[Alt-photo] Re: try one

[raven erebus]

I had actually forgotten I made a tutorial...

http://trollop.com/etching/etching.html
It has pictures of my images and the resulting etch.

I got the image close to what I wanted by thresholding in photoshop
and then played around with the various printer settings until it
printed nicely. I wanted to avoid that news paper look.

The laser printer doesn't exactly print a half tone (round dots). It
prints black or nothing. In otherwords it doesn't print gray scale. If
you don't threshold your image you'll see spotty-ness that isn't
exactly a halftone. The settings for the printer changes the handling
of that computation.  So I just printed with each setting and used the
results I liked best. I haven't seen banding. That sounds like it
might be specific to your printer?

My laser printer is vintage 1995. If I had to guess... that's probably
the key factor in making this work.

I just used regular laser printer paper which is quite glossy.  And
after a soak came right off with a little gentle rubbing.

With transparencies there's gum Arabic to deal with. I didn't try
it... maybe heat doesn't melt it? Also I figured plastic plus iron
would be bad news.

I set the iron to the very hottest setting which on my iron was cotton.

There's a product I was going to try called laser tran that is
supposed to work great for this but I haven't tried it.
http://lazertran.com/

After I transferred I did an aquatint using an airbrush. (I don't have
access to one so I haven't actually done this in a couple years)

best,
Raven


On Aug 14, 2013, at 11:15 AM, Matti Koskinen <mjkoskin at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 14.8.2013 10:29, raven erebus wrote:
>> I find that if you pre-heat the metal with the iron before you start the
>> laser printer transfer it works a lot better. I've only done this on solid
>> copper though. It worked remarkably well! I'm using an HP laserjet 5P to
>> print. I've heard that the newer laser printers don't work as well.
>>
>> Raven
> Thanks Raven,
>
> yes, preheating is a must, found it out while trying. On the pages doing PCB's with laser, it's clearly stated. I found the transparencies are the best, although they say using some type of inkjet papers are best, but they need to be soaked long time to get rid of the paper. Of course I tried with HP Advanced; not only it ruined the copper-board, but stuck on my iron as well. Didn't have a sheet of paper between iron and the HP :-(
>
> I'm using HP LJ 1018, with an aftermarket cartridge. Do you create a specific halftone image, or just let the driver do the halftoning? And have you got rid of the horizontal lines laser printers sometimes create? I'm just about to do two cyanos, papers are almost dry, and I've used laser printer almost every digineg, fast, no drying or oiling.
>
> This is just guesswork, but as the laser neg is actually a halftone, I think it doesn't matter (if the toner blocks UV well) if I overexpose?
>
> tnx
>
> -matti
>
>
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