Dye Transfer and Me, Part II

(Part 2 of an Uncertain Number)

Figure 1 (see text)

Words and photos by Ctein

As a prelude to the big Black Friday Dye Transfer Sale, I'm writing several 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.)

Back to our story...

When we last left our intrepid hero it was 1975 and he was about to attempt to scale mountains that he imagined were molehills (okay, maybe not so intrepid, not so heroic). As I said, I had misconceptions.

Why bother? Dye transfer had two major advantages over other processes: control and inherent quality. It was like having Photoshop in the darkroom. You had multiple tools for controlling curve shape, both the overall grayscale curve shape and the individual RGB color curves.

You could change the contrast, saturation, and overall print density range independently. You could make these adjustments to the overall print or to the individual primary colors. There were always several paths to each aesthetic end; for instance there were three different ways to increase contrast that had different effects on saturation and print density range. There are, in fact, so many different ways to control the print appearance that I don't believe anyone has ever entirely mastered the process. I certainly reject the term "master" for myself. There is just no end to the learning curve.

I photographed Figure 1 at a considerable distance, so normal light scattering in the air washed out the shadows and made them progressively more blue. Printed conventionally, there is no fix for this. With dye transfer, I fixed the white point to keep it neutral but increased the green contrast (magenta dye) a little and the blue contrast (yellow) a lot. That eliminated the atmospheric scattering problem.

Dye transfer's inherent color fidelity and gamut are unsurpassed. Dye transfer prints can have a maximum density approaching 3.0. No other printing process, analog or digital, can reach that level of density and saturation. That gives dye transfer prints an extremely large color gamut.

Even more important, dye transfer's dyes have high color accuracy, especially the yellow, which is comparable to what you'd see in a digital printer. Chromogenic yellow has a strong magenta component—it looks more like "Kodak box" yellow. In a conventional color print, distinct hues between orange and yellow blend into the same shade of yellow-orange. When I printed Figure 2 on chromogenic paper, it was a uniform orangeish-tan, almost monochrome. The dye print distinguishes the yellows, tans, and oranges.

Figure 2

Worse, chromogenic papers can't produce a vivid green. That poor yellow inevitably introduces a magenta component, which is the complement of green, muting it. I printed the illustration in the previous column as one of my very early dye transfers because a chromogenic print clobbered the delicate yellow-greens.

Dye transfer originally had better light-fading and dark-keeping characteristics than any other commercial process. The light stability of chromogenic and Cibachrome prints caught up, but dye transfer is much superior when it comes to dark storage. A dye transfer print in the dark at room temperature has a projected life of 300 years. I am confident in that number. Dye transfer materials did not change significantly over half a century and Kodak regularly measured reference prints that had been kept in the dark. There's 50 years worth of data that says that their accelerated tests are accurate. No other material has been around long enough to give us that sort of real-world confidence.

Now you know why I wanted to make, as Charlie put it, "some good prints." In 1975, I had the will and the money. The means came next. The easy part was ordering boxes of chemicals, dyes, paper, and Pan Matrix Film. It was an awful lot of money. A single box of 25 sheets of 10x12-inch Pan Matrix Film (for making 8x10 prints) ran about $300 (in current bucks). That'll make a maximum of eight prints, assuming nothing goes wrong and no do-overs. Reality was often less kind. Film for 16x20 prints? Three times that much. 11x14 paper? $4/sheet.

Equipment came cheaper. Dye transfer requires laying down the three primary colors separately and in perfect register on a sheet of receiving paper, using "pin registration." It's very low-tech and surprisingly precise. I wasn't sure I could afford a proper register punch (those supplies were really expensive), but I had a good three-hole punch. I punched a sheet of film, gave it to a friend who had a lathe, and he cut two sets of hex-head screws down to exactly match the holes in the punched sheet. I took one set, mounted them on a thin sheet of wood using the punched film to get them aligned exactly, and attached the pin assembly to the end of a vacuum exposure easel that I built out of Masonite, two by fours, and a spare vacuum cleaner. I saved myself hundreds of dollars.

Well, guess what—that primitive vacuum register exposure easel worked beautifully for my entire dye transfer printing career. A few years later I replaced my three hole punch with a real used (and affordable!) Kodak Register Punch and my custom-cut pins with a Condit Manufacturing pin strip (also affordable). That was it for the next 35 years.

My original register transfer easel was a horrible kludge of wood, aluminum, brass hinges and masonite. It was cheap. It worked—after a fashion. It gave me good alignment on the transfers, but it was a royal pain to use. As soon as I switched to Condit pin strips, I abandoned it for a much more elegant design, a simple sheet of heavy plate glass with the pin strip glued to one end. Like the exposure easel, it served me well for the rest of my career.

There were a bunch of other equipment problems to address. I've mentioned I had some misconceptions about dye transfer. One of the big ones was that, knowing that dye transfer prints were "better" than any other kind of commercially available print, I assumed that they were as good or better in every respect. Specifically, that dye transfer prints would be as precisely reproducible as conventional color prints and come out as clean and flaw-free, with nice sharp framing and white borders.

