Wet printing digital photos

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squirrel$$$bandit

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So this just occurred to me--I've never wet-printed before and am actually very happy making prints of my film scans on an inkjet printer. But shouldn't it be possible to project your digital photos onto photo paper and wet print them? You'd have to invert first of course. Is there any reason this shouldn't be feasible? Just get a high-quality digital projector, point it at the wall, focus carefully, then turn off the lights and tape a piece of photo paper in place. Expose, then develop as normal.

Surely one of you has tried something like this.
 
I don't know about that but I do know of folks offering to transfer your digital files into negatives which you can then print in the darkroom.

Cheers,
 
Quite a number of machines 'write' digi to halide, and there's a De Vere head that projects B+W in an enlarger.

Via a projector? About as successful as printing with a slide projector.

Cheers,

R.
 
Remember the average resolution for a digital projector for presentations is only 1024 pixels wide usually . . . not much really. But there are devices which replace the neg with a digital screen, or use a sort of reverse-photocopier idea, to get the image on the paper.

It should be possible to print an interneg on clear film with an inkjet, then contact-print this on to normal silver-gelatin paper, or even an older process of some sort, and this is actually done by a number of people to avoid any need to make very large negatives directly in the camera.
 
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You can always make A4 negatives. Invert your files before printing, making them negative and output them onto over head transparancy film. Then use this as a neg to contact print. I've seen prints from it, that you'd think were pure anologue, but I've never tried it myself. Andrew.
 
Never Satisfied said:
You can always make A4 negatives. Invert your files before printing, making them negative and output them onto over head transparancy film. Then use this as a neg to contact print. I've seen prints from it, that you'd think were pure anologue, but I've never tried it myself. Andrew.
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Yes, that's much simpler--could be an interesting experiment. You could also do cyanotypes this way, right? I asked Dante about this and he says the results can be pretty poor, at least with standard cyanotype paper. But it's a neat idea.
 
Scan you image, print with your ink jet to Pictorio OHP White Film, Print in darkroom as usual. I've done this many times and a quick google search for Dan Burkholder will yield the answers.

Todd
 
For older processes, for example Platinum/Palladium and possibly cyanotype I read that processing using a staining developer and scanning as a positive then making a colour contact neg yields good results as the yellow inkjet ink blocks UV effectively.

Mike
 
mabelsound said:
Aha, got it. But I assume this is the kind of thing a lab does--there isn't any affordable machine for the home user?
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There was never an "affordable machine for the home user" during the era of silver gelatin printing. That is, one used an enlarger and processed by hand via trays & tongs; or contact printed and again used trays and tongs. The "affordable machine" was a home-based darkroom.

Todd had the correct answer, for the home user:

"Scan you image, print with your ink jet to Pictorio OHP White Film, Print in darkroom as usual. I've done this many times and a quick google search for Dan Burkholder will yield the answers.

Todd "

Just to elaborate, the method Todd is recommending is contact printing in a darkroom, using a digitally-produced negative via inkjet printer. Keep in mind that there are a number of good silver papers out there, and one new contact printing paper recent arrived on the market, Michael Smith's Lodima silver chloride paper, which it is claimed is every bit as good as the venerable Azo paper, which Kodak killed off in 2005 after ~100 years of continuous production.

Contact printing onto silver gelatin paper is as simple as a low wattage light bulb suspended above your darkroom table, a timer, a thick sheet of glass a bit larger than your print size, and processing trays and chemistry. This is how Edward Weston did it, contact printing from 8"X10" negatives.

Contact printing also lends itself to alternative processes, which usually require (along with Lodima silver chloride papers) more UV in the light source. All of these are possible with the production of a digital negative via a medium like Pictorio.

See the APUG forums for more detailed discussions around contact printing.

~Joe
 
Wasn't there a company which offered a very expensive enlarger that projects digital files on real silver print paper?
 
mabelsound said:
I must stress I'm not looking for advice here, I'm happy printing inkjet.
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Sure you're not :rolleyes:

I just did my first cyanotype ever using a digital file printed on OHP Pictorico transparency sheet.

For starters, I downloaded one of Dan Burkholder's curve from his website, and applied it to the image *after* inverting it. Then I drew the opacity slider down to about 70%, because at 100, I think the picture looks too murky.

Even with the uneven coating (first timer, the sensitizer is way more water-like than I thought), the resulting blue image on the paper captured the resolution at high enough details (at least high enough for me).
 
The Fuji Frontier "printers" that are used in labs use lasers to expose regular wet prints.

Over on www.hybridphoto.com there are some people doing very esoteric digital negatives using high-end inkjets.
 
There's a De Vere digital enlarger this by replacing the negative stage with a projector.

Plenty of 1 hour minilabs print digital files to RA4 paper. Some have been modified to print on non-chromogenic B&W paper. MPIX does this, as do some smaller labs like Elevator Digital. Places like WHCC only print digital files on RA4 paper. Great quality. But it's RC.

Doing the contact printing thing is also popular. Sandy King does a lot of different processes like this and has a lot of info out there. A good source is alternativephotography.com.
 
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