Coloured Prints

From Online Printing

The worlds of photography and traditional fine-art printmaking have been historically separated by a kind of psychological barrier. Art exhibitions of fine-art prints don’t usually include photographs. Photo exhibits don’t also have etchings, for example. And as far as the practitioners themselves go, traditional artists such as painters or printmakers have not commonly also been photographers, and the reverse has also been true. The techniques and the language of each field have been different until now. Computer technology in general, and digital printing in particular, is the big gorilla straddling the fence and spilling over onto the once-separate arenas of photography and fine art printmaking. The whole field of image and art production is rapidly changing, and if you plan to be an active player in this new world, you have to know something about the old one. It’s time for a quick review to give you some perspective. What’s a Print? Unlike paintings or drawings, most prints exist in repea, multiple examples. Images are not created directly on paper but with another medium or on another surface (a master or matrix), which then transfers (or in the case of digital, outputs) the image to paper. More than one impression or example can be made by printing the same image on a new piece of paper. The total number of impressions or prints an artist or photographer makes of one image is frequently called an edition. Following are The three major types of prints that apply to the making of art. (Traditional fine-art printmakers maintain that only they make what can be truly called prints, but I take a wider view.) Photographic Prints Photographers have been making prints of their images ever since the pioneering days of the medium in the 19th century. While Louis Daguerre (1839) and before him Nichrome Nicety (1829) were able to produce the first, fixed photographs, it was William Henry Fox Talbot’s 1840 invention of the Calotype process that allowed photographers to make an unlimited number of positive paper prints from the same negative. I roughly categorize traditional photographic prints into three technology groups: black and-white, colour, and alternative process. Colour Prints Although the early photographers had hoped to produce colour images from day one and they partially succeeded but with awkward and time-consuming processes like Auto chrome, dye-transfer, and tricolour car bro prints real colour photography didn’t actually begin until 1935 when Kodak launched its famous Kodachrome transparency film. Then in 1939, Agfa introduced the first paper for printing from colour negatives using the chromaticism development (colour coupler) method. The basic process is this: The chemical development of a certain type of silver-halide emulsion creates products that react or couple with special compounds to form colour dyes and a resulting colour image. Unlike the metallic-silver prints of black and white, colour prints are composed of dye emulsion layers that are sensitive to different light spectra and that create images when developed, primarily in RA-4 or EP-2 processing. The three emulsion layers are: red-sensitive producing cyan dyes, green-sensitive producing magenta dyes, and blue-sensitive producing yellow dyes. Alternative Process Fitting somewhere between (or outside, depending on your point of view) black and white and colour are the alternative or non-traditional photo print processes. They’re alternative primarily because they tend to be handmade or use custom techniques that are, in many cases, resurrections or continuations of antique methods for printing photographs. Examples include: cyanotypes, kallitypes, gum bichromated, platinum and palladium prints, salted paper and albumen prints, van dykes, bro moils, and sepia (or other) chemically toned prints. Many of these are made by contact-printing large negatives and most are monochromatic (cyanotypes are blue, which is why they’re also called blueprints; more recent Linotype process blueprints are positive instead of negative, earning them the nickname blue lines). Liquid emulsions, image transfers, and emulsion lifts are alternative printing processes for colour photographs.