Chart Throb for President!

I’ve had quite a few enquiries about the digital wet plates (captured from a computer screen) as I’ve started offering them via my website.

My main concern is one of contrast control. There are enough things going on to affect a wet plate as it is but the luminosity? of the screen has been throwing up some high contrast issues.

Borut had suggested altering exposure and dev times to change contrast results. This I’ve done but the results weren’t as good as I’d hoped for.

Then I thought I’ll give ChartThrob a go, I’ve used it with limited success with VDB/Cyanotypes, no reason for it not to work with wet plate…. is there?

Heres a link to the Photoshop script. Clicky here

So I shot a plate of the greyscale chart, scanned it in, run the script and applied the resultant curve to my digital image.

Heres the two plates.

At first it looked a little heavy handed and I wasn’t convinced. Jalo Porkkala suggested changing the Opacity of the curve…. Doh, why I didn’t I think of that. Sometimes blending traditional and digital can really flummox you as you tend to work in either one or the other and never the twain shall meet. So working in this way is quite a challenge.

Heres a section of a test plate for a client. Hope he doesn’t mind this little crop.
This is Chart Throb curve with 75% Opacity. As you can see it makes quite a difference. Standard chemistry and exposure of 30s at f4.

This week I’ll also be looking at contact printing some diginegs onto wet plate. Chartthrob for President!