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Before Cibachrome?


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#1
Jim_TX

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Kindly forgive my Ancient Brain...

 

... but if Cibacrhome wasn't the actual first Direct from Positive print technology, than what was?

 

And before that, one had to somehow get a negative from their color slide, and could only then produce a positive print, be it on photo paper or for some magazine publication or such?

 

Point of my inquiry though.  At a certain juncture, what was on the slide was what you GOT.  Period.  No pushing Tri-X to 800, no dodging, no burning.

 

Soup, cut, mount, projector, DONE.  Were we better photographers then, just lucky, or (like now) only displayed the best of our efforts to the world?

 

I do miss the darkroom.  The alchemy of the image.  Something the digital screen in a well lit room, well... it just lacks.

 

 



#2
Merco_61

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I think Cibachrome was the first direct to paper process. It was based on dr Bela Gaspar’s Gasparcolor process for duplicating slides and cine film. I have read somewhere that Paul Dreyfus and his team at Ciba Geigy had the process ready some years before production started, but they had to wait until Gaspar’s patents had run out.

It was possible to push-process the E4 and E6 processes without losing colour fidelity, at least with Agfachrome. No commercial lab did it, AFAIK, but I have done both when we needed Agfachrome colours in 160 ASA as there just wasn’t the light available for the nominal 100 ASA.

I had to use an intermediate stage creating a negative for some months in 1996, I think, when we were without a national distributor for Ilfochrome here in Sweden. The result was far from the crispnesss of a P-30 print, but we couldn’t suspend colour printing until more paper and chemistry might be available again.



#3
Ron

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If memory serves... (stop laughing!) Kodak would push E4 film slightly... maybe a stop or two. Don't know about E6 tho.

 

As far as getting negatives from slide film, I used to use a slide copier rig with color or B&W print film. Worked fairly well as long as you weren't planning on making extremely large prints. During the dark room phase, you could use the same techniques you would use if you had shot the originals on negative film. Of course, as I've said before, I never developed color negative film but I did do some copying with find grained B&W film, which worked well enough.

 

--Ron