Sun printing

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Anna Atkins algae cyanotype

Sun printing may refer to various printing techniques which use sunlight as a developing or fixative agent.

Contents

Techniques

Cyanotype

Cyanotype, also referred to as "blueprinting", is the oldest non-silver photographic printing process. [1] It involves exposing materials which have been treated with a solution of potassium ferricyanide and ferric ammonium citrate to a UV light source such as the sun. Negative or positive images can be obtained by blocking UV light from reaching the sensitized material. For example, a negative image can be produced by placing a leaf upon paper treated with this solution and exposing to sunlight for 10 to 20 minutes. The paper will retain the image of the leaf after it has been rinsed with water. Once the paper dries, parts that were exposed to the sun will turn a shade of Prussian blue (ferric ferrocyanide), while parts that were covered by the leaf will remain white.

Light-sensitive vat dyes

A specialized type of vat dye called Inkodye is also used for sun-printing due to its light-sensitive quality. [2] Unlike other vat dyes which use oxygen to develop their color, Inkodyes are developed by light. [3] These dyes are suspended in leuco form appearing colorless until they are exposed to UV. Their usage resembles that of cyanotype, but unlike cyanotype Inkodyes are primarily used on textiles and exist in a full range of colors. [1] Exposure times vary from 3 to 15 minutes depending on the desired color and intensity of light. [4] Once exposed, the sensitized material is washed in soapy water to remove dye from unexposed areas. Such dyes are typically used by craftspeople, fabric printers and artists and can be printed with photographic negatives, resist paste or through a silk screen.

Potassium dichromate

Sun printing may also refer to a photographic process using potassium dichromate which produces a negative plate for conventional lithographic printing. The process uses a film of gelatine spread on a flat and rigid surface. This is coated with a dilute solution of potassium dichromate and dried in low light conditions. A translucent positive is secured in tight contact with the treated gelatine layer and exposed to bright sunlight for a period of up to 30 minutes. During this time the sunlight and potassium dichromate tan the gelatine exposed to light. The plate is developed by washing in warm water and removing the untanned gelatine. Once dry, a relief print is revealed on the plate. The surface can be inked and printed in a hand press to produce any number of identical prints of the original subject.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Blueprint</span> Document reproduction by contact printing on light-sensitive sheets

A blueprint is a reproduction of a technical drawing or engineering drawing using a contact print process on light-sensitive sheets introduced by Sir John Herschel in 1842. The process allowed rapid and accurate production of an unlimited number of copies. It was widely used for over a century for the reproduction of specification drawings used in construction and industry. Blueprints were characterized by white lines on a blue background, a negative of the original. Color or shades of grey could not be reproduced.

Photographic processing or photographic development is the chemical means by which photographic film or paper is treated after photographic exposure to produce a negative or positive image. Photographic processing transforms the latent image into a visible image, makes this permanent and renders it insensitive to light.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cyanotype</span> Photographic printing process that produces a blue print

The cyanotype is a slow-reacting, economical photographic printing formulation sensitive to a limited near ultraviolet and blue light spectrum, the range 300 nm to 400 nm known as UVA radiation. It produces a monochrome, blue coloured print on a range of supports, often used for art, and for reprography in the form of blueprints. For any purpose, the process usually uses two chemicals: ferric ammonium citrate or ferric ammonium oxalate, and potassium ferricyanide, and only water to develop and fix. Announced in 1842, it is still in use.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Albumen print</span> Photographic process

The albumen print, also called albumen silver print, is a method of producing a photographic print using egg whites. Published in January 1847 by Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard, it was the first commercial process of producing a photo on a paper base from a negative, previous methods - such as the daguerreotype and the tintype - having been printed on metal. It became the dominant form of photographic positives from 1855 to the start of the 20th century, with a peak in the 1860–90 period. During the mid-19th century, the carte de visite became one of the more popular uses of the albumen method. In the 19th century, E. & H. T. Anthony & Company were the largest makers and distributors of albumen photographic prints and paper in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gelatin silver process</span> Photographic process

The gelatin silver process is the most commonly used chemical process in black-and-white photography, and is the fundamental chemical process for modern analog color photography. As such, films and printing papers available for analog photography rarely rely on any other chemical process to record an image. A suspension of silver salts in gelatin is coated onto a support such as glass, flexible plastic or film, baryta paper, or resin-coated paper. These light-sensitive materials are stable under normal keeping conditions and are able to be exposed and processed even many years after their manufacture. The "dry plate" gelatin process was an improvement on the collodion wet-plate process dominant from the 1850s–1880s, which had to be exposed and developed immediately after coating.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Photogravure</span> Photographic printing technique

