High Contrast
J. Seeley
Curtin & London, Inc. and Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1980, 256 pages
ISBN 0-930764-21-8
This is a detailed instruction manual for creating high contrast images in a traditional darkroom using special litho film, which produces no gray tones at all; only solid blacks and pure whites are recorded.
Today, many of these techniques are easily duplicated in digital image editing programs such as Photoshop. The basic technique of enlarging a continuous tone image onto a sheet of litho film to create a high contrast image, for example, is duplicated by applying the Threshold image adjustment to a digital image. And precisely combining multiple images using masks, tedious and painstaking work in a traditional darkroom, is ridiculously easy with digital editing.
Some of these techniques, however, are not so easy to recreate with a digital editor. In particular, the technique of enlarging a continuous tone image onto a sheet of litho film through a sheet of frosted glass, to create a beautiful stippled effect that creates the illusion of gray tones, is one that I've never seen duplicated with digital tools.
Despite being quite dated, this book remains a useful reference for anyone interested in working with high contrast images in a digital environment, with the caveat that some techniques are more difficult to duplicate than others. Litho film is still being made, however, so anyone wanting to work with high contrast images in a traditional darkroom will find this book to be invaluable.
The book also contains a large number of completed images by various photographers, which serve both as examples of specific techniques and as inspiration. It is difficult to recommend this book just as a collection of high contrast images, because so much of the book consists of instructions, set-up diagrams, lists and notes, etc. But the included images do provide a good overview of the world of high contrast imaging, and some of them are quite stunning.