Let me preface this by saying that this is a new process I am working on. It's not optimized yet... I post this to try to encourage others to help optimize it.
As we all know, the usual dneg workflow requires printing an interneg on transparency or paper. The spirit of this post is to show that one can bypass the internegative altogether and just print a negative directly onto the photopaper, expose it, remove the inkjet ink, and voila.
Here is my very first attempt at this. Again, it's far from perfect, this is just an early example which shows an image that is partially cleared using my thumbs and water. The left hand side is thumb-wiped and the right hand side is not, I will explain below...
What you are looking at is an exposure test on ilford rc postcard stock. The paper was fed normally into an epson inkjet printer which I had put in a film changing tent. I also covered the printer's LEDs with black tape to prevent fogging the paper. A test image was selected, it's the same one I used for some other hybrid trials on matte fiber. The image was curved, converted to a neg in photoshop, and simply printed directly onto the photopaper.
After inkjetting the neg onto the paper, I exposed the paper. In the case above, I obviously did an exposure series from top to bottom. Bottom was 30 sec under my enlarger, top was 5 sec. Next I developed the paper normally, in ilford chems, and after rinsing, I simply wiped away the inkjet ink, with my eager thumbs, from the left side of the paper.
As you see, almost all of the ink wipes right off.
Almost all of it. Actually the inkjetted image is rather fragile on the RC... there are blotches here and there because I carelessly stacked several trial prints against each other before letting the ink dry. I think I put some fingerprints on there too. If you think about it, the highlights in the final print are the places where the ink was heaviest in the inkjet print, so if any of that ink blotches then you get blotchy highlights. So one needs to be more careful than I was.
There is the issue of how to get rid of
all of the ink, but I think that is a problem that can be solved. Most important is to remember that the "negative" was right atop the paper emulsion so the image is sharp, sharp, sharp even though I didn't do anything to hold the paper flat i.e. no easel or contact printing frame
So there you have it, direct dnegs. A work in progress. Worst case, maybe the pigment has to be bleached off, or maybe a lesser non-pigment ink will make life easier. Bear in mind that this trial was with an RC paper, I don't now yet how things will go with fiber. I am thinking that one can bleach off the ink and be left with a purely analogue image. On the other hand, maybe you won't want to bleach it off entirely, maybe this opens up new creative possibilities. Silver image beneath a coloured pigment image? Whatever.
Possible advantages: no cost of interneg materials, and no need to hold an interneg perfectly flat against the photopaper to get tack-sharp contact prints. Oh and since you're not waiting for an interneg to dry, it's very fast. I imagine that if it works well, it could be scaled inexpensively to any carriage size. Also, I think that if you use pictorico transparency film or velum, one necessarily limits Dmin and introduces some texture via the substrate... this gets around that entirely.
New dneg process - no interneg required
Linear Mode
