Posterizations - How I Made Them

I was a Professional Photographer from around 1968 to 1975. This is the quick&dirty discussion of How I Made Them in a darkroom over twenty years ago. Maybe I'll do another page one day on how I do it digitally today.

This is a scanned image of a dye transfer print made in 1974. It is the result of ten hours of work in the darkroom, although only about two hours was actually spent in the dark. The important thing to note is that there are eight colors present … progressing from the shadows to the highlights, they are Black, Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue, Magenta, and White.

This is the original image … a black & white 35mm negative transferred to a Kodak® PhotoCD at 2,048x3072x16.8M colors. <whew!> The model's name was Sandy, and we did this in a public park in Genesee Valley (Rochester, NY) before the rush hour traffic made public nudity a Risky Business. This early morning shoot, a bare half-hour after sunrise, explains the long shadows.

Don't be alarmed, but the eight colors are derived from only three colors of dye … Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow. That means we only need three "images" to be printed.

The dye transfer process uses sheets of film called matrices that have a layer of gelatin whose thickness is proportional to its exposure to light. Developing matrices includes a tanning step, and the unexposed emulsion is washed off. Making the matrices is the middle step … it takes about two hours, but there's another four hours work required to reach that point.

Deriving these matrices from the original continuous-tone (analog) image of Sandy required a half dozen exposure/development cycles, mostly performed in the dark. I'll tell you all about that later, because we're working backwards from the finished product … it's easier to understand it that way, and it was created using a deconstructionist methodology, so that's the way I teach it.

Once the three matrices are made, there are six possible combinations of dying them in the three colors. That's why the image in the upper left corner is called the "A" variation. Clockwise from the upper right corner are matrix 1 (C), matrix 2 (M), and matrix 3 (Y)

Here's what you get if you print the three combinations of pairs of colors. This demonstrates these fundamental color relationships:

• Magenta + Yellow makes Red
• Cyan + Yellow makes Green
• Cyan + Magenta makes Blue
• Cyan + Magenta + Yellow makes Black

Variation A - CMY

Variation B - MYC

Variation C - YCM

Variation D - YMC

Variation E - CMY

Variation F - CYM

Yellow Brick Road: The path to the Mother of all Virtual Realities.

• Dennette's Homeboy Page: This is where it begins
  • Dream Walk: The Electronic Journal of DAHarrod
    • Dennette's Photography Career: Pictures of ecdysiasts
      • Gallery of Posterizations: The parent of this child.
        • Posterizations - How I Did Them: sandy.htm: YOU ARE HERE.

Last update: 2000-02-13 by <Dennette@WiZ-WORX.com>
<Who is this Dennette person?>