Digital BW, The Print

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@y..., "Martin Wesley"
<mwesley250@e...> wrote:
>.....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.)

I haven't changed mine for scanning Martin, my negs are pretty dense.
I understand people are altering their exposure/
developement to optimize for scanning, but I'm hesitant to go that
route, and I'm dead tired of calibrationg! It seems to 
work fine this way, sometimes I scan difficult negs as tranperancies,
which can really help.
> 
> 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.

It really didn't take that long to learn, most of it is on Dan's
pages. The equipment is another problem, it's hard to justify the 
cost of a photospecrometer, but since I was beta testing profiling
software and inks, I went ahead with it. I was trying to 
develope curves all kinds of ways, by eye, or with a scanner. That
was ok up to a point. I sent Dan a case of Absolute in 
exchange for some ink/paper setup measurements and everything I was
battling fell into place, that convinced me I had to 
have one. It can be done without one, but it takes a lot more time
and some problems are just never found, I'd rather make 
prints. I didn't hear from him for several months, so maybe that was
a bad bad thing...
What takes more time and learning, and is far more interesting, is
the nature of ink on paper and how to find problems and 
create something beautiful. It's an ongoing process, just like
traditional printing.
> 
> I have a couple of questions. When you are adjusting in 8-bit how
do 
> you do your proofing?

I just save where I am, flatten the file and size it to what I want
to see as a test, save it as a temp/test, run it through the 
grayscale-CMYK-seps action, and print. Sometimes I use a cheaper
paper like EAM because it takes the ink similarly, but I 
still wind up needing to see one on the real paper because it feels
so different, even if it's the same tonaly.

> 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?
> 
I think Bruce Fraser has an article about it somewhere. You have your
8 bit file with adjustment layers, and your 16 bit file 
open at the same time. In the 8 bit, open the adjustment layer and
save the curve (level, whatever it is) to the desktop, 
leave that layer selected. Switch to your 16 bit file and go to "load
selection", you will have the option of loading the layer 
mask from the 8 bit file layer, do it. Open curves and load the one
on your desktop that was saved. Now do that with each 
adjustment layer. Note that only edits available in 16 bit can be
done this way, but those are all I generally need.
After you've done this a few times, it goes real quick.
Tyler