May 2025 – Koraks tinkers

Goldberg Carbon – Harnessing inkjet-based halftone for carbon transfer

Last summer, I wrote a sort of sit-rep on where we stand with hybrid alt. process printing (i.e. alt. process prints like carbon transfer from digital images) and what the in my view promising ways forward might be. There’s one thing I had in mind to test for some time, and yesterday, I finally bit the bullet and tried it on for size. It’s an attempt to overcome some problems with inkjet halftone negatives by means of an internegative stage.

DAS is DAS? Comparing different batches of DAS for carbon transfer

This is a brief report on a quick test I did comparing three different batches of DAS sensitizer for carbon transfer printing. Plain and simple – have a look at the outcome.

Scanned to mush – The effect of CT carry-on luggage on color film

This is the result of an unintended experiment I conducted recently. A single roll of film I forgot in a bag went through a CT carry-on luggage scanner on the airport. It’s a nice opportunity to see what this single scan does to (in this case) Kodak Vision3 50D film. It’s worse than I had imagined!

Brownies get the blues – Combining Van Dyke brown and cyanotype

This sort of emerged as I was playing with, and I’m actually quite happy with what I ended up with – unintentionally. It’s a combination of Van Dyke brown prints and cyanotypes that allows for the image tone to be set at virtually any point on the ocher-cyan axis. It’s also quite easy, reasonably quick, affordable and can be done with a high degree of consistency.

A decades’ worth of brownies – Making some Van Dyke brown prints

So apparently 2025 is my 10-year anniversary for making Van Dyke brown prints. To celebrate, I made some more. Seriously though – I was making some prints and thought to snap some pics of the process while I was working. Just now as I started writing, I realized I made my first Van Dyke in 2015.

Adding it up – A new multi-channel UV integrator

I have been using a (DIY) integrator for a while to get consistent exposures on my alt process prints. Recently, I grew unhappy with the buggy nature of the device I had built, so I made a new version using stuff from the parts box.

Silicon or gelatin – Look at the pictures

When it comes to my prints, I’m never really happy. There’s friction, always. As a result, I’m always searching, and this search takes me all over the place. In this case, I find myself on that decades-old divide of film or digital. No ‘versus’ debate for me – I hope we’re all past that point. But the question is still with me: how do the different processes translate into the final print?