I have been playing around with Direct Positive Paper (DPP) since Ilford has restarted production. I wanted to see how the paper would work for color slide printing. I started with a slide I used in a earlier
post.
 |
| The original slide |
I started with a test strip as normal. I had to remind myself that a dark section required a longer exposure which is the opposite from normal paper. I settled on f11 at 22 seconds for the following result. I developed and fixed the print normally as any other print.
 |
| first print f11 22 seconds |
One can see the reputation of the paper being very contrasty. The whites are blown out and the shadows are blocked. Because of the red color in the slide I thought that the lack of red sensitivity was part of the reason for some of the contrast problems. Red would appear as blacker. I reckoned that a magenta filter might shift the white sandstone darker. I used a .50 cibachrome magenta filter and increased the exposure a full stop to 45 seconds. This improved the local contrast in the white areas somewhat.
 |
| Print at f11 45 seconds with .50 magenta filter |
The paper does not exhibit a very deep black more like a dark gray. This does not improve the image either. Fairly disappointing as it would be nice to have an easy way to make prints from slides.
There are probably more experiments to be done to reduce the contrast. Flashing and SLIMT come to mind.
Comments