Re:How to Make Cyanotypes (2020)
by aaronbrethorst on Tuesday July 27, 2021 @12:29PM
(#27974346)
Freestyle has some more information, and a step wedge test file you can print to help calibrate. https://www.freestylephoto.biz/alternative-process/making-di...
The linked article shows making cyanotype from outline if flowers, but far more fun IMO is digital negatives. There is a link to this at the bottom of the article, but I’ll share something I found that helps tremendously that wasn’t mentioned AFAICT.
When printing your digital negative, in addition to inverting your greyscale /B&W photo, you’ll want to adjust the curve, because the cyanotype will expose nonlinearly.
The best way to find the curve given your chemistry, photo, sunlight/latitude, etc. is empirically.
So, I recommend in photoshop/GIMP/whatever to generate a series of greyscale bars from #000000 to #FFFFFF, with perhaps a dozen or more steps. Put this alongside your image, then invert, and make a test print. You can then observe the nonlinear development of color and adjust the curve (remember, inverted) to apply to your final image for printing.
Probably I can think of more but this is already kind of lengthy on mobile :)