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Kodachrome MIGHT be coming back!!!


A miller

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Why would there be a "lack of demand" for what was clearly a large step in the direction of higher quality printing?

[...]

 

Lack of demand can also be considered as aversion to cost/price.

Besides, printing from Kodachrome was not Kodak's goal.

.

Edited by pico
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Hello Jaap,

 

Why would there be a "lack of demand" for what was clearly a large step in the direction of higher quality printing?

 

Best Regards,

 

Michael

Cibachrome was a solution for some things... punchy colors from slides and it had good archival qualities that helped make sale of color "art" prints possible. But the contrast made it difficult to use and not suitable for some types of images. E.g. portraits were generally shot on neg film and had a much softer look when printed. Making internegs from transparencies for C prints was still common too. Once scanning and digital printing improved there was little demand for it. Although some labs ran a hybrid where they scanned and then digitally printed onto Ilfochrome. Presumably that could give better control.

 

I did some of the early beta testing of Cibachrome when the company brought a ton of it to RIT for the color printing students to use back around 1970-71.  Later I had a custom color lab and did Ciba along with other processes.  I had to do a extensive dodging and burning on most images.  Later a special film carrier was offered that sandwiched the film between special self tinting glass that could be exposed to light to create a contrast reduction mask.

 

I can say with some experience that I get better prints with my Canon wide format 12 color inkjet printer.  You don't need a big darkroom and processor for that nor do you have to mess with those nasty dye destruction blix chemicals.

Edited by AlanG
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the last one  and for Adam 

 

attachicon.gifImage7pailkodachromeR4Slfht+++950tc.jpg

 

Best H

Doc, these images look cyanish and somewhat flat to me.  (On my laptop though.)  I have no idea if they represents the original images. But I always felt that Kodachrome's strong points were reds and yellows and that greens and blues were somewhat muted..

Edited by AlanG
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Here is a shot I made on Kodachrome. It was scanned using a Polaroid SprintScan Plus. This was an early scanner but worked well and I made a nice 24x36 inch print. I first bought a Nikon Coolscan but found that it was very harsh and showed tiny black spots in the film grain. The Nikon seemed to have more of a point light source and the Polaroid had a diffused light source. I thought that made a big difference. I found Kodachrome easy to scan.

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Edited by AlanG
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Kodak had a reversal printing process for direct prints from transparencies. It was type R. I recall it being R2203 then R14. I primarily printed on this in my lab because the contrast in the shadows was more forgiving than Cibachrome.

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A co-worker of mine in the Seventies (in fact I hired him) moved on to National Geographic and he used nothing but Kodachrome, and Leica M cameras. His standards were astronomic. His exposures were within 1/3 of a stop or he considered them a tech failure, although some of his 'off exposure' images are awesome. I never saw him use a light meter.

 

 

 

My father was more accurate without a light meter than I was with one. When we bought him a bulls-eye Contarex for his 60th birthday, some years later he said that he had not been impressed with the accuracy of the light meter. I would guess that around 80% of my father's photography after the mid fifties was Kodachrome with his Leica IIIA, although he liked to experiment with other films like Perutzchrome, Ferraniachrome, Agfachrome and others, in search of a faster film but always came back to Kodachrome due to the colour depth. When used with a projector, nothing else worked as well. My mother who was a total technophobe, never learnt how to use the Aldis auto-loading projector and threw away the many thousands of slides, over the years after my father died. 

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My mother has a Cibachrome print from a Kodachrome slide I took in 1980 on her living room wall. It looks as good now as it did when first put up. Cibachrome really is a long lived material. Allied to an appropriate transparency it could give superb results but, as Alan says it was contrasty, which made printing difficult if not impossible from some transparencies. Environmentally it was dodgy even before people worried about such things and if I remember correctly required use of a 'neutraliser' prior to dumping it down the drains (domestic disposal) so I can't see it making a comeback easily for this reason alone.

