Digital Lith Prints

As I’ve previously mentioned I use B&W Styler Pro photoshop plug-in to convert my photographs from color to black and white. One of the many interesting filters that come with B&W Styler Pro is the lith film filter. I must admit my knowledge about lith film and prints was shamefully scarce until I came across some artists who used this kind of technique and fell in love with it.

But what exactly is a lith print?

Here is a decription from Dr. Tim Rudman’s book The Master Photographer’s Lith Printing Course which is a must for all interested in lith printing:

Lith printing has nothing to do with lith negatives. It uses a technique of heavily over-exposing the negative onto a suitable paper and only partially developing it in highly diluted lith developer. This produces very warm coloured mid and light tones of great delicacy between white and black. It prints soft in the highlights and hard in the shadows and is extremely flexible allowing very personal interpretations.

Here is another more in-depth article on lith printing you may find interesting. And there’s also a dedicated site.

In the digital era we can simulate such effect and get beautiful results as well, although purists may have something to argue about it. Anyway, if you want to try to produce your own lith images there’s an action on line you may start to experiment with. It can be found here.

The discovery of this technique brought new juices to my inspiration. I had a series of shots I had took at a local city park where they have a little pond with goldfish. These images have been stored unprocessed in my local hard disk until after I started playing around with the lith filter in B&W Styler Pro. Suddenly I could envision what the whole series should look like. I also took advantage of the split tone filter to achieve the desired effect. You can see a few images in the slideshow. Of course these are low res images. I’ll post an article as soon as I upload the whole project to my official website portfolios.