Making an Autochrome Screen Plate
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- Опубликовано: 25 июн 2024
- A quick overview on how to make an autochrome screen-plate.
If you're interested in a longer writeup, check this out:
www.jonhilty.com/autochromeguide
EDIT:
Hey y'all! I still plan on making a full-length autochrome video Soon™. In the meantime, I've been screwing around with a proper machine to coat plates, which will probably end up having its own video first! If you're interested in (sometimes) routine updates, drop me a follow over at amphetadreamer!
I would love a full video. This is very cool.
It's still in the forefront of my mind! I had a lot of issues getting good results this summer, which really kind of set my video plans back a bit. The process as I know it is still very much a work-in-progress, and there's a ton of room for improvement.
Maybe I should double down though, and not let "perfect" be the enemy of "good"...
@@jonhilty7434 It is also always interesting to see how things are 'in progress'. It may not be at the conclusion, but little successes and failures along the way can be just as interesting as the finished 'perfect' solution.
Either way I am sure whatever you choose to put out will be interesting! (And no pressure to put out any videos about it either)
@@jonhilty7434yes please! Just came across your video almost by accident, I’ve always loved autochromes and had no idea people were making them today! I’d love to know more
Same here. If I had the resources I’d try this myself 👍
Your soft makeup brush is, more specifically, a Kabuki-style foundation brush. 😁 This is so cool! I heard about Autochrome Lumiére a few years ago and have been thinking about it ever since. Such gorgeous photographs--I'd had no idea that it was possible to re-create these plates in the modern day. Thanks for the fascinating video, I'd love to see and learn more!
As someone who grew up in a digital age but has always been intrigued by the analogue means of colour photography this is fantastic. I would simply love to try out this process one day
For me I find analogue photography interesting because there is no resolution (as far as I know lol) and chemistry being able to capture what we see is fascinating.
Very cool! Yes … a full video please. The images are so beautiful
Gracias infinitas desde Sudamérica!!! Por fin tengo una exacta apreciación de este procedimiento!! Un gran abrazo Jon!!
Simply amazing. The photographs look so good I actually envy you but the process is very complicated and requires so much ressources that it’s actually out of my reach 😓
You might be the only guy in the world shooting this old process in almost a century.. I thought the process was long gone and forgotten..
I would totally love seeing more, thank you for sharing
Not so. Many youtube videos are often shot using a potato. I thought it was just a joke.....till I discovered this
Hey Jon! I emailed ya about a year ago about digital autochrome stuff, and somehow didn’t find your RUclips until now! Love the video!! I may have to mess around with this process, hope you make a video about making the dyed starch someday!
Incredible work!
I love to learn old analogue techniques or producing sound, photo or video
YOU'RE A BADASS!!
amazing, looking forward to see a video of how you shoot with these plates
This is amazing! Are you still planning on making a full tutorial? Id love to take a shot at this!
Yessir! Slowly but surely getting footage, writing the script, etc. It'll still be a while before its ready.
You can reference the guide I wrote in the meantime, if you're interested in seeing how it's all done!
www.jonhilty.com/autochromeguide
Awesome!! thanks bud i'll check this out and can't wait for the full vid!@@jonhilty7434
Fantastic video, I've only heard of one other photographer replicating the Autochrome process, you've done a fantastic job, looked at all your autos on your site, almost all the subjects look 1900s period in Autochrome except the shots with modern subjects in it, absolutely enjoyed seeing those photos!!! I personally shoot and process vintage expired film and several years back I bought 3 rolls of 1956 expired Lumiere Alticolor 120 colour film which is Autochrome but on roll film emulsion, the first 2 rolls came out very messy but the 3rd roll came out really good!!! I will upload the photo montage sometime soon and link you to it. I've also shot some 1939 and 1941 expired Dufaycolor films too which are a colour matrix version of Autochrome and got decent results.
Oh man, very cool! I'd love to see your results with the Alticolor! Sometime this spring/summer, I'm hoping to pick up an old Kodak film coating machine, so 35mm Alticolor-like film isn't outside the realm of possibility!
I have a single DufayColor slide, and I absolutely love it! I'd love to try and emulate that style of screen plate. I think first, I'd need to start with a low-res system like the Joly Plate.
So I was not the only one to have their mind blown by seeing an IKEA watering can shot in real Autochrome. :D
I am glad to see I'm not the only young guy still shooting and developing film in Michigan; I'm 18 now, but have been developing film since I was 16. I converted a shed on my property into a fully functional dark room. I'm from a small town outside Port Huron by the way. Anyway, I would really like to try to shoot Autochrome. I mostly work with 35mm film at the moment, but I can shoot on other types of cameras aswell. I am very intrigued from the process of taking the picture to the development process. Sadly, there are no videos I can find demenstrating how to do any of it. I would like to see how you do it. Maybe I can adapt a way to make it work with 35mm film too. I really like the way potatoes can make color; it's like no other.
Hey there! Very cool! I got my start around that age. I got a super lucky deal at a flea market, where a dude was giving away basically a whole darkroom set for $20. I ended up cramming it all in a tiny closet at my parent's house for a couple years.
