Fine-Art Look of Platinum/Palladium B&W Prints With Digital ?

I was admiring an artists work consisting of b&w platinum/palladium prints shot with medium format.

They had an intriguing grainy-ness and the figures had a ghost like soft focus feel to them that I love.

Is there any way to achieve this kind of look and feel with digital?

Platinum prints shot with large format and contact printed are even better. You can copy it with digital, but it won't be nearly as good. Why not learn to do real platinum prints?

I would love to, but dont have dark room access

U don't need a dark room for Platinum printing.

Take a Look at Alien Skin Exposures II. It has a platinum emulation. It is expensive, but in my

experience with Exposures I it is a very good piece of software. You can download a trial

version to see if it works for you.

"...no digital anything."

 

Except, of course, what we are looking at when we go to that link.

Jon, the look you describe, "an intriguing grainy-ness and the figures had a ghost like soft focus feel to them" is not characteristic of Pt (platinum) or Pt/Pd (platinum/palladium). With decent clamping pressure for the contact printing process and a relatively smooth paper, the level of detail for a Pt print is incredible. And grain should be no higher than any other medium format process, so unless someone is shooting pushed to ISO 1600 or 3200, they should be relatively clean. Nevertheless, as Andy mentioned, if you want to add those elements of grain, soft focus, etc. there are plugins to do it.

 

If there is a "platinum look", it's more the tonality and the texture. You actually see the texture of the paper, which may come as quite a shock to people doing "conventional" photographic prints. There's no covering the paper with a gloppy layer of Jell-O until there's nothing left of its character, no Kodak sucking the soul out of the print. Which also means the photographer may have to actually look at an image and pick a paper with texture appopriate to that particular image. This is a common characteristic of all teh "alternative processes", platinum, Van Dyke brown, gum, cyanotype, bromoil, etc.

 

The overall tone of Pt/Pd is warm, the blacks more like a deep brown, the mid tones can go reddish brown, and even the highlights are usually a creamy beige (since we traditionally print on an OBA (brightener) free art paper). Pure Pt is more expensive, the tone is cooler (just the warm side of neutral) but the highlights are similar in both Pt and Pt/Pd. From here on, I'll just use "platinum" to refer to Pt and Pt/Pd interchangeably.

 

DMAX (the "darkness" of the darkest blacks) of platinum is rather low, about 1.6, against say 2.2 for a conventional gelatin print, but the gradations of tone between DMIN and DMAX are subtle and complex, and it is the midtone tonality that is the biggest part of the platinum look.

 

And, surprisingly, the platinum look is not too hard to duplicate with an inkjet, if you're willing to put a little work into it. I do both actual platinum with chemicals and darkroom, and platinum "replicas" with inkjet.

 

You need surprisingly little darkroom capability for platinum work. You don't need an enlarger, just a UV light source, contact printing frame, and room to set up some trays. The developer and clearing agent are surprisingly benign and pleasant smelling, nothing like the toxic waste of the typical B&W darkroom.

 

My biggest camera was a 4x5, so for my platinum work, I shoot digitally and make large contact printing negatives using an inkjet printer. There is a wonderful online forum for people who do this:

 

http://www.hybridphoto.com

 

The "replicas" are done using an inkjet loaded with 6 dilutions of carbon black ink and a program called a RIP to manage the printer. The investment there is also surprisingly light, take a spare or used inkjet, get a set of empty carts and a black ink set from MIS, and you can be up and running fairly quick.

Joseph,

 

What a wonderful, useful post.

 

Thanks.

I print most of my B&W inkjets with a Piezography K7 Splittone inkset from Inkjet Mall:

 

http://shopping.netsuite.com/s.nl/c.362672/sc.15/category.1260/.f

 

Since I tend to print on OBA - free Moab Entrada Fine Art Natural paper, the image has

warm shadows, neutral highlights (at least, as neutral as the paper), with the split

occurring somewhere in the quarter tones.

 

This setup is quite similar to the MIS system Joseph recommends above.

 

Based on your website, you seem to be in NY. If you would like to see an example, I've a

print made just this way hanging at the CCNY (336 W 37 ST. #200) until June 5.

"On the other hand, I do not think digital prints can even begin to compete with traditional photography printed." You gotta get out more and see some good stuff.

Marc, you are quite welcome

 

Tim, many people have said similar things to Mr. Blu after each of his many anti-digital rants. Doesn't seem to help.

 

Robert, cool. I forgot to mention Piezography as another possible inkset.

I wish there were more members like Mr. Wisniewski. His comment was spot on! Ever since I saw my first Pt/Pd print I have wanted to pursue that art form, but have always thought that something so incomprably beautiful could not be attained easily. This thread is motivating me to conquer that apprehension and try this genre. Thanks and Regards.

