Introduction to Carbon Printing

by Sandy King First, about the process. Carbon is one of the oldest and most beautiful of all photographic processes, having been perfected more or less in its present form as early as 1864 by Joseph W. Swan. That year Swan received patents for the manufacture of carbon tissue and for a modification of the transfer procedure. His technique was to coat a paper support on one side with a pigmented-gelatin solution. This coated paper base, which was known as carbon tissue, was then sensitized with dichromate and exposed by contact printing to a negative. It was transferred to a temporary support for development in warm water. When dry the resulting pigment image was transferred to its final paper support. Swan began marketing carbon materials in 1866, offering tissue in three colors, black, sepia and purple-brown. Carbon has a long tonal scale and excellent straight-line characteristics, qualities which allow the use of fully detailed negatives with long density ranges. Prints can be made in virtually any color or tone desired and the final image can be placed on any suitably prepared surface, be that photographic or watercolor paper, canvas, or even glass. When suitable pigments are used, the stability of carbon and carbro is limited only by the gelatin carrier and its final support, making it in an archival sense superior to all other photographic processes. Unlike all other processes, whose image characteristics are closely linked to the nature of the process, (i.e., the limited color range of salted paper and platinum, the surface qualities of silver gelatin, etc.), carbon has the capability of presenting images of virtually any color or tone on an almost unlimited variety of surfaces. It is worthy of note that during the entire period of its history when it co-existed commercially with processes such as albumen, platinum, and silver gelatin carbon was widely considered the aristocrat of all printing processes and commercial carbon prints were nearly always more expensive than those produced by other processes, about twice as costly as platinum and three to five times as much as silver. In spite of a revival of the alternative processes in the contemporary period carbon has attracted far fewer practitioners than most of the other processes, in large measure because it has been considered by many as very complicated and too difficult to work. The reality of the matter is that in spite of a rather steep learning curve the carbon process is a rather straight-forward operation that, once learned, offers a range of possibilities not available with any other printing system.

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