Long live lith printing
Adapted from "Photoshop CS2: Essential Skills" by Mark Galer and Philip Andrews
There is no doubt that a well-crafted lith print is, to borrow an oft used phrase from my father-in-law, ‘a thing of beauty (and therefore) a joy forever’. The trick, for the experienced and occasional darkroom users alike, is the production of such a print. Even with frequent reference to publications penned by lith guru Tim Rudman, I have always had difficulty getting consistency with the production of my prints. Despite this frustration my love affair with the process still continues. There is something quite magical about the quality of images created using this technique and it is this magic that I hanker after. They are distinctly textured and richly colored and their origins are unmistakable.
The process, full of quirky variables like age and strength of developer and the amount of overexposure received by the paper, is unpredictable and almost always unrepeatable. In this regard at least, most printers, myself included, found the whole lith printing process both fascinating and infuriating. This said, it’s almost a decade since lith printing started to become more commonplace and there is no sign of people’s interest declining.
‘Long live lith!’ I hear you say, ‘but I shoot digital’. Well, good news; the digital worker with basic skills, a copy of Adobe® Photoshop® CS2 and a reasonable color printer can reproduce the characteristics of lith printing without the smelly hands, or the dank darkroom.
A digitally produced lith print can exhibit similar color and grain characteristics to those typically found in chemically produced originals. (Image courtesy of www.ablestock.com.)
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Choose an image. If you ask most photographers what makes a lith print special the majority will tell you it’s the amazing grain and the rich colors. Most prints have strong, distinctive and quite atmospheric grain that is a direct result of the way in which the image is processed. This is coupled with colors that are seldom seen in a black and white print. They range from a deep chocolate, through warm browns, to oranges and sometimes even pink tones. If our digital version is to seem convincing then the final print will need to contain all of these elements. Whether you source your image from a camera or a scanner, make sure that the subject matter is conducive to making a lith type print. The composition should be strong and the image should contain a full range of tones especially in the highlights and shadows. Delicate details may be lost during the manipulation process, so select an image that still works when the fine details are obscured by coarse grain. Good contrast will also help make a more striking print. If you’d like to practice using the image from this tutorial, you can find it on the book’s companion website at www.photoshopessentialskills.com.
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Now that you have selected a picture with a strong composition, let’s add some color. Photoshop provides a couple of options for adding the distinctive lith colors. The simplest approach uses the Hue/Saturation control as a way of changing a full color picture into a tinted monochrome, but keep in mind that duotone techniques can also be used for this purpose. If your original is in grayscale mode the first step is to change the file to a mode that is capable of displaying color. For our purposes a switch to RGB color will suffice.
Choose Image > Mode > RGB Color to switch to RGB color.
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Now open the Hue/Saturation feature (Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation). With the Colorize box ticked you can select the color of the tint via the Hue slider. Moving the slider along this scale will gradually change the overall color of the picture while retaining the white and black parts of the picture.
Use the Hue slider to adjust the color of the image.
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Now adjust the strength or vividness of the color using the Saturation slider. Low values will produce subtle coloring whereas higher settings create more dramatic results. Selecting a value of 0% produces a picture devoid of any color just containing black, white and gray.
Adjust the saturation using the slider.
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To simulate the texture of the lith print, filter the image using either the Grain (Filter > Texture > Grain) or Noise (Filter > Noise > Add Noise) filter. Most of these types of filters have slider controls that adjust the size of the grain, its strength, and how it is applied to various parts of the image. The settings you use will depend on the resolution of your picture as well as the amount of detail it contains. The stronger the filter effects the more details will be obscured by the resultant texture. Be sure to preview the filter settings with the image magnification set at 100% so that you can more accurately predict the results. Here I have the used the ‘Noise’ filter with both the Gaussian and Monochrome options set.
Select the Gaussian and Monochrome options in the Noise filter.
