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A tissue of lies by Tim Daly, from Ag26 |
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Making a carbon tissue print: By using a digital process to mimic these vintage results, there’s absolutely no reason to be purist about any part of the process whatsoever. All elements of the process and the final print can be manufactured in Photoshop, rather than sourced in the real world through hard-won research. Illogically, its important to plan the final steps of the process before the first and decide on the kind of paper you’d like to print out on. Sudek liked to print out onto cream or ivory cotton papers, some of which over time have acquired a creased and mottled appearance. There’s no point in searching out a top quality cotton inkjet paper which has the right kind of cream base coat, because it's easy enough to invent it yourself. What you will need to find however is a top quality inkjet paper which has a tactile finish and good weight for the task, such as Somerset Velvet Enhanced. Leave the paper to one side. Texture and ageing: With any inkjet print the last thing you want to do is to dye or stain your printing paper and toss another chemical variable into an already crowded ring. Instead, artificially age your paper by scanning in an already existing sheet of suitable material. Good things to look for are old sheets of good quality writing paper or if you want to introduce an element of ageing, some old and preferably damp books which have unprinted endpapers or blank pages to scan. Even if there’s more than a bit of unwanted matter on the page, such as text or illustrations, you can still remove it with Photoshop’s rubber Stamp tool after scanning. The texture and base colour are important, these examples were taken from a Victorian diary picked up at a car boot sale for their fabulous mottled effect and edges. After scanning, the central coloured block illustration was cloned away and an Add Noise filter was applied over the retouching to minimise the visual ‘smoothing’ effect created by the rubber stamp. Capture in RGB mode and to make a large original, set your scanner input resolution to 300dpi. If your paper is monochrome, like writing paper, change the mode to Greyscale and save and store as a TIFF file, as you can always change to RGB and colourise later on. A good idea is to build up a library of paper textures, colours and finishes and make high-resolution scans and store them on a CDR for future use. When you are ready to start, mix a desirable base colour using your Colour Balance command and use Levels to alter the paper contrast. Avoid making this colour and contrast too intense, as the background paper only needs to show the slightest tone and texture and not pull attention away from your main image. Next Page >> |
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• A 'Photoshop' Carbon print © Tim Daly Page 2 of 5 |
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