely less efficient. The LVT output may have been better than the Solitaire, not as good as the lightjet, slower and almost as labour intensive as manual dup'ing. Why the LVT survived and not the others is beyond me.

The Solitaire was used in the cine industry for just about anything involving CGI up until about 2000. None of these things were used all that often for creating neg's for printing. As far as printing goes, they were probably used more often to create printable chromes for ciba's, more than negs for c-prints.

 

[bradhi]

I've made color digital 'positives' for Cibachromes on an inkjet printer. Printing onto Pictorico White film produces a very sharp print. And I was able to color manage the whole process fairly easily. If you really like Cibachrome printing - let me know and I can provide the details for this. An inkjet printer and a Jobo gets you a start making excellent Cibachrome prints.

Negatives were another story. Printing onto white film resulted in a fairly contrasty negative - and a contrasty print - even with grade 2 paper. This could be made to work with a high quality color RIP that could provide the high level of precision to make a sufficiently flat negative.

But - then Epson came out with the K3 inks. And I have a hard time finding a reason to print color prints. Plus, I can just send my files to a lab for printing onto Fuji, Kodak or Cibachrome papers.

The Lightjet is an excellent tool for making chromes - and chromes are themselves an interesting piece of art. You can get a Lightjet now for pennies on the dollar (really, I paid about $2K for mine - and I need to get it off to Ron-san so he can experiment with it). You can print onto photo papers with these machines - but they excel with chromes. The Lightjet might also be excellent for straight-forward b/w digital negatives - ironically, I haven't experimented much with this yet - but we will.