Arthur said:
I find in general the Kodak kiosk machines (not the dye sub ones, the
one hour variety) are pretty well designed, allowing for cropping, clean
up adjustment red-eye fixes, etc, and they print on a good quality
"archival" photo (silver halide wet process) print paper.
Arthur; I don't think that anything has changed in photo printing since
it was all analog. There's no silver when it's over. Permanence is
pretty iffy.
All of our classic color print systems begin with silver halide
crystals. In color, these are part of dye couplers. The remainder of the
dyes are provided by the chemistry. All of the silver is extracted from
the paper into the developer solution, to be captured and sold. The
color image is made completely of dyes, and is subject to fading. During
the 1970s, color chemistry was changed to improve the impact of photo
processing upon the environment. The resulting negatives and prints have
been much more prone toward fading than the old materials were.
Most modern silver-based black-and-white film and paper is designed to
be processed in color chemistry. Thus, most modern black-and-white film
and prints are subject to fading because they're exclusively dye when
the process has finished. This was a godsend to the mass-market
photofinishing industry because b/w negs and pics were simply run
through the equipment the same as color materials. Genuine silver-based
materials are used by some photographers, and their b/w negatives and
prints are, indeed, archival. The reason for this permanence is that
this is the only example in our time in which the image is frozen in
pure silver.
No color process has ever retained any silver in the final image, with
the exception of the Technicolor archival motion picture process, which
stores the color picture as three separate b/w color films, to be
re-combined later for release prints. Go watch a classic Walt Disney
cartoon to see its benefit.
Certain color processes are superior. The classic Kodachrome reversal
process is marvelous because it consists of three separate silver layers
that don't use dye couplers. It's an old, unique color process that's
very different from the others. Highly specialized processing is
employed, and there were never very many labs that could do it. The
process allows different dyes with emphasis on color and durability
instead of chemical compatibility back to the dye couplers.
Of course, there have been other color processes that have offered
outstanding properties -- these have been expensive and limited to
professionals. I attended a music conservatory that was founded by one
of the inventors of the Kodachrome process. Its inventors were the
teen-aged sons of two New York music families, and The Mannes College of
Music was underwritten by a certain amount of Kodak money. Ironically,
despite the great importance of the Kodachrome invention in this family,
the portrait of musical patriarch Leopold Mannes that hung in the lobby
was a dye transfer print!
Most of my photographic knowledge came from the 70s and earlier, so
there have been newer developments, but I'm sure that the basic
processes are all the same. Ironically, it may be that Epson Dura-Bright
inks have better lasting power than chemistry-based prints from Costco,
which are still constructed of dyes. Pigments may out-do them. How about
that?