Developing autochromes is pretty similar to normal B&W prints, just with a couple extra steps. If you google b&w "reversal processing", you'll get a ton of info. You can develop autochromes with a normal dev/stop/fix method too, but you'll end up with color negatives instead.
I've got some pictures of development here: www.jonhilty.com/autochromeexposureguide
Re: 35mm. It's definitely doable, but since it's "positive" process, the plate you shoot in camera is going to be your final picture too. So it'll end up just being real small. That's why I usually shoot these with a 4x5 camera.
@@jonhilty7434 I got lucky too wkth the darkroom I have. My highschool got rid of all their film equiptment from Film Development class and I got to have all of it. And thanks for the tips and info. I'll definitely try this on a bigger camera than 35 mm 😅
@@jonhilty7434 Would you think putting one of these plates in an enlargement machine would work ? If the film used in the machine was negitive, you could just use normal black and whiite developer ? And if this is possible, I don't see why you couldn't make 8x10 plates since with an enlarger you could make it as big as possible.
@@thewindows95guy You're thinking like, apply the normal b&w film/enlarger/print workflow to autochromes?
I don't see any reason why that wouldn't work, although your grain would get magnified on the "print". But assuming you got the color balance figured out, you could make as many final "plates" as you wanted.
I'm not aware of this having been tried historically, but it may have been. I'll have to look into that!
@@jonhilty7434 I'll have to try this. If it works, it could be possible to make much larger prints the size of maybe a small window. That could be really cool.
太酷了，感谢
This is so cool. I just saw your post from Instagram. I'm really curious about this more as alchemy, but would love to know a list of the chemistry what you are actually using.
Sure! I go into more depth here:
www.jonhilty.com/autochromeguide
I need to touch up a few small things since I wrote it, but it's 99% relevant, still!
Thanks for sharing.
For redlight sensibly the emulsion, what else can I use instead of Pinacyanol? This substance is prohibited in the european union, for both private and commercial use, so there is no way I could get it.
If it's not a secret, where did you find pinacyanol? I can't find it on sale in my region...
Would this be possible to do on film? I assume 35mm would be way too small since the starch particles would be way too big but maybe 120? Would be interesting to create custom color emulsions within the realm of a diy skill level especially since film prices are going up.
Yes, absolutely! When the Lumière company shut down production for the original autochrome line, they switched to potato starch on a flexible support, called "Filmcolor" I believe. They produced additive roll film through the 1950's, with the last product being Alticolor.
You're right 35mm would be pushing it a bit, but I think if you're using sorted grain it wouldn't be too bad. It'd probably be on par with a 4x5 with unsorted grain. I'd bet medium format would look pretty good.
I just learned of this process and have been checking out plates from a century ago
Very ingenious process but I'm wondering;
Why do your pix look more like pointelism paintings than the old pix which looks like film?
From what I understand from my extremely limited understanding of it, it’s got to do with the size of the starch grains, older versions used a specialised refining process that created tiny starch grains, which isn’t as easy to achieve when DIYing.
Would the starch autochrome work with Edwin Land's two color Retinex method? That would be interesting. Please, do a full video.
We gonna get that update?
Someday... I've started and stopped it like 4 times now. I keep changing enough in the process that I have to scrap a bunch of footage and re-write the script
So how long do the plates last with out the silver emulsion? Like could you make up a batch of plates then when you go to use them you just slap the emulsion on and ready to shoot?
They pretty much last months. I've still got some problems to work out with the second varnish, where it kind of starts to delaminate after a while. I've done this with some plates that were a year old, and were more likely to crack/leak, but still worked.
But basically yeah, nowadays I'll make like 30 plates over the course of a couple weeks, and then do a big coating run all at once.
You can reuse the plates a few times too - so if you don't like how an image turned out, you just wash off the gelatin, and you're ready to coat again.
This is fantastic! but I have one question, where do you get the chemicals? Specifically the sensitizers, I've been to your website and read everything along with doing a lot of google research
and couldn't find really ANYTHING on pinacyanol synthesis nor much of anything on purchasing it and or other sensitizers either. There are crumbs of mention here and there but it's like there's no info I can find on the Spectral sensitizing dyes pinacyanol and others (without buying books for guess work). Any info and or sources of that would greatly help!
Great question! You're right, sensitizers are by far the hardest to get a hold of. I get most of my standard chemicals from The Photographer's Formulary.
If you know someone who can order from Sigma Aldrich, that's how you would get a hold of the pinacyanol. You might try contacting the guys at artcraftchemicals.com, the last time I needed to put in a special order they were able to source it for me. Luckily 1g of that stuff will last forever.
The other sensitizer for green, erythrosine, is pretty easy to find. I think I got like 100g off of ebay a few years ago.
@@jonhilty7434 Sorry for the late response and thank you so much for replying! I honestly didn't think you would. When doing research I did notice that Sigma Aldrich
was the only "commercial" source I could "buy". Is it just hard/difficult to add to cart and buy from them or do I need to give them a good reasoning?
