Digital BW, The Print

Sepia bloody sepia

Someone tell me if they have a better idea and what the hell I am 
doing.

I've been fiddle farting around with this sepia thing for months. My 
heart yearns for the tuth. My intention has been to try a get it 
close on a desktop before purchasing larger. I am thoroughly spoilt 
as I print B&W Neg onto colour RC Paper and filtrate to get a rich 
goldern sepia and it gives me the total poops trying to get close to 
that with inkjet.

I start with a black & white neg scan.

A "not bad" method I have tried is to start with a desaturated RGB 
image off the B&W neg and adjust colour - shadows, midtones & 
highlights equally. I will get horrible crossover before I even 
start if you just try mids.

My sepi is very rich, so my settings were 20y 15r each. Try 
proportionally less if you want weaker. This leads to another 
problem. If I have the "Preserve Luminosity" checked, the levels 
change quite drastically, sometimes actually chopping off the shadow 
end of the histogram, if I leave it unchecked it just does weird 
things. In any case, I figured that I  must adjust the histogram at 
the very end of the process and make sure it is intact. If it isn't 
then I try this -

I found that if I converted to CMYK and then did the same colour 
adjustment, my histogram was left fairly intact and then just 
switched back down to RGB again for final output. My next step is 
the MIS sepia neautal inks with a guess at which curves to use. Paul 
suggests 1280 for my 890 but they're not fully refined as yet.

I may be doing this all wrong but when I have tried duotones, the 
histogram is devistated. Channel mixer is also useless to me as I 
start with a B&W neg. What else is there? I seem to have no response 
when I put up a post.

This sepia bizzo seems to be the hardest thing to get to grips with.


Garry Sarre

www.sarre.com.au