Real B/W prints from digital files?

treeman

treeman

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Anyone know if there's anyone who can produce traditional wet process B/W prints from digital files?
I've just had some done locally, on colour paper, and they're rubbish. Managed to produce a print with magenta and green cast :eek:
 
Grab an old HP 7760 series printer off ebay, use orig HP59 triple grey ink carts which are available for reasonable cost on ebay, print onto Ilford Galerie Classic Pearl at the max dpi
setting on the printer and you will produce very good truely neutral near bromide quality prints.

As for the original question, I don't know.

Good luck

John
 
Colour wet printing is kinda tricky complicated.
My local E6 lab is CCimaging, although I can no longer find reference to it on their new site, there used to be a process in their digital section which went something like - print digital file to acetate at finish res/dimensions and use that as a neg to make a traditional wet contact print.
Its an interesting concept but I can't imagine what a contact print of an ink jetted neg would look like, and whether it is even worth the effort.
 
There are plenty of labs doing c-type prints that expose digital images to real photographic paper using LEDs or CCDs and then processed in chemicals. Check out this months B&W magazine available from WHSMITH for an article on it. From the article:

palmlabs.co.uk
theprintspace.co.uk
thedarkroom.co.uk (up to 12x8)
focalpointimaging.net
digitalab.co.uk
 
Kev M said:
There are plenty of labs doing c-type prints that expose digital images to real photographic paper using LEDs or CCDs and then processed in chemicals. Check out this months B&W magazine available from WHSMITH for an article on it. From the article:

palmlabs.co.uk
theprintspace.co.uk
thedarkroom.co.uk (up to 12x8)
focalpointimaging.net
digitalab.co.uk
Click to expand...

Exactly, so it should be easy to do it on B/W paper, and get a true monochrome image :)
 
Yep, you just need to check if the lab are making c-type prints as I've described or giclee prints (poncy way of saying they use an inkjet and more likely to give you colour cast problems).
 
Kev M said:
Yep, you just need to check if the lab are making c-type prints as I've described or giclee prints (poncy way of saying they use an inkjet and more likely to give you colour cast problems).
Click to expand...

No Kev, that's my point, C-types will nearly always give a colour cast of some sort. Needs to be B/W paper in B/W chems. :)
 
My bad, I'd assumed as it was in B&W magazine and it used chemicals that thew were using a B&W only paper. If they're using a colour paper then perhaps it's a profiling problem. Did you send the file as srgb or greyscale? Perhaps you need to speak to the printer to see how they need the file to give the best B&W print.

Ilford are the B&W specialists but I suspect they use the same printers as all the other c-type guys. Might be worth speaking to them about the papers they use. Alternatively you could print them on acetate and make some in the darkroom. Much better:thumbs:
 
treeman said:
Anyone know if there's anyone who can produce traditional wet process B/W prints from digital files?
I've just had some done locally, on colour paper, and they're rubbish. Managed to produce a print with magenta and green cast :eek:
Click to expand...

hint

Print in negative onto OHP sheets!
 
Epson R2400 set in Monochrome does not use any of the colour carts just the 3 black ones and no caste
 
how about a monochrome laser printer, very good at printing etching transparencies for PCB's, can't see no reason it wouldn't work on OHP sheets :)
 
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