(I ask because the sight says literally add to cart) I also wanted to do research in seeing if there is a somewhat "easy" way to synthesize pinacyanol like the chemists of old
so I wouldn't have to rely on single source buying and or having to have a middle man get it for me. I'm looking into improving the process and end result of the image by
trying out Oswald Ripening (once I figure out the best/easiest way to do it simply) along with making a more uniform and patterned color grid like ones in led screens. Any ways
I'll try out those sources once I have everything set up to make my own autochromes and again thank you so much for responding back. :D
@@virus7g7 No worries! I try to reply to everything. If I ever don't, it's probably that I just forgot...
When I last tried, Sigma would let you add stuff to the cart, but you wouldn't be able to complete the order unless you were a registered business or research institution.
I did run across a pinacyanol synthesis a while back. It doensn't look TOO crazy, but you'd probably want a fume hood and some decent equipment. I actually ran across it because I wanted to see if I could make "Orthochrome T", which afaik is completely unavailable. They have extremely similar synthesis routes, and were mentioned in the same article. At the end of the day, though, I decided against it, because there were a ton of weird chemicals involved and I didn't want to end up on a list.
Good luck on everything! I'll be interested to hear how progress goes!
Jon, I’m a little confused. I’m a collodion photographer and I’m assuming this wouldn’t work on an ambrotype because collodion is orthochromatic. But the first color image was produced in 1861, so they had to be using collodion? Even if the results aren’t great, shouldn’t it be possible? Also, are you saying that this could be placed over any orthochromatic plate to reveal the original colors? I just don’t quite understand how this works once the photography part takes place.
Hey there! The first color photo actually goes back to experiments by Edmund Becquerel in 1848, using his own specially created Daguerreotypes. These used the interferential method to produce color rather tricolor. He never did figure out a way to fix them, however, so they were sparingly displayed.
Maxwell's 1861 piece was on collodion plates IIRC, using 3 separate plates that were exposed through red, green and blue filters. I'm sure an alarm bell is going off - how could the red plate ever be exposed, when outdoor wetplate darkrooms use red filters in sunlight without any fog? The red plate had to be exposed much longer than the blue and green plates, and Ron Mowrey (Photo Engineer over at Photrio) theorized that the red plate is actually violet/UV reflecting off the bow leaking through a flawed red filter. I don't know if this is true, but it's always made sense, since Maxwell didn't really seem to make many more pictures using such a novel process.
I don't know much about the specifics of the rest of what he did, but I assume he used the negatives to print positives on glass, and then recombined them in some manner, either using filtered light or by dyeing the collodion before it dried.
As for autochromes - they use a dry plate gelatin coating over top the starch, and the exposure is made with the image passing through the starch layer first, and then to the image. This could be done with collodion instead, as long as the solvents in the collodion didn't melt the "second varnish" on the autochrome plate (it's nitrocellulose based, so there's a good chance it would). Orthochromatic collodion would only likely get you blues and greens though. IIRC ethyl violet was used for orange/red collodion sensitivity, so maybe that could work.
@@jonhilty7434 Thank you. I think this helped me understand more clearly. Have you ever sold one of your autochrome plates? I have no way to make one myself and I’d love to experiment with collodion!
@@TheSoulOfGenius Hey! I've sold them in the past. This summer I was hoping to have been shipping boxes, but I've been having a lot of trouble making them lately, for some reason...
If you're looking for just the screen plates (no dry plate emulsion), though, I could sell you some!
I know it is not historically accurate, but could you use polymer powders and a heated cylinder to flatten it? It would probably be more persistent and easier to get.
I'm all for an autochrome-style process, even if it's not "authentic". I just don't know much about those materials. If they're sufficiently transcluscent and saturated in color, it's something that could probably be leveraged. Especially if the gelatin could go straight onto it!
Do you think a pack of originals expired in 1928 would still work?
Off topic, but I'm consistently amazed that no company has revived any of the mosaic screen processes, such as the autochrome, dufaycolor, etc. The dyes used are much more stable, so it takes a lot longer to fade, it can be processed with ordinary black and white chemistry, and it isn't as complex as producing a "true" color emulsion.
But hey, I know some chemists and other aficionados; somebody's gotta get the show on the road. I don't think chromogenic film with all its required infrastructure is long for this world.
Hey there! Sorry, I thought I replied to this like two weeks ago, but I guess the comment didn't go through.
For original autochromes - I have absolutely no idea if they would work or not. I've definitely heard of people developing older film/plates before. Usually they add extra potassium bromide to the developer to help with fog. I developed a roll of film from the 50s a few years ago and most of it turned out pretty well, though some parts had some fungus on it.
I have a few boxes of autochromes too, but I'm afraid to open them. I probably won't ever think about shooting them unless I can get my hands on an original Lumiere orange filter, since it needed one of those to correct the color balance during exposure.
I agree, it is kind of weird that there isn't at least ONE mosaic screen process on the market right now, since the chemistry required isn't really that crazy.
it would be a great niche product- the original autochromes were high quality plates, might take some work to achieve that.
So the starches are not in any way reactive? Its just a filter?
Yup! All the actual photosensitivity/photochemistry happens in a layer that would otherwise produce a b&w image