Fig. 1
Words and photos by Ctein
Dye Transfer and Me: A Meandering Half-Century Journey: As a prelude to the big Black Friday Dye Transfer Sale I'm writing a series of columns talking about dye transfer—how it worked, what it meant to me and other photographers and printers, and our perpetual jousting with Eastman Kodak. (Important note: You cannot put in print orders or requests before the sale. Please don't email me your preferences in advance.)
Part 4 of an Uncertain Number...
In Which There is More Hacking of Process
My first meeting with Frank McLaughlin in 1978 was a high point in my life. Frank was warm and welcoming and knew everybody in the dye transfer world. Frank introduced me to Phil Condax, Louis's son and a curator at the Eastman House—we also became lifelong friends—and Tom Rankin and the other folks at Frog Prince, a commercial dye transfer lab in San Francisco. Frank knew there was strength in networking and he made certain we networked.
Frank brought in Bob Speck, who developed the dye transfer process for Kodak under the direction of its inventor, Louis Condax. Pretty exciting! Bob and Frank pored over my prints and gushed fulsome praise, to a degree that anyone with a smaller artistic ego than mine would have found embarrassing (I coped). They declared they had never seen better dye transfer prints. I expect my feet didn't leave any footprints as I was departing Kodak.
Frank's favors didn't stop with introductions. He put in a word about my work with Kodak's public relations department which, a few years later, produced its own substantial rewards, and he introduced me to my biggest and best clients. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Fig. 2.
Dye transfer changed what I photographed. This print medium could handle anything I could record on film, and that was a lot. Color negative films had an exceptionally long exposure range, well over 10 stops of straight-line curve. I could photograph in the middle of the desert, at noon, and make prints that held detail in the highlights and the shadows (figure 2).
Night photography was—and still is—one of my passions, though not the way it was usually done back in the era of available darkness, pushing films to their max. In college, I'd begun to wonder what kind of photographs I'd get if I went all the way to the other extreme—slow films, processed for minimum grain and maximum tonal quality. The first time I saw what urban landscapes at midnight looked like on Panatomic X, I was hooked.
Fig. 3.
When I moved to color and medium format, it was the same. It demanded patience, a flashlight, and a good book. Occasionally the exposures were only a few minutes; figure 3 ran 45 minutes. I discussed reciprocity failure last column—contrast went up, and the scenes were contrasty to begin with. Well, that's what contrast-control masking and dye transfer were for. I dealt with previously impossible-to-print-well negatives like figure 1. That vein of work continued throughout my film and darkroom career, culminating in the Christmas in California series.
Dye transfer was a "hi-fi" printing process that exposed problems the same way a really good sound system reveals a poor recording. I loved telephoto lenses (still do), and long lenses are prone to lateral chromatic aberration—the color fringing that occurs towards the edges of the frame because the lens produces red, green, and blue images of slightly different magnifications. Before digital image processing, which made the fix simple, it was something you lived with. I could ignore it in smaller prints, but I was printing large in dye transfer. Worse, the high color purity of the dye transfer process made those fringes more obvious. Worst, color fringes in a dye transfer print look like bad technique! It takes a technical eye to distinguish lens aberrations from mis-registered color separations. This would not do.
I measured the exact amount of the color fringing and calculated how much I'd have to raise or lower the enlarger head to compensate. It was a millimeter or so over a throw distance of about a meter. When I printed a negative made with my 300mm lens I carefully adjusted the enlarger head between the matrices to compensate for the aberration. Mostly, it worked. I rarely got perfect results—enlargers really aren't designed to be manipulated that way with any degree of precision alignment—but there was much less color fringing than there would have been if I done nothing.
Other complications—I've mentioned that one of my misconceptions was that dye transfer prints would be technically the equal or superior to chromogenic prints in all respects. Among other delusions, I expected dye transfer prints to be as clean and flawless as a well-executed Ektacolor print.
Oh my, but that is to laugh! We're talking about a process that involves multiple generations, large trays of liquid dyes, rinses and washes and multiple hand transfers. Why in the world I ever imagined that would produce spotless and flaw-free results, I have no idea.
Any bits of dust on my negative or contrast masks produced a white spot in the matrices that would have to be retouched out of every print I made. You can bet I went to great lengths to be as clean as possible, and sometimes I achieve perfection...but more often, not. Further, any bits of dust or air bubbles that got trapped between the matrix and the receiving paper would keep the dye from transferring to the paper, leaving a little bright red (minus cyan), green (minus magenta) or blue (minus yellow) spot that also needed to be retouched.
