Polaroid transfers? Still doable?

[JoeSchmoe]

What a shame, I used to make them by the dozens, and send them out to AD's as a promo, I used to really enjoy making them. that was a good twenty years ago, I still have a stack laying around, but they are mostly rejects. I had figured out how to get a good dmax, so much so as photogs used to call me up asking how I did it. I did manage to scan a few, but there were only so many hours in a day, I'm now semi retired and was hoping I could revive the old process, guess I'll try emulsion lifts!

 

[_T_]

I used to have a mamiya rb67 with an old polaroid back for peel apart film. I glued in a couple small scraps of black paper to act as guides and would single load sheets of the new polaroid 600 instant film. Then put the back into a dark bag load the sheet of film back into an empty cartridge of new polaroid 600 film and insert it into a polaroid camera. The camera thinks the photo is the black card that gets ejected when you insert a new cartridge and spits it out and it gets processed.

For 4x5 I made a mask for my ground glass and use a piece of tape to stick the sheet of film to the septum of a 4x5 film holder. It’s difficult to get the dark slide in place but doable. Same procedure to process the film.

Then I cut the film apart at the seams and disassemble the stack. The image usually comes apart in pieces. Then I place what’s left of the emulsion in a dilute solution of household bleach. No agitation or you get areas that get over and under bleached. After a time i pull the negative out of the bleach and rinse it under running water. Rub what’s left of the opaque white layer off of the negative and you have something you can scan.

The negative is pretty high resolution too maybe 50-100 megapixels.

You always end up with a little bit of artifacts from the bleach processing. Swirls and splotches and stuff like that. But they’re pretty minimal once you get the concentration time and technique down.

Edit: I forgot to mention that this only works with black and white film. It might be possible with color but I don’t know how to do it and have no plans to figure it out.

 

[Donald Qualls]

this only works with black and white film. It might be possible with color but I don’t know how to do it

I'd expect the whole process to work pretty well with color as well, though you might find you need to use a different bleach (C-41 bleach or blix?).

 

[_T_]

It would be wonderful if it could be accomplished with a small change like that.

Within the layers of emulsion in both the black and white and color there is the visible image forming layer on top which peels off of the stack when you disassemble the film, beneath that is an opaque white layer of something which needs to be removed to access the negative, and below that is the fully formed negative which needs to be protected from further processing lest it get bleached away.

I have tried a couple other solutions to see if bleach is really necessary to remove the opaque white layer, but I do not have enough knowledge of photo chemistry to make much headway myself. My first thought was that maybe the bleach solution is simply sufficiently basic so I tried a couple other common household basic solutions with no success and quit there. I think that the bleach might be oxidizing the opaque white layer, or it could be that some other reaction that I have no knowledge of is taking place.

Either way the issue with color polaroids is that the color negative layer of the emulsion is much more sensitive to being bleached than the negative layer of a black and white polaroid. You can remove the opaque white layer of either with the procedure I outlined, but with color film by the time the opaque white layer is sufficiently softened much of the upper two layers of color negative are completely gone leaving you with a mostly intact yellow layer and bunch of thin splotches of magenta and cyan here and there.

If someone were able to find a way to remove that opaque white layer without any bleaching action at all that would be ideal, as even with the black and white polaroids it causes some small amount of swirls and splotches.