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Cibachrome was a solution for some things... punchy colors from slides and it had good archival qualities that helped make sale of color "art" prints possible. But the contrast made it difficult to use and not suitable for some types of images. E.g. portraits were generally shot on neg film and had a much softer look when printed. Making internegs from transparencies for C prints was still common too. Once scanning and digital printing improved there was little demand for it. Although some labs ran a hybrid where they scanned and then digitally printed onto Ilfochrome. Presumably that could give better control.

 

I did some of the early beta testing of Cibachrome when the company brought a ton of it to RIT for the color printing students to use back around 1970-71.  Later I had a custom color lab and did Ciba along with other processes.  I had to do a extensive dodging and burning on most images.  Later a special film carrier was offered that sandwiched the film between special self tinting glass that could be exposed to light to create a contrast reduction mask.

 

I can say with some experience that I get better prints with my Canon wide format 12 color inkjet printer.  You don't need a big darkroom and processor for that nor do you have to mess with those nasty dye destruction blix chemicals.

My mileage varies. I found it so much easier than printing colour negatives...

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My mileage varies. I found it so much easier than printing colour negatives...

Positive printing is easier because you can directly judge one color slide by comparing it to a similar one and print it the same way. (Keep notes.) And if the slide is too blue, it is easy to hold different yellow filters over to choose the correction. With a little practice you can tell how much more exposure to use for a dark image and how much less for a light one.  It is almost impossible to judge color by looking at a negative. Exposure is harder to judge and you have to think in reverse for color and exposure corrections. There was an expensive device called a Kodak Color Video Analyzer that previewed the negative on a screen and let you transfer the data to the printer. I bet you could make some kind of digital preview device like that now using a digital camera or scanner.

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When I printed Cibachrome I used a Philips additive color enlarger that I found much easier for color correction than the usual color enlargers using subtractive system filters:


Philips calls its design the "electronic Tri-One color system," and it uses the additive method of color printing. So instead of employing the subtractive primary colors (yellow, magenta, and cyan) to adjust color balance, you use the additive primaries (blue, green, and red). Rather than subtracting unwanted color from a white light source, the additive system uses only the colors to which paper is sensitive, selectively adding color to each of the three paper dye layers.

 

Though at this stage all this is theoretical because I think that Kodachrome will come back when pigs will fly.

_______________

Alone in Bangkok essay on BURN Magazine

 

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When I printed Cibachrome I used a Philips additive color enlarger that I found much easier for color correction than the usual color enlargers using subtractive system filters:

 

Though at this stage all this is theoretical because I think that Kodachrome will come back when pigs will fly.

_______________

Alone in Bangkok essay on BURN Magazine

 

Yes, that enlarger looks like a good way to go. I plan to get one and set up a new color darkroom as soon as Kodachrome and Ilfochrome come back. ;)

BTW, I still have a large stainless steel darkroom sink and a stainless steel filtered and heated film drying cabinet if anyone wants to make an offer. Enlarging lenses too.

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When I printed Cibachrome I used a Philips additive color enlarger that I found much easier for color correction than the usual color enlargers using subtractive system filters:

 

Though at this stage all this is theoretical because I think that Kodachrome will come back when pigs will fly.

_______________

Alone in Bangkok essay on BURN Magazine

 

 

AFAIK Kaiser still offers such a colour head:

 

http://www.kaiser-fototechnik.de/en/produkte/2_1_produktanzeige.asp?nr=4544

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We are going to be in real trouble when the geneticists crack this one.

 

Here is the answer www.quora.com/Aerospace-and-Aeronautical-Engineering-What-would-be-the-minimum-wingspan-for-a-pig-to-fly  :)

Edited by wlaidlaw
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Doc Henry, I hope you don't mind me posting this image showing some adjustments. The capability and expectation to fine tune color and detail in photos (often beyond what could be done via conventional printing) makes the color properties of Kodachrome somewhat irrelevant today.

 

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Edited by AlanG
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