Film from Digital (Part 1)

I am revisiting this subject of how to put a digital image onto a piece of film. The motivation for this is to be able to make silver gelatin prints in the darkroom from digital images. Since I bought my Fuji GFX 50s ii digital camera, I have been blogging about it recently and would like to use some of these images in the darkroom. I can print these as c-prints and inkjet however getting a print dialed in with cycle times between versions is problematic. I admit I have difficulty being satisfied with the commercial printers I have used. Somewhere between the consistency of the process and my inability to visualize the print from the screen has frustrated me. In the darkroom one goes through a series of trials until one has a print one is satisfied with. This can take between 2 and 20 prints depending on the objective and the quality of the negative. 

I was recently watching a YouTube video of a master printer in Britain, and he mentioned to the ham-handed interviewer that he used a company called Bayeaux to make 4x5 negatives from digital images if clients requested a silver gelatin print from digital. I made a note of this and later looked them up.

I decided to try them out. The first thing I noted was the expense. £69 for one sheet of 4x5 film. Since I wanted to print some Xpan aspect ratio (2.7:1) images from my Fuji GFX 50s ii I decided I could fit two images in one sheet of film. I contacted the company and got a reply to make an image that is 4" x 3" in dimension with 1016 dpi in an RGB TIFF format. I was confused at first, but they confirmed that the size is smaller because they have to tape the film to a drum. This of course was a little disappointing. Not being able to use the whole film area and the resolution is pretty limited. If I extrapolate the resolution to the digital printing rule of thumb of 300 dpi I can expect a max print size of 13 1/2" x 10". I would like to make a 20" wide print which means I am printing at 200dpi. This may be fine. So, I prepared my image(s) and submitted it. 

The process I used in Photoshop elements was to create a new file 4x3" at 1016 dpi resolution. I then took each image and rescaled it to 4" wide at 1016 dpi and then compiled them to the 4x3" template. I then exported the file as a TIFF file. The image I submitted looks like this. 

Two Xpan (65:24) images on one 4x3 image at 1016 dpi.

In reviewing my old post on the subject, I discovered that one company is out of business or has moved.  DigitalSlides now references a German company that makes color slides from digital. This is not as useful I feel as the dynamic range of slide film (They use Kodak E100 and Fuji Velvia 50) is less that negative film the results would be disappointing. The resolutions are much higher, however. 

My link to Gammatech was broken but it turns out they are still in business. They offer a substantially better product. The support 35mm, medium format, 4x5, and 8x10. In each case they offer slide, color and black and white negative film. For 35mm they offer 4096 pixel resolution in the long direction. On medium and large format, the long dimension is 8192 or 16384 pixels. This is between 6221 dpi (6x6) and 1788 dpi (8x10). In all cases superior to the Bayeaux offering. They also charge $20 for a single sheet of 4x5 film which is substantially cheaper. International shipping is just $7.50 as well.

I opted to try the 4x5 black and white negative. In this case it is recorded on Kodak T-Max 100 film which they develop themselves. Below are the details of the resulting negative. Note the image area is substantially close to the full size of a 4x5 negative. At 300 dpi a print could be about 50" x 40". Practically unlimited resolution for my needs.

My next step was to make some files to send. I created a new file and set the dpi to 3,590 per the table above. I set the document dimensions per the drawing above. (Technically the physical dimensions don't matter to Gammatech. They just want pixel dimensions as that is what the equipment cares about. They will also scale an image up or down if required.) Since I wanted the highest resolution, this meant the long dimension was 16,384 pixels. 

I started with my Xpan dimension images as before. They are 8256 pixels wide, so I scaled them to 1/2 of 16,384 or 8,192 pixels. This allows me to fit two side by side across the long edge of the film. I wanted to see how many images I could fit on a sheet of film. This turns out to be 8 images of this aspect ratio. These are recorded at very nearly the full resolution of the camera sensor. See below. 

Eight images on one piece of film.

I should be able to print these individually in my 4x5 enlarger though I will likely use a shorter focal length due to the smaller images. Indeed, each one is only slightly wider than a 6x6 negative. In theory I could cut the film into smaller pieces to fit my 6x6 enlarger. 

Part of my experiments are meant to get a feel for grain vs resolution. After all I could scale the images, it spans the full film width instead of just half. Here I could see a reduction of grain size by 2 for a given enlargement. One could argue the above images do not take advantage of the full 4x5 negative area. I should clarify that these images were taken with a 'film recipe' on the Fuji that is based on a Fuji Acros simulation with some added digital 'grain' in the digital image. So, these images may not be the best to test the full extent of the process capability. 

Towards the objective of seeing the fuller capability I made two additional negatives. The first is a medium format full frame for the Fuji GFX 50s ii (8256 x 6192 pixels) which I scaled up the 16,384 dimension specified by Gammatech. This is almost 2x scaling. This was based on a desaturated color image.

Medium format full frame (50 megapixel) image.

The next is a 35mm full frame image from the Fuji GFX 50s ii. I use a variety of manual lenses on my Fuji GFX and some are old 35mm lenses. In this case an Olympus 135mm f2.8 lens. The Fuji GFX is setup to crop to the 35mm full frame which results in 6768 x 4512 pixel images. I scaled this to the same 16K long dimension which is a 2.4x scale up. This image is below. Again, desaturated from a color image.

35mm format full frame (30 megapixel) image.

It will be interesting to see how these negatives work out in the enlarger. My plan when they are delivered is to print them to about 20" wide on Ilford MG Classic FB paper. The next post on this subject should cover these results. This will take some time however as I am due to go back to the USA next week and will be away from my enlarger at least a month.