If a bit of grit got embedded in a matrix or it got scratched, then there'd be a little bright spot or streak to spot out of every print thereafter. Manipulating large sheets of soft, wet emulsion for print after print, stuff would happen. Even careful craftspeople aren't perfect, as much as we'd like to be.
Little particles of dye precipitated out of the liquid baths. If they settled on a matrix and weren't entirely removed in the rinse step, those dye specks would transfer themselves to the receiving paper to create a minuscule pinpoint spot of pure cyan, magenta, or yellow. Fortunately, the yellow specks were invisible to the human eye, but the cyan and the magenta? Not so much. They had to be bleached out, and the cleared spot retouched in with dye.
Sometimes there were only a few. Sometimes there were hundreds. Very rarely were there none. Dye specks like that are so common in dye transfer prints that it's one of the more reliable diagnostics for telling if what you're looking at is a dye transfer print. Peer really closely and the odds are good you'll see a primary-color speck somewhere in the light areas.
So, spotting had to be done. A lot of spotting, and I wanted it to be perfect, because I didn't know any better. Nobody knowledgeable was trying to turn out perfect dye transfer prints. (Okay, almost nobody—Frank Tartaro's lab in New York was as obsessive about this as I was.)
It helps that the dyes used to make a dye transfer print are the same ones you use for spotting and retouching. Any finishing work you do can be flawless and invisible, if you're good enough. And your brushes are good enough. I'd buy six or eight 000 brushes to find one that produced the perfect pinpoint spot of dye. I coddled those perfect spotting brushes, but over the course of my career I wore out several generations. Lots of print spotting!
Potassium permanganate selectively removes cyan dye. Happily, that was the most common dye speck. I tried the finest spotting brushes I had, but they made far too big a blotch. I can't recall what inspired me, but I discovered that toothpicks, whittled down to a needle point, proved ideal. I could take out a spot a tenth of a millimeter across and leave the surrounding area almost untouched.
It also helped that I'm phenomenally nearsighted. In my youth, without my glasses my "infinity" working distance was only four inches from my nose!
Permanganate left a brown stain that I removed with sodium bisulfite applied, again, with a sharpened toothpick. Then I had to quickly wipe off the bisulfite with 1% acetic acid, because bisulfite itself would start to bleach dye if left on the print.
Unfortunately there wasn't a strong selective bleach for magenta. There was a general-purpose bleach that would attack all three dyes—it was Kodak's R-18 B&W film reducer formula. R-18 is a mixture of potassium permanganate and sulfuric acid. It bleached great, but it turned out to have problems that I discovered only when I went after the other "dirty" part of dye transfer—stained borders.
In theory, the totally clear parts of the matrix film, where there is no gelatin emulsion to carry the dye (see process description) should print as pure white. Well, they don't. Usually they'd carry a few CC of dye density over to the print paper. Even though I'd figured out how to get sharp borders on my prints' image areas, the surrounding borders would usually have a faint dye stain. Some people considered it a mark of the process. I considered it unattractive.
After I made a print, I'd bleach the area around the image with R-18 bleach, removing most or all of the dye from an inch or three around the image to provide clean white border suitable for framing. Then I'd wipe that whole area down with sodium bisulfite, rinse it off with 1% acetic acid, and dry the print. Nice.
What I didn't realize was that the sulfuric acid in the reducer was creating residual sulfur compounds in the paper. I was turning archival paper into non-archival paper! The paper started to turn brown and get brittle where I'd applied the bleach. Fortunately for me, the the consequences of that became apparent in less than a year and I hadn't sold any prints yet. I needed a better solution—pun intended.
I dug into the chemistry and decided that it wasn't sulfuric acid in particular that was important, it was that it acidified the potassium permanganate. Perhaps glacial acetic acid would do—it wasn't anywhere as strong an acid as sulfuric but if it drove the pH low enough....
It did. R-18C (for Ctein flavor) worked just as well as the Kodak formula and it meant I didn't have to contaminate my prints with sulfuric acid. Not so incidentally, it also worked just as well as R-18 as a film reducer. I passed that information on to Kodak, although I don't think it ever made it into the literature. Now you know.
Why have I spent so much time talking about print spotting and finishing? Because that's where most of the work is! After the first print, I spend far more time on that than on transferring prints. That's the reason I've had to put something like a thousand hours into preparing prints for the upcoming sale.
Ctein
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