Digital BW, The Print

----- Original Message -----
From: "tboleyyh" <tyler@...>
To: <DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Monday, August 05, 2002 12:32 PM
Subject: [Digital BW] Number of tones was Re: Do inkjets dither or not?


> --- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@y..., "Editor P.O.V. Image Service"
<editor@p...> wrote:
> snip
> > IF Cone and others are creating tones the human eye can't distinguish
> > form another tone, who the HELL CARES?
>
> I do.

Tyler,

Me too.

> Well done B&W inkjet prints look great, I've certainly committed to
pursuing this form of reproduction for my work.
> But,
> When I look at a masterfully created silver fine art print, or a
beautifully done platinum print, they seem to have virtually
> unlimited scale, that you can fall right into. One of the comments people
make when viewing a great platinum print is that
> there seems to be an infinity of grays, even between close tones.
> When I put my lovingly made quad prints down next to them, they don't give
the same impression.
> By themselves, they seem to approach it, but next to a great "analogue"
print, not quite there.
> Sorry.

For what? You are one of the most meticulous workers around. I think it just
a matter of different mediums. Oil paint vs. acrylic paint type of thing.
Judge each print on its own merits.

Having said that, <G> how much of a role do you think that chromatic
complexity plays into the comparison?

> I don't know if this is illusion. I don't know if it has anything to do
with how many grays the two processes can put on paper.
> I do know that I would certainly want a system that can produce for more
grays than I can perceive, for a start.
> Music reproduction systems that have frequency ranges beyond our hearing
ability still "seem" to sound better than those
> strictly limited to our hearing limits. The same thing may apply here.

Good analogy. If we did some experiment to find out what the minimum density
change is that the human eye can detect and processed our files accordingly
I don't think we would not get very pleasing results. Assume it is
equivalent to 100 levels and the biggest difference we can see is a unit of
1. Well we don't want to see just the difference between 2 and 3 or 65 and
66, we want to be able to see the difference between 2.2 and 3.2 and 65.6
and 66.6. To do that we would need 1000 levels whether we can distinguish
between two adjacent levels or not.

This comes back to the idea of distinguishable pairs. We can't just take the
range and divide it by the smallest difference we can see and say that is
the total number of levels we need. We need to determine what is the number
of distinguishable pairs needed to give us a tonally rich and continuous
tone print.

> I'm sorry this has bored people or seem irrelevant. But any possible way
to bring the true feel of a great photographic print
> to the Epson, whether it be file prep, materials, or highly technical
issues about software/hardware are certainly of
> immense interest to me.

Same here and while we can really get bogged down in these discussions they
often help me form new ideas or confirm old ones.

> I think this list is called "DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint".

Yeah I am afraid so and it is my fault, although I did have some help from
Yahoo.

Martin