Carbon Printing

MCTuomey

MCTuomey

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At a party last night, a photog friend pulled out some beautiful urban landscape prints (San Fran) made using a technique called "carbon registration," if I remember correctly. He said that the starting point was an 8x10 color negative. Anyone have a reference to this method?

The prints had unbelievable detail and were textured like a very well-controlled, thinner version of an oil painting, if this makes sense. Stunning.
 
I am only speculating here but he may be refering to the carbon inksets for inkjet printers, other than that I have no idea.

Todd
 
MCTuomey said:
At a party last night, a photog friend pulled out some beautiful urban landscape prints (San Fran) made using a technique called "carbon registration," if I remember correctly. He said that the starting point was an 8x10 color negative. Anyone have a reference to this method?
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I think there are articles and links in www.unblinkingeye.com. If not, definitely over www.alternativephotography.com.
If it is a true carbon print, it is a contact print and you need large negs. Either large format negs or digital printed large format negs
 
Sounds like he was referring to color carbon prints, which are true pigment prints, made from large format separation negatives and pigment tissue, contact printed in registration to produce a color print. It's a difficult but beautiful process, and if you don't want to try it yourself, two labs that do versions of this process are Fresson in Paris and Ataraxia in--oops, I just went to atxstudio.com and saw that they've closed. Ataraxia was expensive, and so is Fresson, and Fresson involves an application process, if I'm not mistaken, because they can only produce a limited number of prints per year.

You can see carbon and Fresson prints at the John Stevenson gallery in New York--

http://www.johnstevenson-gallery.com/
 
Carbro color printing using paper coated with a carbon pigment emulsion (some gelatin, some maybe gum arabic) was THE color printing process back in the 40's and 50's. It has a unqiue look to it where the colors are somewhat muted (kind of like Agfa color print film). If you look at old advertisements for Coca-Cola a lot were "proofed" with this process.

The last holdout to carbon tissue printing that I know of was the proofs for large format Marloboro billboards produced with screen printing here in the US. This was a complete in-house process, including the coating line for making the tissue.

It involves full-size negatives and for color work, you have to register each color to the preceeding color. What's interesting is that this process was capable of a lot of hand manipulation and more than 4 colors. Like special colors for Marlboro red, blues for skies etc. The depth of color can be phenomenal, and the permanence is probably better than current pigmented ink jets since the pigments are encapsulated in a hardened emulsion.

They are truly wonderful to look at. Just haven't found a way to get photoshop files onto tissue yet without a halftone dot!
 
Thanks, everyone, for the information. The prints my friend owns are roughly 32x40 - the detail is remarkable, as is the depth of color. They are 30-40 years old with no apparent fading. They were left to my friend by a dear friend of his, a Swede, who produced them himself in California.

I'm going to spend a little time researching further -
 
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