Digital BW, The Print

Tyler,

Thanks for laying out your process for us. I always wanted to move up 
from 4x5 to 5x7 but the cost of moving up to an enlarger that size 
made it more than a bit pricey. However, digital really changes the 
equation and working in 5x7 or even 8x10 gives you a real advantage 
when it comes to scanning. (Agfa T2500 is now down to $3200 at Sparco 
by the way for those who are interested.)

The digital end of your workflow is highly customized and I can only 
imagine the amount of work you had to put into it. This is 
essentially what we all need to do. That is calibrating the entire 
process from start to finish for each of the sets of materials we 
use. Given an established film exposure and development process. (I 
am inclined to leave mine as it is in case I want to take a neg back 
into the darkroom.)

The difficulty seems to be in the amount of expertise and equipment 
required to close the feedback loop from monitor to print in a series 
of iterations to bring it all to a workable point.

I have a couple of questions. When you are adjusting in 8-bit how do 
you do your proofing? You mention loading all of the layer and 
adjustment information from the 8-bit work file back to the 16-bit 
file, how is this done?

Thanks,
Martin Wesley

 

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@y..., "Tyler Boley" <tyler@t...> 
wrote:
> --- 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