A couple of years ago, I saw a photographer’s portfolio of incredible prints. Naturally, I can’t remember his name. What was so interesting about the work was that the prints were platinum prints that had color added to them by means of putting the platinum prints through a large format digital printer. I can’t remember how he dealt with the registration issues. What struck me was first the subjects he chose (a lot of grays, blacks), and how intense the printing process must have been. I had already closed my wet process darkroom when I saw these images. But, it immediately occurred to me that tonal separations would be easy to do digitally. So, I started experimenting with images. The image below was from a color negative. After scanning and imaging the file, I duplicated it in photoshop. One version I converted to grayscale and made the necessary exposure adjustments, and then converted it back into RGB. With the other version, still in RGB I selected several of the predominating colors, one at a time, adjusting the saturation and hue and then copying and pasting them as layers into the B&W version. Registering each layer was simple. Once I had all the layers pasted in and registered, I adjusted each layer’s opacity.