Photogravure is a process for printing photographs, also sometimes used for reproductive intaglio printmaking. It is a photo-mechanical process whereby a copper plate is grained and then coated with a light-sensitive gelatin tissue which had been exposed to a film positive, and then etched, resulting in a high quality intaglio plate that can reproduce detailed continuous tones of a photograph.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Platinum print</span>

Platinum prints, also called platinotypes, are photographic prints made by a monochrome printing process involving platinum.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Potassium dichromate</span> Chemical compound

Potassium dichromate, K2Cr2O7, is a common inorganic chemical reagent, most commonly used as an oxidizing agent in various laboratory and industrial applications. As with all hexavalent chromium compounds, it is acutely and chronically harmful to health. It is a crystalline ionic solid with a very bright, red-orange color. The salt is popular in laboratories because it is not deliquescent, in contrast to the more industrially relevant salt sodium dichromate.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alternative process</span> Non-traditional or non-commercial photographic printing process

The term alternative process refers to any non-traditional or non-commercial photographic printing process. Currently, the standard analog photographic printing process for black-and-white photographs is the gelatin silver process. Standard digital processes include the pigment print, and digital laser exposures on traditional color photographic paper.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carbon print</span> Photographic printing process

A carbon print is a photographic print with an image consisting of pigmented gelatin, rather than of silver or other metallic particles suspended in a uniform layer of gelatin, as in typical black-and-white prints, or of chromogenic dyes, as in typical photographic color prints.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gum printing</span> Chemical method of making photographic prints

Gum printing is a way of making photographic reproductions without the use of silver halides. The process uses salts of dichromate in common with a number of other related processes such as sun printing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Collotype</span> Photographic printing process

Collotype is a gelatin-based photographic printing process invented by Alphonse Poitevin in 1855 to print images in a wide variety of tones without the need for halftone screens. The majority of collotypes were produced between the 1870s and 1920s. It was the first form of photolithography.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Woodburytype</span>

A Woodburytype is both a printing process and the print that it produces. In technical terms, the process is a photomechanical rather than a photographic one, because sensitivity to light plays no role in the actual printing. The process produces very high quality continuous tone images in monochrome, with surfaces that show a slight relief effect. Essentially, a Woodburytype is a mold produced copy of an original photographic negative with a tonal range similar to a Carbon print.

Photographic emulsion is a light-sensitive colloid used in film-based photography. Most commonly, in silver-gelatin photography, it consists of silver halide crystals dispersed in gelatin. The emulsion is usually coated onto a substrate of glass, films, paper, or fabric. The substrate is often flexible and known as a film base.

Dye transfer is a continuous-tone color photographic printing process. It was used to print Technicolor films, as well as to produce paper colour prints used in advertising, or large transparencies for display.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lumi (company)</span>

Lumi is a Los Angeles–based company founded by Jesse Genet and Stephan Ango that offers packaging and supply chain management software. The company got its start developing Inkodye, a photo-reactive vat dye that develops its color through exposure to UV or sunlight.

A heliographic copier or heliographic duplicator is an apparatus used in the world of reprography for making contact prints on paper from original drawings made with that purpose on tracing paper, parchment paper or any other transparent or translucent material using different procedures. In general terms some type of heliographic copier is used for making: Hectographic prints, Ferrogallic prints, Gel-lithographs or Silver halide prints. All of them, until a certain size, can be achieved using a contact printer with an appropriate lamp but for big engineering and architectural plans, the heliographic copiers used with the cyanotype and the diazotype technologies, are of the roller type, which makes them completely different from contact printers.

A contact copier is a device used to copy an image by illuminating a film negative with the image in direct contact with a photosensitive surface. The more common processes are negative, where clear areas in the original produce an opaque or hardened photosensitive surface, but positive processes are available. The light source is usually an actinic bulb internal or external to the device

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oil print process</span>

The oil print process is a photographic printmaking process that dates to the mid-19th century. Oil prints are made on paper on which a thick gelatin layer has been sensitized to light using dichromate salts. After the paper is exposed to light through a negative, the gelatin emulsion is treated in such a way that highly exposed areas take up an oil-based paint, forming the photographic image.

References

  1. 1 2 House, Suda (1981). Artistic Photographic Processes. Amphoto Books. pp. 84–88. ISBN   0-8174-3541-7.
  2. How to Dye and Paint Fabric with Light
  3. Epp, Diane (1995). The Chemistry of Vat Dyes. Terrific Science Press. pp. 5–8. ISBN   1-883822-05-X.
  4. Ray Laury, Jean (2010). Imagery on Fabric: A Complete Surface Design Handbook. C&T Publishing. pp. 122–123. ISBN   978-1-57120-034-1.

Further reading