Conventional capture, digital output to conventional printing.

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A few years back when I was shooting film, I became a big fan of Barry Thornton's books - Edge of Darkness opened my eyes to the possibilities of black & white film.

If I remember correctly, in his last book, he was talking about conventional capture, scanning and processing the negs, then re-printing the neg onto clear acetate and making a conventional print from that.

Is anyone here doing anything like this?
 
You can 'edit' the negative, take the sky down and make adjustments and whatnot so there's less work to do while printing. And you can make a big negative for contact printing, which gives a much nicer quality than enlarging. A lot of people do it for cyanotypes and albumen prints and other alternative process things where enlarging is not an option and they don't have access to a large format camera.

I've been thinking about it for a while just for the sake of playing with it, and maybe for bigger prints than the enlarger will allow. Silverprint sell a digital negative film thingy, but I imagine just using acetate will be much the same. Give it a go :thumbs:
 
Surely your "resolution" would be limited to the output dpi of the printer?
 
Yes sort of done it at college to make cyanotype prints.

You can use ordinary acetate but the problem is they do not work very well with inkjet prints, the ink does not 'sink in' as it does with normal paper. It is the reason why you can get more specialised acetate. The chap at college got his from USA but I have no idea what it was.

You also need to apply curve adjustment to the image as well together an nice negative, if you Google it you should be able to find a few people out there willing to share.

The advantage is that you can do all the cleaning up, dodging and burning etc produce nice clean neg, plus if you print out 10x8 the you can contact print so no need for an enlarger.

Should be fun let us know how you get on :)
 
After doing something similar to create digital plates for use in zinc plate lithographic printing, I became really interested in using non conventional printing methods in the darkroom.

I did a project revolving around this technique; I was shooting colour medium format film, scanning, then reprinting as 5x4 & 10x8 sheets to use in an enlarger to produce 20x24" final prints. I used a laser printer to produce the acetate negatives to utilise the various imperfections the printers have when making gradients and the 'wrong' kind of acetate.

LnqE

[excuse the bad quality phone picture]

I can take some proper close ups and scan some of the 10x8 "test strips" from the project if you want? Also I should be able to answer any other questions you have (or at least will try, haha) with regards to timings, methods and techniques for making the negatives, etc.
 
Thank you for all the replies. Lots of stuff here for me to look through and think about.

This is a question I have been wanting the answer to since buying a digital camera. I must go back and read Barry's last book - Elements of Transition. It's in this book that he described the technique similar to this, that he used.

From reading his book Edge of Darkness, it seems he was like a bloodhound in pursuit of the perfect monochrome print. Although time has moved on since then, if he applied the same doggedness to his digital/hybrid research as he did his film research, I'm sure there must be something very worthwhile finding out about. I'll post it if I find/do anything of interest.

Edit: s162216 - That digital contact film sounds like just the job for contact printing, avoiding the need for acetate at all. Jakska and Kinikki, have you ever used this recording film?
 
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^^ That digital contact 'film' is pretty much just acetate, it doesn't take any steps out of the process at all. You still have to print onto it and then use that as a mask for the exposure onto silver gelatin paper.
 
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