Digital BW, The Print

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@y..., "Martin Wesley"
<mwesley250@e...> wrote:
> Would you have the time to run us through your workflow camera to 
> print?

OK Martin, here goes. As concise as possible, if it's too concise
just ask questions-
Any Dan Culbertson method mentioned can be found on his pages in the
bookmark section for this list.

A custom CMYK ink setup is required, though I learned this from Dan
I'm not sure how much is on his site about it. Basically 
a photospectrometer is used to measure the exact color, and dot gain,
of each of the inks and combinations, then entered 
in Photoshop. One is required for each paper you want to use, the
differences can be surprising, or not.

5x7, TMY with normal zone system approach, TriX for extreme
compactions
120, XP2 exposed for shadows, C41 lab processing

Agfa T2500 scanner, grayscale, 16 bit 1250 dpi for 5x7, 16 bit 2500
dpi for 120

8 bit dupe, all tonal editing done as masked adjustment layers. After
proofs look good, each mask and adjustment is loaded 
to the 16 bit file. Sharpen (very little) with Deep Bit Filters, even
though PS6 will sharpen 16 bit files, I think DBF does a little 
better job. Spot with the rubber stamp tool, resize (don't resample)
to print size, save as "printer".

The following is all built into an action-
Convert to CMYK using Dan's high bit method. There are several steps
but you wind up with a 16 bit per channel CMYK file 
with all the original grayscale info in each of the 4 channels.
Apply separation curves, developing the curves is a huge separate
topic.
With the custom CMYK ink setup, Photoshop previews on the monitor
exactly what all this will look like.
Convert to 8 bit

Then print-
3000 printer, PressReady RIP, Piezography inks, Wells River paper for
now.

Recently I've been using Dan's Profiler Pro RGB preview method
developing RGB workflows for other purposes with the RGB 
driver, it works extraordinarily well. For my personal work, the
above still gives me the best results for what I'm after.
There are a lot of aspects I've glossed over, but that's the guts of
it.
Tyler