Making a neg for carbon printing

Hi. Which to get started with carbon printing. But one thing I can't wrap my head around, how can I make an enlarged negative from my 645 negative, without going thru scanning and printing?

Could I use a ortho film under my enlarger and then contact print that to another ortho film?

Yes, you can. I did that all the time before I started making digi negs. I've even used xray film.

non sequiteur said:

Could I use a ortho film under my enlarger and then contact print that to another ortho film?

Click to expand...

Yes, that's one way.
Another way is to enlarge onto film (ortho, xray etc.) and reversal process it.
Both have their pros & cons. Both ultimately work.

Welcome aboard! It's great to see you're wanting to start with carbon transfer. It's a gorgeous process.

By the way, I'm a carbon transfer printer. **Shameful Plug: I have several videos on my youtube channel. You'll find a link to the channel in my signature. Cheers!

I've made enlarged negs from 35mm film using Aristo Ortho Litho film. I used flashing and reversal processing. A good reference for this:


I found that some of this PDF is based on assumptions about your negatives that might not apply, so I had to use a different calibration method.
Here is a platinum-toned VDB made this way:



I've also printed using digital negatives. The learning curve is about the same, and the results are similar when everything goes well. The main advantage with digital negs is consistency. That's a great help with carbon, where it takes significant time to redo a print that wasn't right.

Start with a color transparency and you only have to copy it once for a negative!

Andrews videos are great....