Digital BW, The Print

Steve,

I have read that the PQGF does not work well for digital negatives. It 
imparts a gritty texture to the print.

What I have ascertained from the reading I have been doing and the 
prints that I am seeing locally is that you need to make two negatives. 
One for the shadow detail and one for the highlights. Then pin register 
and print the sandwich. One local printer is actually experimenting with 
three negatives, adding one for the mid tones. He tells me he has seen 
no loss in gray scale range as suggested in an earlier post.

He is using the color table method of making digital negatives as 
outlined in Berkholder's book.

Mike


On Thursday, May 2, 2002, at 09:01 PM, stevekphoto wrote:

> 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]
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>
>
>
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