When you have an endless thirst for knowledge and a crippling photography habit, you will eventually get interested in printing using alternative processes. Alt process printing is a blanket term that effectively just means “not silver gelatin.” You may have heard of some of the following alt processes:

• Platinum/Palladium printing (aka Pt/Pd, aka Platinotype or Palladiotype, aka printing for rich people)

• Salted Paper (Henry Fox Talbot’s first ever paper-based photographic printing process)

• Albumin Print (salted paper, but one important step closer to becoming an actual cake)

• Tintype (old timey 1800s prints on iron plates. You thought it would be tin, didn’t you?)

• Daguerrotype (even older and timier 1800s prints on silver-plated copper sheets)

• Ambrotype (collodion negatives on velvet lined glass to make them look like positives)

• Kallitype (the working man’s platinum print)

• Van Dyke Brown (Kallitype’s less cool wannabe younger brother)

• Argyrotype (Chemist Mike Ware’s superfluous modernized version of the Van Dyke Brown and Kallitype, which nobody asked for)

• Ziatype (I don’t even know what it is, I just see the word sometimes on the internet)

• Gum Bichromate (color printing for people who feel nothing unless they’re handling deadly poisons)

• Bromoil (photography for people who should have picked up impressionist painting instead)

• Lith printing (silver gelatin for people who want their image detail to be destroyed by excessive grain)

• Carbon transfer printing (a heinously complicated process originally developed as a torture method and later adopted by photographic masochists)

• Cyanotype (the blue one)

• New Cyanotype (Chemist Mike Ware’s theoretically better version of the Cyanotype, which is weirdly polarizing on internet forums)

• Photogravure (printing with etched copper plates for some reason)

• Anthotype (printing with plant juice for hippies)

When I decided to dive in, it was Kallitype that held my interest. Done correctly, your final image is exactly the same as you could get with the much more expensive platinotype or palladiotype processes. But because you’re forming the image first in (comparatively) cheap silver, you have an eject button available prior to using up expensive precious metals in case your print sucks. In fact, there’s speculation that a lot of the old platinotypes floating around in museums and private collections are actually kallitypes that were toned in platinum after the fact. They’re chemically identical, so there would be no way to know.

I won’t try to explain the process in any kind of detail. The video below goes over the basics and is more fun to watch than it would be to read a step-by-step guide. Kallitypes have a lot of right answers (and even more wrong answers) available in terms of papers to use, various developer and toner options, etc. Sandy King has covered it better than I would be able to anyway, and I used his guide to work out the process that gave me the best results.

Without further ado, let’s introduce our champions. In the corner, our defending champion, the gold-toned Kallitype!

But here’s the deal. Sometimes even when you can make gorgeous, purplish-hued gold-toned Kallitype prints, you occasionally get a hankering for something more… blue. And since you’re already up to your eyeballs in jars of white and colorful powders with increasingly ridiculous names like “ferric oxalate” and “sodium citrate” and “baking soda” (what even is that?) at this point, what’s a quick order of potassium ferricyanide, ammonium dichromate, and ferric ammonium oxalate to add to the pile? That’s right folks. I skipped right over Cyanotype and went straight for New Cyanotype. Introducing Mike Ware’s spicy, controversial new take on Prussian Blue!

So which one is better? *sigh* They are entirely different processes with different uses, different looks, different price points, and also all art is subjective. Frankly, I’m disappointed that you thought I would declare a winner. As punishment for your thoughtlessness, you now have to go try out an alt process. If you don’t want to spend a ton of money, I’d start with cyanotype or salted paper. If you choose ziatype, could you send me an email explaining what it is? Thanks.