Walter, thank you very much. You made my day.

The UV light source may be the sun on a bright day. It takes about 3-5 minutes for an exposure for a Platinum or palladium Ziatype. It used to take me an hour with a sunlamp for regular platinum prints. The Ziatype is a printing out process which saves you money because you can interrupt the printing as needed to inspect the print and see if it is ready. I have found that palladium only, works fine for smaller prints such as 4x5 and 5x7, but it is preferable to add platinum for larger prints. Platinum is very expensive lately, palladium is not too high. As said above, no darkroom is really needed, but you have to develop the negatives in pyro to get good results, and it might be hard to find a lab that uses pyro. The most difficult part of the process is getting an even coating on the paper. This takes a lot of practice.

Ditto Joseph's comments on the quality of the paper itself being a part of the experience. As a sometime dabbler in watercolors this is an important factor to me too. Well said.

You've got me there. The biggest block of glass I've ever run through an inkjet (a Vutek flatbed, but it uses Epson heads) is under 100 pounds.

 

I've run granite, flat mirrors, and inch thick aluminum through that machine, too.

 

But since you seem to want to play "who's is bigger" for some reason...

 

I run a lot of cloth (linen, real silk, and polyester imitation silk) through an off-the-shelf Epson 2200, along with sheet brass (you have to spray it with ink-aide first, but I'd consider that a whole lot easier than a chemical-head's "liquid light") and I can do B&W or color on any of those materials.

 

Mint tins? Big rock? Sheet of fiberglass? Inkjet and sublimation ink ;) Can you put a color image on a maple panel?

 

The Epson printer has a reputation going back almost two decades with art folk who like to experiment. The cartridges are friendly to a lot of interesting materials. As far back as about 15 years ago, I was doing things like:

 

* loading common glazing colorants such as copper sulfide and gold chloride into Epson cartridges, printing on slip sheets, heat transfering the images to glass and ceramic surfaces and kiln firing until the chemicals would strike and glase the surface.

 

* printing an "invisible" image with gum arabic, getting it damp with the nebulizer, and dusting it with gold dust.

 

* printing resin "resist" materials and heat transfering them to glass surfaces to be etched or sandblasted.

 

* printing resist directly onto silk for silk screening and serigraphs, without

 

* printing with food colorings and transfering to a decorated cake (10 years before you could have that done at any decent sized supermarket).

 

I've off-the-shelf inkjet compatible temporary tattoo material with photographs of wrist watch and clock gearworks, and applied them to strategic parts of the body of a (very adventurous) woman. Have you ever used a darkroom technique to print work on a live human?

 

I also have a technique for printing on inkjet coated polyester film, coating a sheet of glass with UV curable adhesive, pressing the film to the glass, curing it, pealing away the polyester film and leaving the ink on the glass, for reverse images. Sort of the way Polariod transfers worked, until that material went away. ;)

 

And there's another thing to consider. Polaroid is gone. Dye transfer is gone. The original "liquid light" is gone. Tech Pan is gone. Kodalith and Kodak infrared are gone (and the alternative come from totally unpredictable factories in the Ukrane. Each year, as yet another traditional photographic process goes away, more new inkjet based materials come out.

 

So, I'd say you got it totally backwards, and it's the inkjet folk who boldly go where traditional photography doth fear to tread.

I can't help you with the moon, but I really have photographed scantily clad woman posed on the sand dunes of the Lake Michigan shore, wearing wings, hair flowing in the wind. :) Printed them on the inkjet, too.

 

And I use digital techniques for my platinum and other alternative process work because I don't do much photography using a 24x36 inch view camera, nor do I care to deal with the unpredictability of large copy negatives. Alternative processes tend to be unpredictable enough to start with, so I do what I can to tame their randomness. So, "as far as the actual printing goes", well, it goes better.

I wonder if anyone has any other suggestions for simulating a Pt/Pd look with digital printing

beyond 1) printing with carbon inks on "fine art" paper, or 2) making digital negatives for

contact printing.

Sure thing, Robert. Might as well turn this into one of my wizfaq threads ;)

 

Remember, a big part of the classic platinum look is that of a contact print, printed "as it was shot". Tones should be subtle, not the look of a heavily manipulated silver print. Put away the Ansel Adams books for this exercise ;) Don't get crazy with burning and dodging, and avoid automatic "tone mapping" like PhotoShop's "shadow and highlight" control, Nikon's "D Lighting", etc.

