The Online Photographer

This week's column by Ctein

While slaving away in the darkroom to finish the printing for the last, blow-out TOP dye transfer print sale (see the footnote* for a status report), I started musing on how many hours I've spent doing dye transfer, total. I can figure that out. By the time I started doing dye transfer printing in 1975, I was doing pretty good record-keeping. (Figuring out how much time I've spent on all photographic printing and film processing would be more difficult, because I put in a lot of time before I started keeping detailed records. A project for another day.)

First question for myself: how many photographs have I printed as dye transfers? My own portfolio totals 300. Here's the very first photograph I ever made a dye transfer print of:

Off the cuff, I don't have quite as precise a number for the printing I've done for others. I could figure it out by digging through a bunch of disconnected records, but that'd be work. I'm sure it's at least 200 photographs. I'd be awfully surprised if it was 300. So let's call it 250, which means I've printed a total of 550 photographs (+/– 10%).

The time it takes to print a photograph as a dye transfer varies a lot. Sometimes it's been as little as four hours of darkroom time until I'm ready to pull a finished print. Sometimes it's been a dozen. 6–7 hours sounds about right, for the average. Give or take, oh say, an hour. Multiplied by the number of photographs, I'm looking at 3,500 hours (+/– 20%) of darkroom time.

That's just until I'm ready to make finished prints. Rarely did I make only one print of a photograph, either for myself or for clients. Again, no precise numbers unless I want to dig through too many records. I settled into the habit of making four prints of my photographs (one for the portfolio and three for sale). Clients rarely ordered fewer than two prints.

In my early days, I made fewer than four prints; conversely, sometimes clients would want a lot more than two prints. Plus, there are the times when I'd sell all three of my photograph's prints and make more. I'll guess 3.5 finished prints, average, for each photograph I've printed. (That doesn't count the TOP sales; we'll get to those.) Multiplying up, let's call it 1,900 prints. So, once I've got to the point of making those finished prints, how much time do they take? Well, the darkroom time isn't too bad, typically half an hour per print, and that's pretty reliable. Rounded off, I'm up to 4,500 hours of darkroom time.

Ah, but, there's the spotting and finishing. As I said in the footnote, those take up a lot more time than printing. This really varies from photograph to photograph; some require essentially none of this and others take all day. On average, it's a solid hour and change, so there's maybe 2,200 hours of non-darkroom time.

Now, what about those TOP print sales? They're exceptional. I spend a lot more time getting to the point of being able to make a first print, because I want the printing to be as easy as possible and exactly right, and I also make multiple sets of matrices, for when I screw one set up in the course of printing the run. So, maybe 100 hours of darkroom time.

Smaller prints take a lot less time to spot and finish than big ones and Mike and I were careful to choose the prints in our previous sales to be ones that I knew would take very little spotting and finishing time. That's how I could afford to make the prices so low. I know I spent less than 40 minutes printing and finishing each of the 1,000 small dye transfer prints I sold through TOP. Let's call it 500 hours of darkroom time, 200 hours of finishing time. Total so far: 5,000 hours in the darkroom, 2,400 hours out.

I've omitted two things—the very end and the very beginning of my dye transfer career. The very end is, of course, the TOP sale I'm currently working on. Like the earlier sales, it's atypical, but in different ways. 150–200 hours of darkroom time (that includes the considerable pre-sale prep) and an equal amount (I hope!) of spotting and finishing time.

Now I'm up to 5,200 hours of darkroom time and 2,600 hrs. of non-darkroom time (unless I screwed up my addition) with a 20% margin of error.

It's difficult for me to estimate how much time I spent in the first few years. My routines weren't standardized and there was a steep learning curve I was climbing solo, filled with trial and error. I can't look to my volume of finished work for a good estimate, although my records say I printed about 10 photographs a year in the early years. Probably the best reference point I have is the 3-year interval from when I started (1975), and when I went back to Rochester to see Kodak's dye transfer experts, Frank McLaughlin and Bob Speck (1978). At that point, I could reasonably say I was proficient, since they declared that they had never seen better dye transfer prints than mine. (I know better printers than me, but who am I to turn down a compliment!) It's likely any printing I did after that would fall under the earlier analyses.

