Process for Print Making

One of my goals is to make prints that can be hung on the wall. Once the process is understood it will be time to concentrate on the art.

We prefer black & white prints to color. The reason may be historical. When I was doing lab work color was expensive, tedious, and error prone. My last efforts were in the '70s. The prints I have from that period are very poor. Today with ink-jet printers, 8 x 10 prints from 35mm images scanned with low cost scanners are easy and quite good. I'm amazed. In an interesting reversal there are some challenges in digital black & white. The scanning and ink-jet printing don't do as well with B&W as compared to color. One answer seems to be in the digital analog to toning using the duotone mechanism in PhotoShop. Another is Piezography.

In broad brush the process might be:

1. Take pictures using negative film. 1. Process the film. 1. Digitize the images. 1. Process the digital images using PhotoShop as the 'light' room. 1. Print the images with an ink jet printer. 1. Document the process on this web site.

The old negatives could be handled from step 3. So far I've captured over 2000 old slides mostly dating from the late 50s into the 80s. In addition many archive sheets of color and b&w negative in both 35mm and 120.

An initial cut for this process is documented here.

Last modified: Fri, 12-Oct-01 08:15:45 PDT