Digital BW, The Print

Hello everyone,

On my website I have posted the results of the second round of Lightjet 
negs I recently received from A&I Digital (link at bottom). For those 
of you unfamiliar with this test it involves making 4x5 B&W negatives 
from scans (from 4x5 originals) using a Lightjet digital enlarger. Once 
again I made 24x30 enlargements from 4x5 negs.  The new negs show an 
increase in sharpness and some gain in the grain area, but are 
promising depending on what your particular needs for this process 
might be. They are still lower in contrast by about a grade or so than 
the original. Still unclear is how an image will print back to negative 
after my tweaking it in PhotoShop, since all of these negs were 
produced without my intermediate involvement there.  I have yet to 
produce full crop 24x30's yet to get a sense of the overall impact of 
the Lightjet negs, but will try to find time to do that soon.  Note 
that for these negs, A&I went back and did a 16 bit scan of my 
original.  First negs were from 8 bit scans.

Conclusions so far are that at 24x30 there is a moderate loss of detail 
and tonal smoothness.  If printed at less magnification, something I 
will also do shortly, this may not be much of a sacrifice.  And for 
problem negs, ie. difficult or impossible to obtain satisfactory silver 
prints of, it may be worth the tradeoff.  Again, that is each person's 
own decision.  I will try to provide as much information about the 
results of these tests ongoing as possible (posts to the site, 
qualitative remarks), but those of you who are serious about this 
process will have to perform their own trials in order to determine its 
feasibility.  At some point down the line I might be able to mail out 
samples of the actual prints I've made to folks who are interested, as 
long as I'm not overwhelmed with requests.  Off list for that please.

I'm contemplating having 8x10 negs output. It could increase overall 
sharpness and reduce grain.  Additionally I will continue to work for 
increased film contrast and test the results of contrast control/burn/
dodge in PhotoShop on the scan before sending it to the Lightjet.

Hope these are informative, sorry for the double post.

Here's the link:  http://philbard.com/tests.html

Cheers,
Phil
http://philbard.com