Now comes the wild-ass guessing. I was most definitely not doing dye transfer full-time. I'm sure I wasn't putting anywhere near 1,000 hours a year into it: I didn't have the time and I didn't have the money. It's an expensive process! It's hard to imagine I was spending less than 500 hours a year on it, but maybe. Still, I'll generously guess 1,000 hours of darkroom time and 500 hours of non-darkroom time, on top of what I previously figured in.

So, there you have it! Thirty-eight years of dye transfer printing roughly equals 6,200 hours** of darkroom time and 3,100 hours of non-darkroom time.

The import of all of this? Thinking about such things keeps me from getting too bored while rolling out prints in the darkroom.

©2013 by Ctein, all rights reserved

*I know many of you are curious about my progress, so here's where that stands. I'm 90% done with the printing but less than halfway done with the spotting and finishing, which takes longer. And the shipping part? Not even begun. I may not be able to have everything shipped by June 17. If there's anyone out there who wouldn't mind getting their prints later (shipped by the end of July, I promise), I wouldn't mind hearing from you, via email: [email protected].

[**A standard work-year (eight hours a day times five days a week times 52 weeks a year minus two weeks annually for vacation) is considered to be 2,000 hours. —Ed.]

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robert: "6200+3100 hrs = 9300 hours. Seven hundred hours short of mastery and you are giving up dye transfer?? but you are so close!  :-) "

[In case you might be wondering, Robert is referring to the notion that it takes 10,000 hours of practice before true mastery is achieved, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell's 2008 book Outliers: The Story of Success. —Ed.]

This week's column by Ctein

One (of many) things I find interesting about printing is that some photographs demand to be printed a certain way and others seem to accommodate a substantial range of different "looks." I have no doubt that this is a function of my artistic mood as much as the photograph. But, still, there are some photographs that I see the need to print in exactly the same way, day after day, if they're going to look right to me. Others, my opinion changes about.

This used to bother me. Eventually I realized that there is no objective arbiter of rightness; it's whatever I think looks good. If a particular photograph looks best to me printed five different ways on five different days, then probably all of those are right for some legitimate value of "right."

Two of the photographs in my recent dye transfer sale illustrate that phenomenon. The "Roses against Black Stone Wall" photograph only looks right if I print it with precisely the right brightnesses; much lighter or darker than that and it's wrong. (Who judges right and wrong? I do; I'm the artist and I'm the only one with standing.) But the hue of that wall can go all over the place. Some days I like it closer to neutral (figure 1); some days I like it very cold (figure 2).

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

(Note: the illustrations are just that, illustrations of differences. There's no point in telling me you like figure 1 better than figure 2; you're looking at lousy JPEGs rendered with lousy publishing software. They don't look anything like the prints, and it's the prints I'm talking about. But I gotta give you something to look at, don't I?)

"Niagara Falls" is a different case. I'm pretty particular about the color balance in this one. Oh, a few CC one way or another from the particular blue-cyan I want looks good, but it can't go very far or the clouds end up appearing to be too cyan-green or too pinkish-white. But, brightness? Yeah, it's a high-key photograph, but which particular high-key I think looks best is all over the map. I'd say there's a good half-stop variation in print density in the way I've printed that photograph over time, and there's a pretty significant difference just from day-to-day. Some days I go in to print it and I think it should be really, really light (figure 3). Other days I think it should be distinctly darker (figure 4). And that's under constant bright incandescent lighting; start messing with that and I suppose anything is possible.

Fig. 3

Fig. 4

I used to try to print exactly the same way every day, matching the previous day's prints. Now I just print it however it looks best to me. Yeah, this is lessening of consistency, but who says I was right the previous day...or even more right than I am today? I can't!

It's just one more reason why fine printing is an art and a craft and not a science.

©2013 by Ctein, all rights reserved

Original contents copyright 2013 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.