False! But not knowing any better (I still hadn't seen a dye transfer print) I strove for that. Getting clean edges on the image area was a trial. In ordinary printing a hinged four-bladed paper easel overlays the print paper and crops the photograph exactly where you want. I suppose one could engineer a four-bladed pin registration easel that would ensure that those blades overlaid each sheet of Pan Matrix Film in exactly the same position. I wouldn't have been able to afford it if they had.

After some trial and considerable error, I hit upon the idea of masking the edges of my negatives directly, using strips of opaque metallic tape to define the crop. It worked—also, after a fashion. It never produced super-sharp nor super-straight edges. Geometric imperfections in my laying of the tape were magnified by the enlargement factor.

Eventually I figured out a better approach that did produce the super-crisp edges I longed for. I cut out full-size masks from opaque sheet film and punched the end so that I could register them on the exposure easel. After I installed a sheet of Pan Matrix Film on the easel and turned on the vacuum, I laid to the mask down on top. You can tell the photographs I printed in the very early years from later ones by the sloppy borders—they got a lot better once I surmounted that learning curve.

By the end of 1975, I was ready to start working. Learning how to develop Pan Matrix Film, not easy! I had to develop three sheets of large, un-hardened emulsion uniformly and to exactly the same degree, by interleaving them in a tray of developer in pitch darkness (panchromatic, remember?) with a total development time of only two minutes. Compared to that, learning to dye, rinse, and roll prints was relatively easy.

I learned all the steps in Kodak's magnificent 24-page pamphlet and, truthfully, it wasn't all that hard. Just one small problem.

After six months, I'd burnt through all the money from Charlie's first check and was into my second, and I was still getting lousy prints. Development was hit or miss and I couldn't get a complete and clean transfer, where all the dye in the matrix migrated over to the print paper like it was supposed to. Something was wrong and I didn't know what. In June 1976, I penned a letter to one Mr. Frank McLaughlin at Eastman Kodak that began as follows:

Dear Mr. McLaughlin—

I was given your name by the local Kodak representative as one to contact on questions about the dye transfer process. I began teaching myself the technique about six months ago—while I have most of the aspects under control, a few problems pop up with annoying frequency....

I had no idea what kind of response, if any I would get. I had never tried writing to a major company like Kodak before, and I had no faith that a nobody like me (yes, then I was a nobody, no publishing credentials, nada) would get anything more than a boilerplate "thank you for your interest in our product..." response.

My lack of faith was badly misplaced.

...Which is where we will pick up with the next thrilling installment!

Ctein

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

hugh crawford: "I always thought those funky edges of the image that revealed the separate layers of the image were pretty neat. Well not literally neat but a cool example of letting the process show."

William Schneider: "At Ohio University a long time ago, there was a small room set up with equipment required for dye transfer. Being a daunting process, only a handful of students ever attempted it. One professor there, Arnold Gassan, worked with the process. In that room, I recall colorful stains on the countertop, floor and walls. I suspect that this could be a very messy process. Perhaps tie-dye shirts were an unintended badge of honor for practitioners."

Ctein replies: Dear Hugh, You're not wrong. It's just that I grew up with a different aesthetic around photographic prints. Not "fine art" prints like serigraphs or lithographs, which I also did—there, unfinished edges were part of the expected look. Heh, no one ever required artists to be consistent. From a commercial point of view, all my clients wanted those clean edges. Over my entire career, I didn't have one ask, "Can you do unregistered edges for me?" Interestingly, unfinished edges are still part of the platinum print "look," where practitioners have to prepare and brush the light-sensitive emulsion onto raw paper stock. The aesthetics of the brushstrokes at the edge of the image area are an important of the quality of the print.

Dear William, Oh yeah, a very good way to turn new (dress) clothes into old (work) clothes—wear them in the darkroom. Shoes, too. Having dilute acetic acid repeatedly dripped on them doesn't leave them very happy.

Fred: "Wow. As a former mediocre (at best) black-and-white printer I am very fascinated with this series. It feels to me like 'inside baseball' at its best. I am eagerly awaiting the next installment."

Comments

[J Williams]

I'd love to know how Cibachrome prints are in comparison to dye transfer prints. Back in the film days I shot mostly slide film and always thought the Cibachrome prints were better than conventional prints made from negatives. Of course it lacked the adjustability of dye transfer. I wonder if it is even available anywhere now?

[Earl Dunbar]

J Williams: Cibachrome prints could be adjusted for contrast by using masks, though I never attempted it because it seemed to be a very precise process and I had no one to teach me. For me, Kodachrome slides printed on Ciba were the pinnacle of colour printing.

[Ctein]

Dear J,

Comparing prints from negatives to prints from slides is an apples and oranges comparison. Negative printing is always going to be better for the same level of labor, until you get to heroic levels. That's because negatives have been designed to be printed, with appropriate contrast levels and curve shapes and built-in color-correction masking. To get the same out of slides, you have to do all of that manually.

Straight Cibachrome prints don't come anywhere close to dye transfers from slides. There are ways to make them look as good — I know a few Cibachrome printers who did such a superb job of masking that the quality of the rendition was comparable. Joe Holmes took it to a whole new level, by designing a custom light source for his enlarger that eliminated the significant color crossover problems associated with Cibachrome.

