Reversal Film workflows

[Halford]

So after my recent house move, the power supply for my film scanner is missing. It will turn up or be replaced in due course, but this has got me thinking:

What analog workflows are current and workable for images originated on reversal film? There are no more reversal printing papers that I'm aware of. There has been talk of reversal-processing of RA4 materials but I'm not convinced -- that might be interesting for some specific aesthetics but maybe not for general, 'high fidelity' use. (Please - convince me otherwise if I'm wrong I'd LOVE to be able to print Velvia onto Kodak or Fuji RA4 paper!!)

I see that the old Kodak manual for dye transfer printing starts with instructions for making B&W colour separation negatives of transparencies. Has anyone here done that recently with current materials? Such negatives could then be used to contact print on either RA4 of various alt. technique materials.

I'm just curious -- I'd love to carry on exploring the delights of the remaining E6 films, and to do more with my existing transparencies. Just wondering what, exactly, other than hybrid workflows.
(I am not a purist and have nothing against hybrid workflows, but I'm particularly enjoying analog printmaking at the moment)

 

[flavio81]

Mmm... for prints you should use negative film.

My comment above sounds dumb, but Photo Engineer (forum member) explained long ago that due to the high contrast and the curve of a positive film (E6 slide), to do a transfer onto a positive material will always have issues with translating the tonal gradations correctly onto paper.
While the negative film's contrast and transfer curve (density versus exposure) is very well matched to the paper; they work as a system. And this is the reason why on professional movie making, it is always prints made from negatives, and nobody ever uses reversal film on that industry.

So you mention you want "high fidelity" printing of slides, and perhaps this does not exist. You can check forumers for past experience with Cibachrome and the problem cited is keeping the contrast in check.

On the other hand, you are correct in considering doing dye-transfer printing, this could give great results, but this is not a simple process (correct me if i'm wrong!).

The other alternative is doing internegatives; there is no interneg film available but there is a forumer that has mentioned several times having great success using Portra 160 as an internegative for producing prints from slides.

So perhaps for starters you should try reversal processing of RA4 paper, because from all the alternatives it seems the most simple.

Bottom line is -- doing this on the analog domain is not easy. I would simply invest on a very good film scanner and do it digitally. While prints from negatives are excellent the analog way.

 

[flavio81]

Here it is, from Photo Engineer which is a veritable and reliable authority on this matter:

(i've highlighted some parts)

It is known that the contrast of a print = contrast of negative X contrast of print material. Above, we showed that a good print had a contrast of about 1.5 and a good transparency had a contrast of about 1.8 on average. It can be shown easily (and most of us have done it) that the transparency material had very poor exposure latitude even though the picture might look good. We had to nail the exposure correctly though because the latitude was rather short. Well, it can also be shown that if you make a positive print of a positive transparency, you lose detail. Early on, it was found by observation that positive-positive printing yielded loss of detail in highlights and shadows. This is directly related to the fact that contrasts of the starting materials multiply and so in the toe, both the original and print material may have a contrast of 0.6 in the toe, but will reproduce the scene at a contrast of 0.36 (0.6 X 0.6) and thus the contrast of one or the other had to be manipulated to give the most viewable result. Well, this task has proven impossible even today and thus pos-pos printing is not a preferred method of printing photos. It works, it just does not work optimally.

Knowing this, it was further obvious that the best way to achieve a good viewable print was to start with a negative, with a Log E response that was linear and longer than the latitude of the desired print. This had two beneficial results. It allowed the print to be made from a straight line response curve rather than one that had a toe and shoulder, and in addition, it allowed for a very long exposure latitude. Further, by knowing the Dmax should be 3.0 just as in reversal films, and that Dmin is close to base density, a curve could be drawn for this negative material. It had a slope of about 0.5 – 0.8. The best results were about 0.6 – 0.7 with the higher value selected at that time due to the flare in old cameras. Today the values range from 0.5 – 0.65 due to the lower flare and higher quality lenses.

Source:

(there was a url link here which no longer exists)

 

[Halford]

Hi and thanks for the input

I'm not suggesting replacing negatives with reversal films. I shoot at least 10x as much C41 as E6 and that's unlikely to change.
But some slide films do have some distinctive characteristics that it would be nice to use. And I'm just exploring possibilities for ways to use these images aside from a scanning workflow.
The contrast issues with ciba / ilfochrome were notorious and had to be brought into check with contrast masking, which is a schlep but not that hard to do (I'm even starting to play with it for B&W printing). I always dreamed of printing ciba/ilfo but never had the facilities when it was available. And now that I do they're gone. Oh well, what can you do?

I'm not thinking of dye-transfer printing as such since as far as I know the materials are almost impossible to get hold of now, unless you happen to own Ctein's freezer But starting with the same color-separated negatives, you could either do a 3-exposure contact print on RA4 material, or go to alt-proc techniques like tri-color gum bichromate printing, which I love the look of but they're not 'high fidelity' in the sense of a traditional print. In theory

Thank you for the pointer to Portra 160 as an interneg film. I can believe that it would be about as good an option as contemporary materials allow.

I suppose that in general now, getting the best out of reversal materials really requires a hybrid workflow...

 

[flavio81]

I'm not thinking of dye-transfer printing as such since as far as I know the materials are almost impossible to get hold of now, unless you happen to own Ctein's freezer But starting with the same color-separated negatives, you could either do a 3-exposure contact print on RA4 material, or go to alt-proc techniques like tri-color gum bichromate printing, which I love the look of but they're not 'high fidelity' in the sense of a traditional print. In theory

This is very interesting, i have never thought of it.

