The Making of a Dye-Transfer

DREW WILEY said:

Please re-read my own words. "And as for ONLY Kodak allegedly teaching" such and such. Or I could have phrased it, "As you allege that only Kodak" did so. The point being, there were considerably more opportunities for training or coaching than what Kodak themselves provided.

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I apologize for misreading your sentence.

Yes, there were a number of other schools that taught DT. In the SF Bay Area for example, there was SF City College, SF Art Institute, and some state colleges. I have the course book from SF City College printed in 1990. As an introductory course there wasn't any advanced techniques. I think they used a wash-off relief type method, as it was easier to learn than unstable fast acting tanning developers.

I have now reformatted the pdf file to under 2 MB with the 1985 Frog Prince & Company inc. procedure for making separation negatives on Super XX pan. And yes, I do have permission to distribute this here. I think it may be better to post on another separate thread as separation negative making is a broad enough area beside DT, and it can encourage others to share problems with it for other processes as well. Separation negatives can be used for printing transparencies on RA-4 materials, color pigment processes, archiving images, and more.

There are a number of other unpublished techniques crucial to making good commercial DT's. Color correction and highlight control was corrected at the matrix printing stage using endpoints supplied from Kodak. Processing matrix film often required additives to the tanning developer not disclosed in any publications. Making prints required calibration of the dyes with knowledge that was essentially proprietary. It is an absolute shame that Eastman Kodak Company kept this information from everyone else except the lab customers.

IB Photochemistry said:

I think it may be better to post on another separate thread as separation negative making is a broad enough area beside DT, and it can encourage others to share problems with it for other processes as well.

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Please, go ahead! I think the present subforum (Color etc.) would be the most appropriate. Looking forward to seeing your post.

As someone who had involvement with the team that brought the T-max films to you, I can state clearly that the film's intended markets were the high-end photojournalists of the day that shot black and white and the "prosumers" - the "high end" consumers that made photographic works for artistic uses, competitions, etc. As the two films featured T-grain technology, the construction of the films would utilized more common components used in other products (gelatins, hardeners) and utilize less silver / sq. meter, meaning manufacturing advantages for the company, too. In all the meetings I was in, I never heard any discussion on the fillms being used for separation work as was done with the IB technology films, nor were the T-max films mentioned or used when Kodak rebuilt IB matrix films for Technicolor when they went back into the business for a short spell sometime around 1995-2000.