Digital BW, The Print

HI all;
Here's my 2 cents worth on digital negs:
the idea of printing digital negs is what finally got me to buy into 
the whole computer thing 3 years ago-but three years ago the 
available printers wheren't good enough. I took another stab at it a 
couple of weeks ago with Pictorico OTF and dye inks, test printing 
the output on silver RC paper. I could see from the 2-3 tries I made 
that it could work in terms of contrast and tonal range, but the 
film showed marked microbanding that showed up a lot in the 
higlights, and the heavy-inked areas like skies, also showed 
gritiness similar to a black-only print. My first impression is that 
this material in order to be useable, needs to be printed as a 
spectral image in red-orange for non-VC papers, or perhaps magenta 
for VC papers, with little or no black ink in use. I think it'll 
work well for alternative processes, but not well enough for silver 
prints. My next attempt will be on Photo Quality Glossy film-it's 
available up to 13x19, and should produce a much smoother image, 
though obviously the exposure time would be longer.

Any one else?





-- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@y..., Michael J. Kravit 
<mjkaia@k...> wrote:
> Stephen,
> 
> Your information is very interesting. Thanks for taking the time 
to 
> share it.
> 
> I am going to check out the section of Dan's book that deals with 
making 
> two negs. Hey, If this does not work there is always traditional 
> enlarged negatives.
> 
> Mike
> 
> 
> On Wednesday, May 1, 2002, at 05:20 PM, Stephen Kundell, MD wrote:
> 
> > Mike,
> > The digital neg is what got me here in the first place. I have 
not 
> > tried using my epson to produce a dig neg, but did produce image 
setter 
> > negatives that I contact printed on both silver and palladium-
platinum 
> > as ziatypes. Some of the images were stunning, the best of both 
worlds. 
> > Unfortunately, I abandoned the effort because I found it 
extremely 
> > difficult to find service bureaus willing and able to do what I 
needed. 
> > Another occassional problem was related to the necessity of 
using a 
> > transfer function which tended to compress some areas of the 
gray 
> > scale. Realistically, you are probably dropping the number of 
distinct 
> > shades of gray to well less than 100. This works for some 
images, but 
> > in others you will see a little posterizing. This is why Dan 
Burkholder 
> > would often use two negatives for exposure, one to separate the 
> > shadows, and one to separate the highlights. Printing your own 
desktop 
> > negs will similarly affect the gray scale. In essence, you are 
going 
> > from a fairly linear gray scale to a more logarithmic one, 
consistent 
> > with the response of photographic vs printing materials.  I will 
be 
> > interested to hear how it goes.
> > You might consider dye based inks on pictoro translucent media. 
You 
> > might also be able to acheive some of the effect of the transfer 
> > function by varying the color along your gray scale, with red 
obvious 
> > being most dense as viewed by the sensitized photo materials, 
blue 
> > being more transparent. If I had enough time in this 
> > life...............................
> > Stephen
> >
> >
> > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
> >
> >
> >
> >