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John Camp: "Years ago, when I first started collecting photography, I decided to buy a print of Ansel Adams' 'Moonrise.' Adams printed several hundred of these, which was good for me, because it kept the prices relatively low for what was already seen as a classic photograph. I then got involved in a protracted discussion with a couple of different gallery people about getting a 'good' version of the print, and wound up buying one that was supplied through the Weston Gallery of Carmel. A 'good' print had to do with the treatment of some very subtle cloud layers against the dark sky, and it seems that even as good a printer as Adams was, some of the cloud results were favored by collectors over others. I've look at a lot of different versions of the images now, besides the one I own, and I can see differences, but they're very, very subtle. Whether he had a particular vision on one day or the next, or if he just had a range of acceptable prints, I don't know...but I do know that some collectors look at these things, and what they think may be different than what Adams thought, and all of that can affect the price of the prints...."

Mike Haspert: "You said,'Yeah, this is lessening of consistency, but who says I was right the previous day...or even more right than I am today? I can't!' Now there's a thought that fills some big shoes. Walt Whitman said, 'Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.' I believe I speak for many when I say. 'Thanks for the free lesson.'"

This week's column by Ctein

Two disappointed readers who missed out on last week's blow-out dye transfer sale asked me if I'd be making digital prints of "Roses Against Black Stone Wall" and "Niagara Falls" in the future. I won't be able to say for certain until I try, but the prospects are very good for the latter and problematical for the former. Why is that?

It goes to the inherent strengths of the two media. Something that dye transfer has uniquely going for it is the huge density range it can render. It's possible to achieve a D-max of 3.0 if the subject demands it. Furthermore, the medium is more linear in the shadows than conventional darkroom materials. That means that dye transfer prints can hold more and deeper shadow detail and produce better tonal separation in the shadow detail that falls within the range of other print media.

For many photographs, even most, this is not a critical issue; the quality of the shadow detail doesn't make or break the photograph. Sometimes, it does. Within a few years of taking up dye transfer printing, I was photographing with that in mind. I knew I could print an exceptionally long exposure range and rich but open shadows, so I didn't hesitate to photograph subjects that would demand that. For example, I started photographing in the American desert under the midday sun, a time avoided by most color photographers, because I could hold both highlight and shadow detail in my prints.

I definitely made the photographs in my Jewels of Kilauea series with dye transfer in mind. All that rich, black shiny pahoehoe just soaks up the light and provides a great backdrop to the iridescent flashes of color that I'm photographing. The problem is, many of the compositions fall apart without that impression of intense shadow detail you could fall into. Figure 1, for example. I've tried printing that as a digital print. So far it's been a failure. The photograph doesn't work well without those three dimensional shadows.

Fig. 1.

A lot of the photographs in the series are like that. Probably has something to do with why those prints haven't sold very well; I can't reproduce that quality in a JPEG any more than I can in a digital print. Consequently, the online presentation doesn't show those photographs in a good light.

All of this is subject to change, of course. There's no fundamental reason future digital printing technologies and displays can't give me as rich and long-range a rendering as dye transfer does. But at the present time they come up lacking. I'd say that approximately 20% of the photographs in my portfolio just won't work as digital prints, for the present.

"Roses" may turn out to be one of them. I won't know if it depends upon that shadow detail richness and three-dimensionality until I try printing it without that. I may be able to come up with an interpretation in a digital print that entirely satisfies me. If not, I'll be disappointed but not surprised.

At the highlight end of the tonal scale, though, digital printing is massively superior to anything I can do in the darkroom. In this case, though, it's not about any inherently superior tone or color rendition in the digital print media—it's all about the control.

Highlights are very difficult to precisely control in the darkroom, regardless of the process. It's inherent in the nature of silver halide print materials; there is always a severe rolloff in contrast in the extreme highlights. Consequently, it's very hard to separate delicate highlight detail from the paper-base white. In addition, the usual darkroom controls and masking methods, even with a process like dye transfer, give you fairly poor and crude control over the exact shape of the highlight curve. While precise tonal placement is possible in midtones, with highlights you're substantially stuck with what the print hands you once you've established the overall exposure and contrast.

The curves tools in digital printing make it possible to shape highlight tonal rendition with exquisite precision, independent of any other control you exercise over the print. Most notably, it's possible to get a linear rendition of tones and colors that preserves both delicacy and separation much better than in a darkroom print.

