At the mention of these processes many photographers throw up their hands in alarm and say things like 'they're too difficult to use', or 'they're too expensive for my exhibition work.' There has been a sort of mystique built up around them which is largely unjustified. This may have been circulated by platinum printers to enhance their reputation or worse, to put lesser mortals off the scent completely. Although the start up cost of buying the platinum or palladium salts is much higher than the equivalent amounts of silver, it is certainly no more a shock to the wallet than having prints made in a lab from colour slides. As far as difficulty is concerned, if George Bernard Shaw could do it, then so can any competent photographer. If, however, you aspire to be a master printer using these processes, you will need a lot of practice to make high quality prints. This applies to most things in life. Dick Arentz, the distinguished American printer once observed that platinum printers accumulate a shelf full of platinum prints which are not quite good enough for exhibition but which are too good to throw away.

The use of platinum for photographic purposes had been investigated by Herschel at an early stage in the development of photography, but it was not until 1873 that William Willis devised a practical means of producing platinum paper. In 1879 the Platinotype company put platinum paper on the commercial market. In 1887 a Captain Pizzighelli introduced his ready coated platinum paper which could be printed out and 'fixed' with muriatic acid (known now as hydrochloric acid). The cachet of using a precious metal and the superb quality of the images produced by it led many well known photographers to adopt the process. Among them were Emerson with his studies of life in rural Norfolk and Frederick Evans with his series of pictures of English cathedrals. Later Steichen, Stieglitz, Paul Strand and Edward Weston worked extensively with the process.