During my last project of making note cards I thought about adding my 'Morse Bros Studio' logo to the back of the card. Since the back of the card carries the light sensitive emulsion I could print this along with the image before development.
Alas I decided not to because of all the time involved making a template. In a previous post I described how I make archival print labels using an image copied on ortho litho film. I have run out and with Coronavorus preventing travel tot he US I could not pick up any fresh material this year.
Photowarehouse and Arista sell very cheap traditional ortho litho film. (I have recently discovered
RK Photographic here in the UK carries Wephota product and I have ordered some.) The Photowarehouse Ultrafine ortho litho film is less than $1.00 for an 8x10 sheet whereas Wephota is like £2.00 per 8x10 sheet. Other Ortho film from Ilford, Berger, Rollei and Adox is much more costly. Adox is 5.40 Euros, Berger is over 4.00 Euros, Rollei is 7.00 Euros, Ilford is £3.60, For these graphics images the cheap stuff is fine. I am curious why this other material is worth so much more money.
Anyway, I pondered this and thought perhaps I could get good results returning to an old idea. Years ago as my first foray back into the darkroom I made a simple enlarger out of an iPad and an old camera lens. I got good results and this gave me the encouragement to get an enlarger and build out my darkroom. Since then there have been numerous examples of using smartphones to make images on traditional photo paper. You can even find small smartphone enlargers. Mostly though this involves sticking the phone into the negative holder slot, focusing and exposing the paper using an image displayed on the phone.
This seemed ideal to me as you could quickly work up the graphics and print it directly on the paper. The question was will it work well enough? I did all the composition of the graphics on my iPad then sent the image to my phone (an iPhone 6) for use in the enlarger. I turned off the the automatic lock screen and disabled notifications so the image would stay up as long as I needed uninterrupted.
So I made a simple graphic, inverted it and mirrored it so it would project properly in the enlarger.
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| Inverted graphic |
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| Mirrored graphic |
My first prints were to dial in the exposure. I ended up with f5.6 at 15 seconds with a very close enlarger height. I don't want a very big image. My first attempt pointed out a problem that looks like vignetting from the lens. This was unexpected but apparent in the denser exposure where the middle of the graphic is more exposed than the ends.
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| First print with vignetting |
I decide to correct this by adding a gradient layer. This was a challenge on the iPad as I first had to make the white areas transparent then construct the gradient from two rectangles. Ideally the vignetting gradient is radial (radiating from the center) but I reasoned it is a thin rectangle so a rectangular gradient would be close enough.
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Graphic with gradient overlay shown above.
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My first attempts made the gradient too harsh so I got the reverse of what I was after.
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Attempt 1 gradient
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Attempt 2 gradient
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Finally I got a good balance...
I think printed 4 different sizes to see how small I could go. They are all reasonably legible thought scans don't quite do justice to the smaller ones.
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Four different logo sizes
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The exposure is high enough that individual pixels from phone screen are not apparent even under magnification. Much lighter exposures do reveal them on the paper however. Since my objective is not to show gray-scale this isn't an issue. I printed these through a number 5 hard contrast filter to accentuate the contrast. I had to turn the screen brightness to max to make the exposure a reasonable time. Also the max setting is a known value for reproducing results later. The black on an LCD screen image leaks a lot of light. Without the high contrast filter there is a chance the black areas of the graphic would print as light gray.
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