So, following on from my post about digital silver gelatin processing, it seems that it is readily available and I’m probably the last person find out about it.

OK, not so readily available, as it seems limited to certain Ilford suppliers (or Ilford themselves). Nonetheless, on a trip to London, it allowed to try this method out and I’m impressed. I haven’t done a side-by-side comparison yet, but my images certainly did come out with very nice prints. Good dynamic range and detail.

So far I’ve only tried the glossy paper and am awaiting the ‘pearl’ versions. Of course, it is impossible to show how this looks online – I could scan different versions, from different suppliers and technologies, but the usefulness of this would be limited. And, of course, it’s hard to know how much of the quality is due to one supplier being more skilled or taking more care over their print output, versus the technology itself.

But what I particularly like is that this is a dedicated black and white approach from Ilford – they actually prefer that you supply greyscale images, as opposed to RGB (so many photo bureaus that I’ve used in the past have returned tinted prints from RGB files, despite me being careful about my conversions and colour profiles).