Electric coating with metal

[Mustafa Umut Sarac]

I thinked that it would be cheaper to electrochemically coating silver print , laser print or inkjet print with palladium , platin , gold or whatever.

Is it tried before ?

I am not expert but may be two different dots or pigments could be trigger a third dot also ?

What do you think ?

Thank you ,

Mustafa Umut Sarac

Istanbul

[polyglot]

Do you mean electroplating metallic Pt/Pd/Au/etc onto the metallic silver in a fixed silver print? My question is how do you ensure that current is available from all of the metallic silver but prevent plating onto the blank (no silver) emulsion?

[Ray Rogers]

a.
Cheaper than what?

b.
Electrocoating a non-conductive paper base might be challenging...

On a conductive base, for certain kinds of fabrication, its been done before.

For most photogrphers, toning is going to be much much easier.
---
Mustafa, are you named after an Indian?

[Ray Rogers]

Polyglot, I suspect he was daydreaming(?) about toning... otherwise you are correct... his post doesn't make any sense... maybe he has gone 100% digital and was thinking of direct imaging by computer controlled electroplating or forming an electroplated surface over an image resist?

Posts by Istanbul's Mustafa Umut Sarac are always a curiosity.

[Mustafa Umut Sarac]

Polyglot ,

I thought palladium goes whereever the silver is. No silver , it is white and no need a electroplating .

Ray ,

Image resist would be a silver image. Platino Palladium is expensive. And I asked the people years ago and they said only platinum or palladium stays in the fibers after the process.
You have to use more platin than the image surface to stick the metal in the papers fibers.
So electroplating can be very thin , waste less metal and easy.
I asked people about toning and they said it is not good , they said if it was good enough , everybody uses it.
Thats all I knew.
I am an Rollei 35 S user and no interest to digital machines but I thought with little bit of change , bw digital prints could be changed.

Mustafa Umut Sarac

Istanbul

[Ray Rogers]

Sounds like they were thinking of siderotype processes based on the light sensitivity of iron complexes...
all of those suffer from expensive reagents being absorbed into non-mage areas of the paper... but electroplating presupposes you have an image...

There might be a way to use electroplating but you will need an image to start with.

[people] said:
platinum or palladium stays in the fibers after the process.
You have to use more platin than the image surface to stick the metal in the papers fibers.

So electroplating can be very thin , waste less metal and easy.
I asked people about toning and they said it is not good , they said if it was good enough , everybody uses it.
Thats all I knew.

[Mustafa Umut Sarac]

May be someone can photocopy his her 6x17 cms positive from pinhole anamorphic camera to bigger one and than electroplate. I think photocopy toner active to electric.

Yes , I need a print to electroplate and many ways to get it.

Or someone can be very poor for enlargers , papers , chemicals and take color photographs , go to a lab , desaturate at the printer monitor and get a big bw print. This is all analog. And than electroplate at a tray with walkman dc adapter . This is all I can think to get cheapest your own platin print.
I dont know there is enough silver at a color paper ?

Umut

[polyglot]

The paper/emulsion would probably be conductive since it's soaked in the electroplating solution... but since you have to do that, you're going to have the same problem of leaving expensive salts behind in the paper. And you're probably going to plate a lot more expensive metal onto the electrode on the back of the paper than the image itself.

[polyglot]

If you're desaturating a digital image while printing at a lab, you're talking about RA-4, which contains only dyes once complete, not silver. That's definitely not going to work.

[Mustafa Umut Sarac]

Thank you Polyglot for color paper information. May be someone could tape the back of the paper and protect it from the coating. And the electrode would be on the print side. The recieving electrode could be coated with platin but it is not lost.