Fig. 2

A photograph like figure 2 is a good example of one that turned out much better as a digital print than a dye transfer. Not that the dye transfers don't look fine, but the digital print looks even better. Getting exactly the right tonality and tonal separation in those clouds so that it properly mirrors the forms in the hills, which is what makes this photograph work, succeeds better in the digital print than in the dye transfer.

Fig. 3

Extreme highlights exist in places you wouldn't think, for example in figure 3. Colors that are close to primaries, like the greens and yellows in this photograph, actually depend on the quality of the highlight control. The reason for that is that colors that are very close to primaries contain only small amounts of the complementary color. For example, where the greens are most intense and delicate in this photograph, there is almost no magenta density; the precise quality of the greens is entirely dependent upon the highlight rendition of the magentas.

Figures 4 through 6 show the red, green, and blue channels for this photograph; they would correspond to cyan, magenta, and yellow ink or dye densities in a print. Notice how high key much of the green image is, especially in the yellow-green grass at the base of the hills. Getting these colors and tones exactly right requires being able to control the highlight curve shape for the magenta image very precisely, and that's extremely difficult in the darkroom. By itself the dye transfer print looks wonderful, but placed side-by-side with a digital print the colors in the dye transfer print look cruder and less real.

Fig. 4. Red channel.

Fig. 5. Green channel.

Fig. 6. Blue channel.

What's best?
Some of you may be wondering, apropos the discussions of a few weeks ago, how this relates to the art market.

It doesn't. The art market is not remotely driven by measures of visual quality, either objective or subjective, nor by the artist's intent. The concerns of this column have nothing to do with making prints that sell better or for more money.

My dye transfer prints, both of my own photographs and others', sell substantially better than digital prints of the same photographs, even when by every visual measure, and even by the artist's own vision, the digital prints are superior. Does this distress me? Let me rephrase the question—

Does it bother me that people would rather buy a much more expensive print of mine? You get two guesses, and the first one doesn't count.

There's art, and then there's commerce.

©2013 by Ctein, all rights reserved

Original contents copyright 2013 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.

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-et- (signed Tom): "As an addendum to Ctein's comments above, a couple of years ago I wrote to him asking about purchasing a dye transfer print of 'Apollo 17 at Dawn.'  However, I was interested in a larger print than the size he listed in his catalog—which offered only the smaller of the two sizes for which his other dye transfer prints were available.

"Ctein replied that this image would not meet his standards for quality if printed any larger, due to limitations imposed by the negative sharpness. He wrote that he had a second negative shot at the same time that was quite sharp, but simply could not produce a quality dye transfer, so his only option was to limit the size of his dye transfer print from the first negative.

"I expressed my regret at the circumstances he described, as I really liked that image for both artistic reasons and sentimental reasons. (I had been one of the design engineers on the Saturn launch vehicle for the Apollo capsule.)

"Ctein replied that the discussion had made him take another look at his negatives, and that he thought that he might be able to use the second negative to generate a print that met his standards if he used digital techniques. Accordingly, he was going to experiment to see if his 40-year-old negative that could not be used for a dye transfer print would work well for a digital print.

"Some time later he wrote to say that his experiment was a success, and he was pleased with the large digital print from the second negative. Was I still interested? My response was very brief—'How much do I make the check out for?'

"The resulting print is now framed and hanging on the wall in my home. It is everything that I would have expected from looking at his dye transfer print in his online catalog, and much more."

Nigel: "That was one of your most interesting columns—which is high praise indeed. Though it makes me wish even more that you'd offered the SR71 pictures in the recent sale (probably a minority view)."

Mike replies: I have to take the blame for that, as I chose the pictures. The SR71 shot was in the running, however. I'd still like to see it as a dye.

Frank Gorga: "My first response, upon reading only the title, was 'of course, just like painting, water color and oil are two different media and no one confuses those.'

"Then I remembered an encounter I had with an acquaintance some years back (when digital was fairly new). This fellow knew that I made cyanotypes (I still do) and he wanted to show me his cyanotypes.

"You can probably see where this is going...he had some bluish-toned inkjet prints (on glossy paper, no less) for me to look at. I tried to be polite and explain that they were not at all similar to my cyanotypes except for the hue.

