Platinum Palladium Printing with Leica M Monochrom

This is great - I have so many questions

the processing seemed to occur in a lit room - was that actually white light or was it a safelight where the movie was rebalanced to white ?

the tones on the photo were outstanding - I'd love to know how hard it is to get passable results.

the intermediate negative, is it one time use or can it be reused ? how good of a printer do you need to product a good negative ?

I assume you could do the same process with silver prints and stock paper, has anyone here tried it ?
 
Plat printing is mainly sensitive to UV light, the bulbs in the paper exposer (it's not an enlarger!) are essentially un-filtered blacklights. On top of this, the exposure time for Plat printing runs into the minutes, as it is not at all sensitive like your ordinary Ilford paper.

The intermediate negative can be used again and again, and you want it to be done from the best quality printer with the best inks possible. What's interesting was looking at the intermediate curves he applied - first he used photoshop to adjust the image to taste, then inverted it, then curved it for printing.

As far as using this for regular silver prints, the whole idea runs in the topic of "alternative darkroom processes" or "hybrid darkroom".
 
Plat printing is mainly sensitive to UV light, the bulbs in the paper exposer (it's not an enlarger!) are essentially un-filtered blacklights. On top of this, the exposure time for Plat printing runs into the minutes, as it is not at all sensitive like your ordinary Ilford paper.

The intermediate negative can be used again and again, and you want it to be done from the best quality printer with the best inks possible. What's interesting was looking at the intermediate curves he applied - first he used photoshop to adjust the image to taste, then inverted it, then curved it for printing.

As far as using this for regular silver prints, the whole idea runs in the topic of "alternative darkroom processes" or "hybrid darkroom".


The curves for silver are different and there is some suggestion that it can be a bit harder to get the best results. I'm planning on doing some silver next year and will, undoubtedly, report back. Might even mail a few prints.


Mike
 
Oh yes, Dante (Stella) has a nice article somewhere about using digital negs for Cyanotype - a less expensive start point than Pt-Pd.

He is customarily forthright in his approach to the setting curves at the most minute level o detail, preferring to let the process dictate the outcome to a much greater extent. If you dig around his site it may still be up - I think the series was called American Cyanide

Mike
 
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