Halftone film?

Hey everybody,

I have a box of Kodak Halftone film, in 11x14 size, that I acquired on the cheap. Plan was/is to cut it in half and play around with my Kodak 8x10's 7x11 back. I have done some research and have an idea what the halftone process is/was, but I'm having trouble translating that in my head into what it might mean for a film stock. Anybody have any experience with it, or ever experimented with it as a camera film? I gather that it likes a lot of light. Any info is appreciated!

Its a high contrast film designed to use with lithographic developer. It can be processed with standard developers at a lower contrast but its still pretty contrasty unless using a POTA type developer. A few decades ago companies were selling similar film in 35 mm to be used with low contrast developer for ultra fine grain. Proper exposure was pretty tempermental. The halftone part of it was the very high contrast in conjunction with a halftone screen, not to be confused with a grey tone screen, that produced dots of varying sizes according to how much light got through. The film is generally orthochromatic so it can be inspection processed under a red safelight, check your box to be sure its not panchromatic for making color separations. Its a lot of fun to play with and can be used for posterization and masking techniques.

Lately I've had the best results with Arista's lith film using half-strength liquidol with a tiny bit of sodium hydroxide added. The density isn't great but the tonality is nice. Chromium intensifier followed by selenium works well with the stuff, too. In lith developer, I still haven't cracked keeping it from being splotchy, still trying to dial that in for shadow-increase masking.

Halftone film might be the high contrast film lith described above, but I don't remember that this particular film was actually named Halftone film. However, there was for a short time a film with the screen built in to make variable-dot halftone negatives in one step, and I believe this may be what you have. You'll know as soon as you develop it whether it is that film or the lith film. For the film with included dot pattern, you will need to develop it in D19 or a similar high-contrast developer to optimize the effect.

That film was a rare bird! In all my time in the newspaper and printing industry I never saw any. Kodak did produce lith film for halftones that produced a hard clean dot from your halftone screen due to its extreme contrast and also had a gloss surface for better acuity in the platemaking stage. Ordinary lith copy film for shooting pasteups made a “soft” dot due to lower contrast to help eliminate hairline shadows because your copy was supposed to have all the contrast. It also had a matte surface to recieve blocking paint or soft graphite pencil to cover any defects in the image.
The reason for wanting this hard edged image was in the platemaking stage. With a soft dot image changes in the plate exposure would change the size of the dot on the plate where a hard dot greatly reduced this effect. Ive made halftones with both kinds of film and can testify the cheap copy film was a pain in the butt getting good results out of it.

Thanks everybody! I'll check the box and see if there's an emulsion number on it before I crack it open. May be a day or two what with job and such.

nosmok said:

Hey everybody,

I have a box of Kodak Halftone film, in 11x14 size, that I acquired on the cheap. Plan was/is to cut it in half and play around with my Kodak 8x10's 7x11 back. I have done some research and have an idea what the halftone process is/was, but I'm having trouble translating that in my head into what it might mean for a film stock. Anybody have any experience with it, or ever experimented with it as a camera film? I gather that it likes a lot of light. Any info is appreciated!

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half toning is a process to simulate continuous tones with materials only capable of black or white as in magazine or newspaper printing. a film will not automatically halftone an image for you. You will need a raster process image processor for that. the reason you got it cheap is that these machines hardly exist anymore. what you bought was a high-contrast film.