Photo History Assignment: Calotype
Digital Calotype
Steve Weinrebe
Paper negatives, called calotypes, were extremely popular in the mid-nineteenth century, especially in
Europe. Invented by William Henry Fox Talbot, this photographic process is frequently showcased in
museum exhibitions, both as prints from the paper negatives and the negatives themselves.
Let's use a contemporary
photograph to re-create, and
celebrate, the historic look of a
calotype, both positive and
negative, using considerably fewer
chemicals (zero unless you count
ink) than those early
photographers needed.
While often used for landscapes and group portraits, calotypes were well suited to travel images because
the paper negatives could be sensitized ahead of time, and developed well after the exposure. I'll use a
photograph of the palace at Fontainebleau for this tutorial, and you can follow along with any landscape,
portrait, or architectural shot of your own.
Choose a photo, and convert to a tinted Blackand-White
Step 1:
Choose a landscape or architectural photograph to
work with. A portrait, especially shot outdoors, could
also work well. To start I'll convert this image, shot
after a late afternoon storm, into a tinted black-andwhite image using a Black-and-White adjustment
layer.
Let's start the project with a non-destructive
workflow, and first convert the image to a Smart
Object by right-mouse-clicking (control-click, Mac)
to the right side of the Background layer, and choosing "Convert to Smart Object" from the contextual popup menu.
Now that we have our original image safely contained within the Smart Object, let's choose a Black-andWhite adjustment layer from the Layers palette's Adjustment Layers drop-down menu (Click on the halfmoon icon at the bottom of the Layers palette).
In the Black-and-White adjustment's dialog
box we can simply drag in the image (as
with Lightroom) to adjust the influence of
each color on the black-and-white image. In
this image, by dragging to the right in the
yellow reflections on the water, I can lighten
the yellows in the image and boost the
contrast in the reflections.
Then let's tint the image by checking Tint at
the bottom of the Black-and-White dialog
box, leaving the default settings, and click
OK to apply the adjustment layer.
Give the image a vintage fade
Step 2:
150 year old images tend to have faded a bit, so
let's reproduce an overall fade. Add a
Hue/Saturation adjustment layer from the Layers
palette's Adjustment Layer's menu, and bump up
the Lightness to 15.
(NOTE: I generally wouldn't use Lightness in
Hue/Saturation when optimizing a photograph
because Lightness simply has the effect of adding
white or black to the image. If you want
to see this in practice, do this step to
any photograph. Then add a Solid Color
adjustment layer, in white, at 15%
opacity. Toggle back and forth between
the Hue/Saturation layer with Lightness
of +15, and the Solid Color layer with
15% white; you won't see any
difference.)
Apply ye olde lens blur
We're going to add another fade, but
before we do let's see the effect that a
lens of the period, with a spherical aberration causing corner softness, would have on this photograph. The
Lens Blur filter itself is not available as a Smart Filter (actually it is by means of a script that comes with
Photoshop, but that's not necessary for our purposes here). The photographers that created calotypes in
the mid-nineteenth century did not have shutters in their lenses, they would take the lens cap off and then
place it back on the lens to make the exposure. So we'll use the simplest shape of all to make our blur, the
shape of a lens without a shutter: a circle.
Step 3:
Make a circular marquee, with the Elliptical Marquee tool, over most of the image, except for the corner
areas. TIP: Hold down the Shift key to constrain the Elliptical marquee to a perfect circle; hold down the
Spacebar to move the marquee around the canvas while creating the marquee shape (it's a little like driving
a standard shift car, you'll get used to it).
Click the Refine Edge button in the Options bar and add
a sizable feather, 150 pixels for this high-res image.
Click OK in Refine Edge to apply the feather, and then
(IMPORTANT) choose Inverse from the Select menu
(Select > Inverse), so that only the corners are selected, not the center.
Make sure the Smart Object layer is
the selected, highlighted, layer in
the Layers palette, and choose
Shape Blur in the Filters menu
(Filters > Blur > Shape Blur).
First choose the simple circle shape for the Shape Blur. The circle is a
little more than half-way down the list of shapes, as pictured below.
Then drag the Radius setting all the way to the left, and click OK.
The resulting blur is still a little
too strong (assuming we are
simulating a reasonable quality
lens of the day). Let's take
advantage of the Smart Filter's
blending options dialog to
reduce the opacity of the filter.
Double click on the Smart
Filter's blending options icon to
the right of the Blur Filter in the
Layer's palette, to open the
Blending Options dialog.
In the Blending Options
dialog enter 50 into the
Opacity field, or drag the
slider down to 50, and
click OK. This will reduce
the opacity, and thus the
intensity, of the filter by
half. We can always go
back into the Blending Options to change the opacity of the filter
again if we choose; such is the wonderful nature of the Smart
Filter.
The edges fade first
A fact of life for old prints is that edges fade. Let's apply a fade to the edges of this image by creating a
rectangular selection, inversing it as we did above with the elliptical marquee, and adding another
Hue/Saturation adjustment layer.
Step 4:
Choose the Rectangular Marquee tool and drag a
rectangular marquee just shy of the edges of the
image canvas. (Remember, you can hold down the
Space bar to move the marquee around while you
are creating it.)
Now feather the rectangular marquee, using Refine
Edge as we did above; I use an feather amount of
180 for this image.
Then Inverse the feathered rectangular
selection, and choose Hue/Saturation from the
Layers palette's Adjustment Layers menu, to
apply Lightness to the edges only. I boosted the
Lightness up to +30, by entering 30 into the
Lightness text field.
The finished image is below, but you
could distress your image in a variety
of ways, depending on how well
preserved you want the image to look.
The negative comes first
The photographers that used
calotypes as their medium, William
Henry Fox Talbot, David Octavius
Hill, John Muir Wood, and others,
would use a high quality writing
paper, coated with light sensitive
emulsion, to make a negative; then
they would make positive prints
from that paper negative.
Unfortunately many of the prints
from early (mid-nineteenth
century) negatives no longer exist,
and there are many historically
significant paper negatives that
museums still want to display. I
have seen powerful images on
paper negatives in exhibitions, usually back-lit for display; they are beautiful and evocative, the original
point of capture from a distant time. In Photoshop it is an easy matter to simulate the paper negative, using
one of the simplest Photoshop adjustments, Invert.
Step 5:
The Layers palette currently looks like the image below, with the
two Hue/Saturation layers, the Black-and-White layer, and the
Lens Blur filter, which applied as a Smart Filter to the Smart Object
image layer.
Make certain you have the topmost layer selected in the Layers
palette before choosing the new adjustment layer, so that the
adjustment layer will appear at the very top. From the Adjustment
Layers menu at the bottom of the Layers palette, choose Invert.
TIP: Before you do this step, double click on the Black-and-White
layer and unchecked Tint. This will give a true grayscale negative,
as opposed to one with an inverted tint.
The Invert Adjustment layer will create a negative of the image, seen below.
Translucent print
The way that museums exhibit calotypes makes the paper negative become an aesthetic unto itself. Now we
can make our own paper negative and display it with some backlight. Here is what I did with this negative
image.
Step 6:
With the image open in Photoshop, experiment printing the image on a few different quality, printer
friendly, "writing" papers. My favorite is on an off-white bond paper. I placed the print in a glass floater
frame (the print sandwiched between two pieces of glass) against my window. Check back in 150 years to
see if it faded.
http://www.modestudio.us/photoshop_tutorials/Digital_Calotype/