Are you bored? Stuck at home? Make a lumenprint. It’s easy and fun…
All you need is a clipping frame, some binder clips, a photo paper (the more expired the more fun) and of course some sunshine.
Go to a dark room (could be your darkroom), and switch on some red light. You can use red led bulb or red bike lamp. Put the paper to the back of the frame and make your composition on this. You can use anything from a fresh plant (to make a photogram) to a negative (for contact print). Now, put the glass on the top of everything and fix it with the binder clips.
The only thing you need to do now, is, take it to the sunlight and forget it. In a scorching summer day half an hour could be enough, but in a regular spring or autumn day you need one-two hours to get all the things done.
If you think everything is done (and it is done exactly when you think it’s done), you have nothing to do but, remove the photo paper from the frame and scan it. After scanning put it into a dark bag (something like the one contains the unexposed papers). From this point this is a digital image, because the every scan and also every minute that the print spends in a bright place, degrades it’s quality.
OK, let’s edit it, to pop! I’m going to show you a very simple method for this, but you can use every digital retouching method you used to.
Open the lumenprint in GIMP by pressing CTRL +O. Choose Colors > Hue-Chroma… and set the sliders. It is unlikely that you need exactly these setting, so make some experiments: move the Chroma slider to that position that you like the most, and tune the image with the other two sliders.
Making a lumenprint is not an exact science, it is fun! Therefore I give you some tips, that you might try out to get interesting results. The interesting thing in lumentprint, that the black and white photo paper gets color tint because of the large amount of light and by chemical processes, therefore you can experiment with the paper itself, fresh plants that release juice, or squirt or coat the paper with some liquid, like water, salted water, oil, orange juice or anything you can grab in your kitchen. Have fun!
