Electric coating with metal

I thinked that it would be cheaper to electrochemically coating silver print , laser print or inkjet print with palladium , platin , gold or whatever.

Is it tried before ?

I am not expert but may be two different dots or pigments could be trigger a third dot also ?

What do you think ?

Thank you ,

Mustafa Umut Sarac

Istanbul

Do you mean electroplating metallic Pt/Pd/Au/etc onto the metallic silver in a fixed silver print? My question is how do you ensure that current is available from all of the metallic silver but prevent plating onto the blank (no silver) emulsion?

a.
Cheaper than what?

b.
Electrocoating a non-conductive paper base might be challenging...

On a conductive base, for certain kinds of fabrication, its been done before.

For most photogrphers, toning is going to be much much easier.
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Mustafa, are you named after an Indian?

Polyglot, I suspect he was daydreaming(?) about toning... otherwise you are correct... his post doesn't make any sense... maybe he has gone 100% digital and was thinking of direct imaging by computer controlled electroplating or forming an electroplated surface over an image resist?

Posts by Istanbul's Mustafa Umut Sarac are always a curiosity.

Polyglot ,

I thought palladium goes whereever the silver is. No silver , it is white and no need a electroplating .

Ray ,

Image resist would be a silver image. Platino Palladium is expensive. And I asked the people years ago and they said only platinum or palladium stays in the fibers after the process.
You have to use more platin than the image surface to stick the metal in the papers fibers.
So electroplating can be very thin , waste less metal and easy.
I asked people about toning and they said it is not good , they said if it was good enough , everybody uses it.
Thats all I knew.
I am an Rollei 35 S user and no interest to digital machines but I thought with little bit of change , bw digital prints could be changed.

Mustafa Umut Sarac

Istanbul

Sounds like they were thinking of siderotype processes based on the light sensitivity of iron complexes...
all of those suffer from expensive reagents being absorbed into non-mage areas of the paper... but electroplating presupposes you have an image...

There might be a way to use electroplating but you will need an image to start with.

Mustafa Umut Sarac said:

[people] said:
platinum or palladium stays in the fibers after the process.
You have to use more platin than the image surface to stick the metal in the papers fibers.

So electroplating can be very thin , waste less metal and easy.
I asked people about toning and they said it is not good , they said if it was good enough , everybody uses it.
Thats all I knew.

Click to expand...

May be someone can photocopy his her 6x17 cms positive from pinhole anamorphic camera to bigger one and than electroplate. I think photocopy toner active to electric.

Yes , I need a print to electroplate and many ways to get it.

Or someone can be very poor for enlargers , papers , chemicals and take color photographs , go to a lab , desaturate at the printer monitor and get a big bw print. This is all analog. And than electroplate at a tray with walkman dc adapter . This is all I can think to get cheapest your own platin print.
I dont know there is enough silver at a color paper ?

Umut

The paper/emulsion would probably be conductive since it's soaked in the electroplating solution... but since you have to do that, you're going to have the same problem of leaving expensive salts behind in the paper. And you're probably going to plate a lot more expensive metal onto the electrode on the back of the paper than the image itself.

If you're desaturating a digital image while printing at a lab, you're talking about RA-4, which contains only dyes once complete, not silver. That's definitely not going to work.

Thank you Polyglot for color paper information. May be someone could tape the back of the paper and protect it from the coating. And the electrode would be on the print side. The recieving electrode could be coated with platin but it is not lost.

There needs to be an electrode attached directly to the silver in the image otherwise nothing will plate onto it - the plating requires transfer of electrons. It must be on the back of the print because the silver (on the front of the print) must be exposed to the electrolyte bath. Obviously the other electrode will be suspended in the electrolyte, probably a few mm away from the face of the print.

If the paper+emulsion are conductive themselves (means they don't need to be soaked in electrolyte, so you get your savings), I think you'll get problems with the Pt plating directly and uniformly onto the emulsion, regardless of where the silver image is. If the paper is soaked in electrolyte, there are no savings and I think you'll get plating onto the electrode on the back of the paper and not onto the silver image at all. In summary, I don't think the electroplating is going to work.

I think the chemical processes of either directly developing Pt/Pd salts or chemically replacing Ag with a more noble metal (i.e. toning) are used for a reason - they are what works. If you just want to avoid loss of expensive salt solution into FB paper, don't use FB paper; do your printing onto an impermeable surface like mylar film or glass.

And by the way , you can use cheaper metals to electroplate like zinc , tin or stainless steel. I did not hear any alternative method for stainless but it is a possibility. Indium , titanium , all are very strong for aging and titanium reflects the light very interestingly which used by Gehry for its this special soft glow.

Do you know the Sinatra song , My Way ?

Yes...

Something i had wanted to ask you for a while: why don't you just try all these things you seem to think would work if done Your Way, and report here what the results are?

Because I have no money even for a bus ticket to city center. It is 1 dollars.
If you look at my posts , it always says cheapest , simplest.

Then perhaps you might want to focus on what you have a fair chance of actually being sucessful with... The Worst pitfall I have, even worse than being poor,
is opening too many doors at once.

Do you know the saying ... "Jack of all Trades... Master of None"?

Cheap is ok, but inaction is a trap.
I am a dreamer... I think anyone can do anything...one step at a time.