"I have had similar discussions many times since but it is a losing battle. I fear that the differences in media are lost on many photographers...present company excepted!

"And don't get me started on simulated IR images...these should be against the law!

"Thanks for the interesting article. It is too bad that this is the end of the line for dye transfer."

This week's column by Ctein

I frequently describe dye transfer printing as being a little like having Photoshop in the darkroom. For a complete description of the process, as I use it, please read this article. Because I'm dealing with individual separations, I can control the characteristics of each primary color component of the print—think "channels" in Photoshop. This lets me do things that would be impossible with conventional color printing. It also makes some kinds of controls trickier.

Castle Eilean Donan—1995. Photo and print by Ctein.

My photograph of Castle Eilean Donan, one of the four images Mike and I offered in the final blowout dye transfer sale on Wednesday, has several problems as a "straight" print. First, the light in the foreground and in the sky was considerably brighter than the light on the castle, so the print needs dodging and burning in if it's going to look good. (In my experience, most photographs can be improved by judicious dodging and burning-in.)

Second, since the photograph was made from a long distance away with a telephoto lens, there's some contrast loss and color shifting caused by scattering and haze in the air. If you've ever tried making photographs out an airplane window, you know what I'm talking about. The whites come out looking fine, but the scattering fills in the shadows, so that they're bluish and the scene is lower in contrast overall than you'd like. In the case of my photograph, the scattering is more greenish than blue, probably because of relatively low grazing light and all the foliage, but the overall effect is similar.

The third problem is that my telephoto lens had some uncorrected secondary lateral chromatic aberration. In other words, a bit of color fringing. I find this especially annoying in dye transfer printing, because it looks like I'm a sloppy printer and have misregistered the matrices, when it's the fault of the lens.

Solving the first problem takes a bit more cleverness than with conventional printing. Remember, this is a separation process: there are three separate exposures on three separate sheets of pan matrix film, one for each primary color. Manual dodging and burning in just won't cut it; there's no way I could do that precisely enough to avoid color fringing.

One of the smartest things I ever did, early in my dye transfer printing career, was to make up a bunch of dodging and burning masks out of sheets of 4x5-inch B&W film. I probably have 100 of these, in various densities, abruptness of gradients, and shapes of gradients (lines, arcs, and angles). The masks aren't sandwiched with the negative; they sit on top of the negative carrier, several millimeters away from the negative. That way, any dust or scratches or slight imperfections in the masks don't show up in the print.

When I need to do dodging and burning in of a dye transfer print I look through my assortment of masks and figure out which combination will do what I need. In this case I wanted a fairly sharp-edged burn of about a half stop at the bottom, and a much more diffuse burn of half a stop at the top. Figure 2 shows the two masks I used in combination with my negative for this photograph.

Fig. 2.

Reducing the aerial haze is pretty easy in dye transfer. I can mix up dye baths of slightly different contrasts. It's like making the curve steeper in Photoshop in one or more of the channels. In this case, I kicked up the contrast of the magenta dye bath by about half a grade, to neutralize the excessively greenish shadows.

Getting rid of the lateral chromatic aberration is a tricky thing, but it's doable (sometimes) with sufficient care. How did I do it? I changed the height of the enlarger head slightly between the exposure separations. That alters the relative magnifications for the different separations, and if I do it just right, I can undo chromatic aberration. For this photograph, a height adjustment of 1 mm was what I needed to eliminate the color fringing (figure 3).

Fig. 3.

Sometimes this trick doesn't work, and the separations fail to align properly. I suspect that's due to irregularities in the gearing of the enlarger head that causes it to slip a bit sideways if the gears are in just the wrong position. This time I was lucky. The trick worked perfectly and reliably for this photograph.

Just another ordinary day in the darkroom, when you're a dye transfer printer.

©2013 by Ctein, all rights reserved

Ctein's weekly column usually appears on Wednesdays, but this week we were busy with the sale on Wednesday. (May the admiring editor just add that this is the first time he has ever heard of adjusting enlarger height to correct LCA, and his mind is suitably boggled by the degree of precision in technique this requires.)

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