£12.00
67 in stock
5″x4″ large format black & white negatives from your digital photos
Priced per negative. New 2024 – there is now a minimum order of 2 negatives per order.
There is no cropping service for 5×4 negs – we expect files to be supplied as you want them output.
67 in stock
Output at 8K resolution (8192 x 6372 pixels) these gorgeous 5″x4″ large format black & white negatives from your digital photos are exposed on Ilford Delta 100 film and processed in Hydrofen developer for fine grain and easily printable negatives. For those who shoot digital but love making wet process silver halide photographic prints in the darkroom.
Because of the niche nature of monochrome work negatives are output on demand, not ganged with other customer’s work.
Please note that to make the most of large negatives your original digital file should be of high quality: high resolution scans, images from high end digital cameras and so on. It is your pixel count that matters so you need to at or very near our output resolution of 8192 x 6372 pixels. Negatives will reflect the lowest common denominator so please don’t up-size smaller files in Photoshop, you won’t get the sharpest possible negatives this way, even though you magically have the correct number of pixels!
Of course, this only matters if you are using negatives in the enlarger. If you are contact printing or have some other fine art application then lower resolution images are fine. You may be supplying museum or library archive material for which there is nothing better available in which case there is no choice, the images are what they are.
Your image will not be cropped and if not of the exact pixel size they will be fitted to either 8192px wide or 6372px high (vice verse for portrait images), the excess is left as clear film. So you are quite welcome to send in long thin panoramic images, for instance. We don’t offer a cropping option as we expect users of this service to be users of Photoshop.
Detailed instructions on creating perfect images for b&w negatives can be found here: Making B&W negatives.
Is a 5″x4″ negative better than a 6x7cm negative?
This isn’t quite as easy to answer as it might seem. In terms of side by side sharpness, then the smaller 6x7cm negative is sharper – the 8192 pixels are closer together. But think in terms of shooting with a camera and the reasons for choosing a 5″x4″ camera over a medium format camera – a 5″x4″ negative requires less enlargement for a given size print, the exposure time will be shorter and the film grain will be less visible.
But, all things considered, the smaller 6x7cm negative will print just as well as, and maybe better than, a 5″x4″ negative, not least because Ilford PanF Plus grain is incredibly fine.