I would guess, speculating from my armchair, that you would need a suitable B/W negative material since the spectral response of B/W film is not always uniform (depends on the film and this is one of the factors that give each film its "look").
Also that you would need to find a way to keep the 3 contact negatives in perfect register. Although that doesn't seem hard.

Thank you for the pointer to Portra 160 as an interneg film. I can believe that it would be about as good an option as contemporary materials allow.

Yes, if i was pressed into do reversal printing the ANALOG way, i would enlarge/copy the positive onto a bigger film ("blowing up") and then do the enlargement from that film. Or if you can copy to a large format Portra (say, 8x10") you can contact print. But i think that for example, copying from 35mm slide to 6x7 negative would probably give excellent results. In this way the generation "loss" would be minimized, so no extra grain or loss of definition would be incurred.

Then lately i was googling about copying slides and i read that some people did the copy by CONTACT, that is, place two films one over the other, emulsion against emulsion, and expose. No optics needed. Perhaps you can try doing the positive-> internegative in this way too.

NOTE that i have never tried any of this!!

 

[darkroommike]

Dye transfer is no longer an option unless you want to reinvent the wheel, the materials are no longer available. There are some other processes available but none would be "high fidelity" without a lot of work. As far as color separation negatives, it's my understanding that in the good old days one could adjust contrast of the various "seps" by different exposures and processing times to get negatives that were a better match and that frequently printers also resorted to highlight and midtone masking using negatives/positives to get things just right. A simpler approach might be to shoot internegatives and print from those or Ilfochrome, it's my understanding that odd pockets of materials still exist for this process, and then you usually only need one highlight mask. Or digital...even ctein now prints only digital, he closed his Dye Transfer lab down a couple of years ago when he could no longer source materials.

 

[Mainecoonmaniac]

I haven't done reversal printing in decades. I printed on Kodak's R-2000 and Cibachrome/Ilfochrome and the contrast is hard to control but I love the look. But when I shot more slide film, I preferred use Kodak interneg film which is no more. I'm said this on APUG before on threads inquiring printing from slides and it's sacrilege, but I'd scan the transparency and have it printed digitally. I love analog processes, but I'm also a pragmatist.

 

[thuggins]

I have shot E-6 almost exclusively for nearly two decades. Typically I view these directly with a viewer of one sort or another. There is nothing like the color, brightness, and sharpness of a slide; as someone once said, it is like looking out a window at the scene. C-41, whether scans or prints just can't come close to the experience of viewing a good slide.

But a slide viewer is not a good way to share with others (I've tried). Projecting is OK, but still limited. I have had slides scanned and printed by a professional lab and had uneven results; some very nice, some very disappointing. Ultimately my goal is to have a shareable copy of the slide that is directly viewable and as close as possible to the appearance of the original.

I am loathe to bring up the scanning issue as the purists will banish you to DPUG. But since the OP brought it up, here is what I have found over the years. Scanners have been a mixed bag. The results of some are better than others, but they are all very slow. I have given up on them and now use the slide copier for my OM system. This gets outfitted with a micro 4/3's mirrorless electrical thingy sporting a 50f3.5 Zuiko macro thru the suitable adapters. This lens has a magnification of .5X and the electrical thingy has a crop factor of 2, so you can work out the math. Set the lens to F8 and set the shutter speed manually. It takes less than a second per shot, you see it instantly and adjust the exposure and take as many shots as needed.

After running this thru the "hybrid workflow" and viewing on a top-notch screen (e.g. OLED), it's pretty damn good. It has definitely lost quality from the original; the highlights are blown out, the colors aren't as rich, fine details get garbled, and subtle tonality is gone. But these are the inherent limitations of the electrical thingy and that's why we still shoot film.

 

[flavio81]

This gets outfitted with a micro 4/3's mirrorless electrical thingy sporting a 50f3.5 Zuiko macro thru the suitable adapters.

"Electrical thingy"

From now on, I declare "electrical thingy" the official APUG euphemism for those electrical thingies that go behind the lens and produce images that are then converted as into numbers in the binary system.

I own two electrical thingies, by the way. Both of them are 1.0X electrical thingies. There are 1.5X and 1.6X electrical thingies available, but the 1.0X thingies are better in my view.

From your post, i infer that you are using a 2.0X electrical thingy, so your 50mm lens performs as a 100mm.

 

[BMbikerider]

I have shot E-6 almost exclusively for nearly two decades. Typically I view these directly with a viewer of one sort or another. There is nothing like the color, brightness, and sharpness of a slide; as someone once said, it is like looking out a window at the scene. C-41, whether scans or prints just can't come close to the experience of viewing a good slide.
.

That I can equate with. If only it were not so expensive and there were a wider range if films available. There is nothing to equal a good transparency. What passes today for a projected image only very, very rarely come even remotely close to a top quality transparency with regard to colour saturation and the sheer quality they have.

Having said that, I have a Nikon LS5 film scanner and have no problem with scanned images with regard to colour, but I find the resolution of the scanner is almost too good and makes the grain all too prominent. It is simply the cost that makes me stay with C41 film and printing it in my darkroom.

 

[pdeeh]

It has definitely lost quality from the original; the highlights are blown out, the colors aren't as rich, fine details get garbled, and subtle tonality is gone. But these are the inherent limitations of the electrical thingy

without wishing to turn this into a digital thread, I've copied plenty of negatives with my micro4/3 camera and haven't experienced these issues. If you are getting blown highlights, then use the spot metering function of the camera to meter the highlights. Even with the fairly low resolution of my "ancient" E-P2, using this approach - and judicious post-processing - I have preserved detail across the whole negative, even for high-contrast scenes.

still, enough of this I suppose, or it's off to DPUG with us all, tails between legs ...