Digital Negatives

I've long been a fan of traditionally printed photos but don't always have a film camera with me.  It seemed reasonable that you could produce negatives from digital photos.  A quick Google search confirmed that people are really doing this, so I thought I'd have a go.

I found a useful howto here which is based around using GIMP, but with a focus around making cyanotype prints rather than silver prints.  But it gave me a starting point.

As for the picture Steve Ellerton took a brilliant picture of the interior of Bath Abbey and with his permission I used this as a basis.

So the first step was to convert to negative and print onto acetate:

Which can then be contact printed - in this case onto Ilford Multigrade IV paper.  I used the enlarger as a controlled source of light - exposure of about 3s @ f5.6:

The paper is then developed as normal with the following result:

I found the tonal range here to be rather lacking and the contrast quite flat.  One piece of advice I gleaned from the cyanotype howto was using a red-toned negative rather than black.  I thought I'd give it a go, reasoning that variable contrast papers are insensitive to red light and so the red light would expose the paper less than the dim white light that is passed by the black negative.  As was recommended, I tried hue 15, saturation 100 and lightness 30:

Producing a much better print:

final tweak was to print at a higher contrast:

The one big problem I found it the surface on the inkjettable acetate caused a pattern to print through onto the final image.  I may have to look into to different acetates to see if they have a less profound surface effect.  If anyone has tried this and has any suggestions, I'm all ears!