So if you’re still getting chromogenic ink b&w prints, I urge you, regardless of if you shoot film or digital, to give silver gelatin a spin. I’ll let you know in a hundred years! Suffice to say, I shoot on silver and I like to print to it too. I’m not going to go down that rabbit hole. It’s probably arguable too, as to what technology is more archival at this point. And I do honestly enjoy the look of my silver gellies over ink. But the consistency from source to product is important to many art patrons. Will the average person look at a silver gelatin print and seen an obvious distinction from ink? Nah. Prices are a little higher than comparable ink prints but the cost difference is negligible considering the difference in quality. If you want fiber paper or larger sizes, there are other labs that will do it for you. Ilford offers incremental sizes from 3.5×5 to 10×15 and does matt and glossy finishes. All b&w prints I’ve sold to clients and shown in galleries since 2013 have been printed on silver gelatin by Ilford. There are other pro labs offering this service (some of whom apparently just send the work to Ilford) but I’ve never had any reason to try anyone else. In 2013, Ilford Lab USA opened to provide not only film processing but also these digital silver gelatin prints. But at least in the last 5 or so years, Ilford Photo has driven a charge to produce genuine silver gelatin prints from digital files using Durst Lamda and Theta machines.īasically, instead of using a film negative and a light bulb to project your image onto silver gelatin paper, these machines use a computer to reproduce your image on an LED panel that the silver gelatin paper reacts to. I’m not clear on the timeline of things but since I’ve been seriously involved with photography, since about 2000, if you took your work to anything but a pro lab that offered hand-crafted darkroom prints from a negative, you were getting inkjet prints of some form. Even CMYK can mix a color cast to key (black). This means that there is absolutely no color cast because the blacks and the whites are not composites of red, blue and green channels like a color print. Blacks are the stimulated silver grains and whites are the paper itself. The image is held by tiny, randomly dispersed, light-sensitive silver salts which sit in a gelatin suspension on the paper. by Johnny MartyrĪlso like photographic film, silver gelatin paper undergoes a permanent physical change when exposed to light. So the resulting images have a slight depth and perhaps life to them. Unlike modern inkjet prints which consist of ink sprayed onto the surface of paper, silver gelatin paper, like photographic film itself, consists of layers of organic and chemical material. Throughout the 20th century, b&w silver gelatin prints were THE standard in b&w photography.
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