A Platinum Print from an iPhone?

Written by Carl Weese

Photo: Michael McWeeney. Instagram account @havana1933.
Co-Founder and Creative Director at the Reggae Math Foundation.

Recently I taught a weekend “Digital Platinum” workshop at Penumbra Foundation in Manhattan. The basic point of the workshop is to teach participants how to make platinum/palladium prints from digital negatives prepared specifically for printing in the process.

Setup
The first two hours are taken up with a lecture to explain what we have to do to trick a photo-quality inkjet printer and transparency media into producing a negative with sufficient UV-blocking density range to match the extremely long scale of the Pt/Pd print. This includes learning how to vary some of the tricks in order to calibrate for a specific paper, sensitizer coating mixture, UV light exposure unit, and general lab conditions. Then we test the calibration using a negative that combines a complex step tablet file with a real-world picture. Printing these tests lets me demonstrate the hand coating of the paper, preparation of the sheet for printing, then exposure, development, and finishing.

After that, the workshop goes free-form as I work with each participant to prepare picture files in Photoshop the way I think will work best for the process, then send them into the semi-automated “black box” of the calibrated procedure. A Photoshop Batch Action prepares the negative file, then a print driver Preset instructs the printer what to do to enhance the UV-blocking density range of the output on transparent media. While the freshly output negative cures (outgasses), the participant coats and preps a sheet of paper, then exposes it and heads into the wet darkroom area for processing, where my teaching assistant (thanks, Lizzy!) keeps everything running smoothly. By the end of Saturday each student had made negs/prints of one or two of their own pictures.

Image sources
The two most obvious advantages of working with digital internegatives are that you can enlarge a small original (platinum prints must be made in direct contact with the negative under intense UV light), and that you can make a Pt/Pd print from a picture that didn’t start out as a film negative.

There’s much more versatility than that, however. By the end of Sunday our five participants had made 30+ negs/prints from a wide range of original sources. Most were from captures with good digital cameras, but we also had: scans from medium format film; scans of negatives from a 4x5 view camera; scans from 35mm transparency film; scans of negatives from a handmade 4x5 pinhole camera; non-photographic images from Adobe Illustrator renderings; and copy captures of historical wet plate photographs more than a hundred years old. This is almost typical of these workshops and a very real part of the fun.

Sunday surprise
One participant, Michael McWeeney, had brought his MacBook Pro to the workshop, and after working up one or two pictures with me on mine, began to do the workups on his own. Late Sunday, he had a surprise for me. “Just to see if he could,” he chose a picture on his iPhone 6, and worked it up entirely on the phone. Then sent it to his computer to run the “black box” operations for a digital negative. The resulting print was entirely presentable, and had all of us at the workshop amazed/amused that he’d pulled it off.

I asked Mike to detail the apps and steps he used to do this, so here’s his lightly edited explanation:

iPhone Pt/Pd workflow

1. Shoot a raw file with the Moment camera app.
2. Send the Raw file to Google Snapseed.
3. Adjust basic highlight, shadow, and color temperature as Structure in the Snapseed RAW processor.
4. Convert to B+W in Snapseed’s filter tools, BLACK & WHITE tool, using color filters, grain, contrast and brightness adjustments.
5. In the Tools section, use DETAILS to add sharpness and structure if needed [Note: Only add structure one time, either in the Details tool or RAW editor].
6. Use SELECTIVE to create masks to edit specific areas.
7. The lens blur tool added a selective focus look and some lens fall off/vignetting to the image. [This concentrated emphasis on the flowers and helped the hosta leaves recede visually.]
8. Save image.
9. Send image to computer via Airdrop or email.
10. Run the Batch and print driver Preset to make the negative.

As you can see, it worked!

An equivalent workup could be done in the Lightroom Mobile App, and I’m sure there are others, while of course specific steps will vary.

I’m happy to see this blending of the 19th and 21st centuries!

Carl
(Thanks to Mike McWeeney)

Text © 2017 by Carl Weese, image © 2017 by Michael McWeeney, all rights reserved

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

New and old
Give TOP a “Like” or Buy yourself something nice

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

Comments

[dan]

priming the audience for the next TOP print sale?

[Robert Gordon]

One of these days I'm going to scratch my platinum/palladium itch, but only with an experienced printer in a workshop environment. Flying solo is an Image Too Far.

[Doug Chadwick]

A friend of mine, David Lewis, gave me a Pt/Pd print a few years ago. An extraordinarily beautiful thing. But I was surprised by it since I had been the "tour-guide, location scout" on that trip and I knew he didn't have a camera (a real one, you know, a view-camera), and yet he had made a print.

Canon digital camera and digital neg. It looks great.

Another friend of mine is planning to make prints, maybe Ambro-types with a Chromega F enlarger I gave him. With an iPod Pro Retina as the image source. Pretty wild. I hope it works.

It wasn't my last 10x10 enlarger so I will follow what he does very carefully.

[Doug Chadwick]

It should be a few years ago, and my last name does not have the second letter capitalized,

[Frank]

I wonder, can you make series out of a neg, and all the prints look just the same?

[Carl]

Frank, with good, practiced technique, you can make a series of Pt/Pd prints from a negative that are very consistent. Exactly the same? If nothing else, the border brushmarks will have to be different. You can definitely achieve a consistency where difference will only show if you examine two prints right next to each other, and even then there will often be no visible difference.

[greg brophy]

Come on Carl, we all know that you can only make platinum prints with a 20x24 camera hand built by Stieglitz and paper made by Irving Penn.

[Carl]

Greg, no, no! Penn bought paper, he didn't make it himself.

He forged and rolled the aluminum backing all by himself!!

[cdembrey]

Second try

Two questions for Carl Weese.

1. Can I use a LightJet printer, instead of an ink jet printer, to make the negative?

2. Do you know of a Pt/Pd Printer in the USA who does customer work (do you)? No-one I know has a UV contact printer, or experience mixing the Pt/Pd chemicals.

Manuel Gomes Teixeira http://manuelgomesteixeira.com/index.html does good work, but he is in Portugal—a long way from Huntington Beach, CA.

[paul logins]

Interesting article. But there is no explanation why I would
desire a platinum print. If it was extraordinary beautiful or
artistic, wouldn't Fuji have this in their digital cameras alongside their different color film and b&w emulations.
Also prints, while not entirely passe, are not how we look
at photos. How would they look on an iPad ?

[Carl]

cdembrey, I don't know enough about LightJet printers to take a guess at that. The problem is to block enough UV light to print clean highlights at the minimum exposure for dmax in the blacks, while also maintaining a smooth tonal ramp in between. What the negative looks like by visible light doesn't really count, the paper only sees UV.

There are people/firms who do custom Pt/Pd work, you can turn them up with a simple internet search, but I don't have any direct experience of their work so don't want to pick random names out of a hat. The couple times I looked at web sites out of curiosity the prices were extremely high.

[greg brophy]

Manuel,

Carl may do printing, I am not sure, but Stan Klimek is one of the best know platinum printers for photographers. Check him out at http://www.stanklimekstudio.com/

Their is also a studio in NYC that does it as well, but I don't remember their name.