 

On the other hand, tone curves, applied to the whole image, are necessary. You'll hear people talk about the "tonal range" of platinum. The platinum print has a limited tone "range", a density range of about 1.5 (30:1 contrast) as opposed to a good glossy darkroom or inkjet print, which can easily hit a density of 2.3 (200:1 contrast). What a platinum print has is a long "scale", it takes a huge range of negitive density and "maps" that density into the limited range of the print. A platinum print can take a negative with a range of 10 stops and show detail in the shadows and highlights where a more modern paper would block up.

 

You want to simulate this ability when you process your image: maintain your tones without clipping either shadows or highlights. It's tricky to do this without making an image that looks "flat". If you're shooting digital, watch out for raw conversion software. Lightroom, for example, has the default shadow clipping at a whopping 5%, this insures that there will be plenty of deep, inky black shadows for a "snappy" modern print, but robs you of all that shadow detail you will want to see in a platinum print. Take the shadow and highlight clipping right down to zero in raw conversion, do whatever adjustments you're going to make later, in photoshop, with curves and not the level controls. Smooth curves that preserve all tones.

 

Study a few actual platimum prints to get a feel for the highlights, shadows, and mid tones. People shooting with view cameras with an eye towards making platinum prints obviously choose subjects that will look good under those "flattening" conditions. Someone choosing to try platinum from a large collection of existing images faces the problem of picking out ones that will make good platinums. Look for images with wide tonality, you want interesting things happening in the highlights, the midtones, and the shadows. You'll make up for the lack of print tone range with detail to take advantage of the print tone scale. Avoid both very high contrast images and ones that can be described as "low key". High key images often work well, but they take practice. Wide range images are the easiest.

 

Keep your sharpening to a minimum, remember, you want no traces of 21st century artifacts on a 19th century image. Shoot for "old fashioned" detail, simple lenses, small apetures, and huge plates. My best platinums come from the insane detail of stitched images. They have a large view camera look.

 

I once made a digital negative of a computer generated fractal and made a platinum print from it, there was just something so inherentely wrong with that concept that it had a certain appeal, but in general, you want the image to have a "days gone by" feel.

 

If possible, get a platinum printer to print a step wedge for Pt and Pt/Pd for you. These will serve as a handy reference for tonality.

 

Maintain your image as 16 bit, from capture to printing. You want to do all you can to preserve middle tones.

 

It's the deviations in tone that are going to give you away, so you really have to be in control of tone. The newer printers with three or more blacks mix the near neutral colors (like a monochrome image toned to lool like platinum) using a mix of the three dilutions of black, with only enough colored inks added to give you the desired tone. The results in any monochrome process (toned or otherwise) are much better than off-the-shelf printing with the older machines using the manufacturer's drivers. The black is very consistent in tone from batch to batch, so once you get your process running right, it tends to "stay right" with a minimum of tinkering. Three inks means your highlights use a large number of dots of the most diluted black, instead of less dots of a stronger black, so you have visibly smoother tones. Three black printers include the Epson "K3" printers 2400, 38XX, 48XX, 78XX, 98XX, and the Canon "Lucia" printers 9500, iPF9100, iPF8100, iPF6100, and iPF5100. I don't think HP currently has anything in their lineup to compete.

 

If you have one of the newer Epsons, print using their ABW (advanced B&W) mode. You can build monochrome tone curves that will simulate the tonality of the platinum print and preserve more tonal detail in the mid tones than you will get printing with the regular print driver as if it were a color print. If you have one of the newer Canons, print from PhotoShop using Canon's printing plugin. That

 

If you have an older Epson (no three black system, no ABW) I'd suggest investing $50 in a program called Quadtone RIP (aka QTR). If you're not going to use custom inks, the RIP will let you print in a way different than the manufacturer's driver, and more like the AWB, you use the black and light black for overall density, and only use enough color to tone the image. QTR has a split toning mode, so you can adjust shadow, mid, and highlight tones in a fairly easy way that will let you match the tonality of those test strips.

 

If you're printing on an older Canon or HP, pay to get a professional profile made.

 

Control your DMAX. It's near inpossible to get a "real" platinum print to a DMAX higher than 1.6, and pretty much everything you see hanging on a wall is closer to 1.5. Even on fine art paper, a modern inkjet can easily lay down 1.7. Print a step wedge, learn where 1.5 falls, and adjust your levels to move the black up to 1.5.

 

Print densitometers are dirt cheap on the bay these days. If you have a printer profiling tool (An Eye 1, Pulse, or ColorMunki spectrophotometer, or a Spyder 3 Studio colorimeter) you measure with it and use one of several free tools to convert the LAB values to density.

Oh, and join the yahoo group "digital black and white the print". That's the hangout for the kind of folk who can make inkjet prints that can fool you into thinking you're looking at "real" platinum, AZO, silver gelatin, or lith.