That said, once you went to such heroic measures, banging out a whole series of Cibachrome prints was a hell of a lot less work than printing dye transfers (although you still didn't get the longevity, nor the superb D-max).

- pax \ Ctein
[ Please excuse any word-salad. Dragon Dictate in training! ]
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[Dan Montgomery]

I know I'm straying off the topic of dye transfer prints, but those photos from Lassen Volcanic National Park, right?

[Ctein]

Dear Dan,

Yeah, that's "Painted Dunes and Fantastic Lava Beds, Lassen Volcanic Park CA - 1985"

pax / Ctein

[Ctein]

Dear Earl,

Cibachrome was well-matched to the dye set in Kodachrome and was probably the best way to print those slides short of going to dye transfer. Unfortunately, that wasn't always true if you were printing anything other than Kodachrome (i.e., any of the chromogenic slide films). There were problems with red-shadow/cyan-highlight color crossover which varied in severity depending on the particular slide film and the version of Cibachrome. It was particularly bad with some flavors of Ilfochrome.

As I mentioned to J, you could solve that with elaborate color correction masking or customized enlarger light sources, but there was no easy fix for ordinary mortals.

Other than dye transfer, I gave up slide printing in the darkroom in the late 90s. Even with the primitive color printers available then, I could get better prints by scanning my slides, correcting the contrast and curve shapes in Photoshop and printing them on what were (by today's standards) pretty bad printers.

Also, because of the always-high cost of slide printing materials, it wasn't much more expensive to print digitally.

- pax \ Ctein
[ Please excuse any word-salad. Dragon Dictate in training! ]
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-- Ctein's Online Gallery. http://ctein.com 
-- Digital Restorations. http://photo-repair.com 
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[Jeff Clevenger]

Thanks for your writing on dye transfer printing, Ctein. I've been reading it with pleasure and look forward to more.

Now, myself, I go off in very different directions in two ways: one, since we are not in a film photography, film-developing rich environment now, simply doing black and white film will satisfy my mojo, which is purely on behalf of certain artistic impulses I have. I don't have a Charlie to bankroll advanced ventures, and I don't care. The pleasant pictures I have taken so far, pleasing and whispering silky promises of even better results in the future, to me at least, did not call for exquisitely demanding technique and lots of expensive gear, but rather, for a good eye and some resourcefulness in approaching possible subjects for a picture.

That's the way I'll go, though I know I'll give up bragging rights in the process. And two, I'm busy imagining how I hopefully will get to do film photography on my own in a Starting Now kind of way, not replicating a muscle memory from another time or whatever. And, ahem, having said that, I did do a little film photography back in the day, so in fact I do have photographic muscle memories after all, tenuous remnants of early dreams from my times as a beginner, but what I do going forward will be based on what I am feeling and looking into Now, to the extent I even care about labels and attitudes.

That means that I look for manufacturers to come along soon who pick up on new and growing interest among photography students in shooting film and follow through with new inventions and products to help those new film fans do their preferred thing. I imagine digital camera makers like Canon and Nikon and of course my main brand Pentax, that somehow get a film photography inspiration and in a small but sustained way, make new things happen that link up to the shared past of film photography. That means cleaner and safer darkroom chemistry, film enlargers made in a digital world and with whatever digital advantages they can dream up, and either completely new, solid film cameras or honest revivals of tried and true film camera designs like Nikon's FM. New developments like Bergger's Pancro 400 dual emulsion black and white film will hopefully pave the way for more inventing of new ways to do film.

For me, there's no need for purism or wearing a technological hairshirt when doing film photography, far from it. I'm not like those fellows who carry muskets and reenact Civil War battles in the summer sunshine. I will be glad if modern technology augments film technology in myriad ways, as long as the end result is recognizably a film negative made in a film camera and a film photographic print from that.

I'd be glad to have a hybrid film and digital camera that's light and capable and is as durable, compact and well-engineered as a Nikon FM (you see I like keeping it simple, so as to concentrate on getting good film photos if I can). And such a camera can have digital features to the extent that its digital side keeps out of the way of taking pictures on film.

My black and white prints will not match the sort of thing you achieved with dye transfer back in the day. They won't ascend Parnassian heights of technique and sustained application of specialised knowledge. That's a given and it doesn't bother me. But my film efforts can at times have a look all their own, and that is what makes it worth doing, or at least, at the moment, mostly worth dreaming about.

Yes the developments I posit earlier in this note may not ever happen, and things may not ever magically make it easier to do film than it has been for a while now. I already know that my style however I make it happen is based more on discovery than on rigid controls and figuring everything out down to the tiny details in advance of taking a shot or printing a picture, but I know what I'm doing well enough to do ok anyway. I'll get by for the present with used but still functional Nikon FMs and similar classic film cameras because they were built to last and I am very fond of how they feel in the hand as well as the results they give me. As long as it is film and I get to do most of the process myself, it's all good.

Thanks again for writing,
Jeff Clevenger
Ann Arbor, Michigan