Digital BW, The Print

---  "Jo Brunenberg" <jobnl@e...> wrote:
> ...Try the following:
> Take a B&W stepwedge, Convert to RGB.
> Print on Epson 2200 at 2880 dpi, Color.
> 
> Results will be: You will get all kind of color shifts along the 
stepwedge.
> So the result will not be a neutral grey printed stepwedge which it 
should be.

Hi Jo,
I tried what you suggested and yup, you're right, got some 
unacceptable color shifts along the 21 step wedge on EEM paper, and I 
thought that might happen with EEM as noted on my original post. But 
tried the wedge on Epson resin paper (premium semigloss) and got a 
nice neutral wedge that is virtually identical to the wedge I printed 
using Pieziography selenium quadtones on my 1280 and no metamerism. I 
say "virtually" because after carefully analyzing the wedge I picked 
up an ever so slight magenta shift only at 35 percent black that is 
so small its not noticable in a photo. I think it would be easy to 
neutralize with maybe a one unit curve tweak, and one unit may be too 
large. Even silver halide prints have a microscopic bit of color in 
them -- they're not perfectly greyscale. Also, if a tint is added 
that tiny shift at 35 percent becomes totally invisible. I guess 
everyone has to draw their own line somewhere on what is acceptable 
quality and then go out and take some pictures. Even Ansel Adams had 
to say at some point, "Heck, that's good enough." But if I hear 
comments like, "nice tinted print" when I didn't tint the print then 
its time to move the line.

I'll leave it to someone smarter than me to explain why shifts occur 
on EEM on not resin paper. I suppose it has something to do with 
metamerism and the scattering of reflected light. I profiled both 
papers identically using an EyeOne spectrophotometer and Gregtag 
MacBeth ProfileMaker 4.0

Thanks for your reply.

-Sandy C.