Pre-digital Photography - Postcards and "Laser prints": Distinctive Look?

Cafe Society
1

Hi folks -

Background: I know just enough about photography & photo printing to butcher the terminology & confuse myself. Back in the day I had a nice 35mm SLR, a few so-so lenses & shot rolls and rolls of mediocre slides with indifferent shot composition, color, lighting, focus, etc. Never got into film processing or printing myself; the local photo shop did that.

Here’s some questions from the pre-internet era that are hard to Google, especially when you = me don’t know the terms.

Part 1:
Set the Wayback Machine to the e.g. 1960-70s. Long before digital cameras, Photoshop, etc.

Your standard picture postcard was a glossy thing that resembled an ordinary photographic print. But the image was enhanced somehow. To be sure, the pic was shot by a pro with good gear on a nice day with good light, a clear sky, etc. But the sky was bluer, the clouds crisper and whiter, the foliage greener and sharper than reality. It’s more than just underexposing then overdeveloping to push color saturation up a notch; heck even I did that.

Or so I think. It was like they got infinite depth of field, a perfectly transparent atmosphere, fully saturated colors; everything including the kitchen sink. They looked highly artificial, the most perfect of perfect days, the most perfect of perfect subjects, but that was the accepted “vernacular” of picture postcards so that was OK.

How did they do that?? IOW … How were they shot? How were they developed? How were they printed? All to achieve these effects?

Part 2:
Some time in the late 70s, maybe early 80s, large format (12x18 & up) printed color art photographs began to be a big thing, including some pros or semi-pros who sold their work at local and regional art fairs. The images I’m about to describe also got printed as posters sold in poster stores.

About that time a technique called something like a “laser photo” or “laser image” or maybe even “laser print” came into being. The word “laser” was definitely in it. AFAIK, this was not something printed on what we now call a color laser printer; that machine was still years in the future.

The distinguishing characteristics of these prints was that if contemporary postcards turned saturation and sharpness & depth of field up to 11 or 12, these things were turned up to 15 or 20.

How did they do that?? IOW … How were they shot? How were they developed? How were they printed? All to achieve these effects? Last of all, what role did “laser” play in these processes besides filling a square in the Marketing Dept’s buzzword bingo?

Thanks in advance!

2

Never heard about Part 2…

But with regards to those amazing photo postcards, I always thought that they used a combination of a bag full of quality gear and appropriate film for the effect, followed by specific decisions in the offset printing stage.

For gear, they would use a relatively wide angle lens, on a tripod with a stopped down aperture, to get lots of stuff in view and have it all in sharp focus. There would probably be a polarizer on it.
Then they could use films like Kodachrome, Velvia, or Ektar to get punchy colors. You don’t use the same film for landscapes that you use for portraiture: the color balance is all different.

From that point, I imagine the lab must do some tweaking, but the real impact will be during the printing process. They will convert it all to CMYK and use an offset printing press to create those postcards, so there is lots of wiggle room for changing the appearance as things are manipulated at the print stage.

3

The technical word for tweaking saturation is Bozing. It was coined by me and my brother, derived from Bozo the clown. “Boze it up!” or “Boze it down!”.

It’s important to know the correct terminology.

4

From a search of Australian newspapers the only relevant use of ‘laser’ in the 1970s came with wire news service photographs which were credited as ‘AP - laser photo’, so scanning images for transmission.

An advert appears in 1989 for ‘laser photo prints’. These were just normal images rather than anything bespoke on behalf of a customer. It sounded like a standard offering and nothing special in cheap frames. We [the nation] got our first colour laser printers in 1987.

5

I worked in a photo lab from 86 to 93, never heard of these kinds of prints.

For increased colour saturation, Kodachrome slide film was the gold standard for many years. The K-12/14 process didn’t use colour couplers in the emulsion which muddied the colours. It wasn’t until Fuji Velvia come out in the 80s which could rival Kodachrome with a standard E-6 process, although more towards the green and blue side)

Regular negative film (C-41) with the colour masking in the negative (the orange tint) could never match the colour depth of positive.

6

Yes, there were Laser printers in that era.
Of course, it’s almost impossible to search for information these days, because “laser printers” mean something different now.

Almost…