Ilfochrome, Melinex Directive Refraction , Source of metallic colors and sheen

[Mustafa Umut Sarac]

I amazed with the depth feel, sheen and metallic colors. I found about the reason as directive refraction of melinex layer causes that sheen , metallic colors and depth.

Websites reports plastics have very complex refraction , dispersion qualities.

Can you please shed more light on that ?

Umut

 

[Rich Ullsmith]

Yeah, I dunno. I had a couple ilfochrome prints made some years ago by a lab in AZ, and yes the depth, sheen and colors are incomparable. They are like sheets of glass. My limited understanding of ilfochrome is the emulsion layers are not unlike transparency films, thus the sense of depth.

 

[DREW WILEY]

For about ten years I based my portfolio on using these characteristics of Ciba to make prints with very complex depth of plane issues. I'd go into the high Sierra and take large-format subjects which were themselves inherently complex in relation to depth perception, like water reflections atop thin meltwater atop complex glacial ice patterns etc. In one public opening where they were displaying a bunch of my big Ciba prints, some guy got so confused trying to orient himself to one of my images that he cussed me out. Guess he was expecting something postcardy. I was not offended at all, but really fascinated by his reaction. Certain other people (and obviously the curator) responded favorably. I can get the same printing effect on Fuji Supergloss, but am not as obsessed with the same compositional game anymore. Besides, there aren't very many glaciers left up there anymore! - or at least ones that I'm still ambitious enough to hike to. Same
thing in Wyoming last fall. I was well above where the glaciers were on the map, but no more glaciers. I was happy just to avoid
having my view camera trampled by a mother moose who suddenly popped out of the willows.

 

[Mustafa Umut Sarac]

Thanks Rich and Drew.

Drew , that was the most exciting story on prints. You describe it like a hologram print. What is Fuji Supergloss ? Is it still in production , can it be bought at small sizes ? Nobody talks about world here , their only interest is politics. I dont think that goes faraway. People overdosed , we have a maniac at chair and he cusses to everyone and everything.

 

[DREW WILEY]

Fuji Supergloss is a full gloss polyester medium, also called Fujiflex, using CAII dyes. I has that same kind of 3-d effect and capacity for
extreme detail as Cibachrome, but is an RA4 material. In other words you can print color negatives onto it optically, or either chromes or
negs via scanning and big pro laser printers. It is not one of the print products marketed as "metallic", which are not on polyester at all.
Holograms are completely different, involving different image positions in different emulsion layers. Analog 3-d prints, long before holgrams, were termed vectographs, and were extremely difficult to make. The 3-d effect I got on my own prints was more just a utilization of the full gloss itself in relation to optimal subject matter. A few people were doing similar things in studio setups, but I might have been the only one at that time actually going out and discovering equivalent slices of the natural world and printing them in that manner for others to discover. Playing around with dimensional discrepancies was an obsession with abstract painters and a few black and white photographers in the 1920's. And in my own phase of doing this with color photography I was sometimes displayed alongside well known abstract expressionists. Sometimes this was a good match, sometimes it wasn't. I don't believe any photograph is an actual abstraction. We might attempt to mimic such styles, but it is conceptually a different discipline. The sooner people realize that, the sooner
they can be unshackled to discover photography for what it really is. Most outdoor photographers are merely after syrupy sticky-sweet
postcards and don't have a clue about what I'm talking about. Fuji Supergloss is sold in large rolls, typically thirty or forty inches wide, which then have to be cut down. I don't know if there are metric sizes per se in Europe. It used to be available in cut sheet too, but no more. I do contrast control via unsharp masking, just as in Cibachrome; but with color negs work, sometimes it's a contrast-reduction mask
needed instead of contrast-reduction. And unlike Ciba, you don't need a mask routinely, just certain times, due to the inherent orange mask of the neg itself. Digital printers obviously correct the curves in PS. It's a worthy substitute for Ciba and distinctly more affordable, but not cheap like RC-paper-based RA4 media.

 

[Mustafa Umut Sarac]

Drew,

Amazing, really amazing. I remember a childhood toy which there is a parallel plastic grid on top of the photograph and when you look from different angles , you see a different image , they say lenticular I guess.

Drew, do you have time, energy to tell your technic to us ? Do you have scans ?

Can you do what you did on new fuji film ?

Or is it possible to do your technic with laser printer on supergloss ?

Thank you,

Umut

 

[DREW WILEY]

I don't use scans. It's all true darkroom work. I am rearranging part of my facility, which will include a new copy station, but it will be next
year sometime before I have a chance to use it or start up a new website; and websites are extremely poor at conveying what these prints
really "feel" like. I personally print onto Supergloss from Ektar and Portra color neg film. But the big labs print onto it using Chromira, Lightjet, and Lambda laser printers, generally based upon scans of chromes. The masking protocol would take some time to explain, and just about the time I'd be done with that, the specific films involved might not even be around any longer.

 

[wildbillbugman]

Hello Drew,
I am curious! Years ago, I worked with KODAK Duraclear , a clear RA4 product. I do not know whether or not that product even exists now. Or under what name. If you are familiar with Duraclear, how dose (did) it compare to the Fuji product? I did not attempt to produce a metallic look with the Duraclear product and never saw it happen by accident.
Thanks !,
Bill