Digital BW, The Print

> From: Ken Carney [mailto:kcarney1@...]
>
> Hello, all.  This question (observation) is new to me.  The last week I've
> had some time to fiddle around making prints from a Canon 10D
> with the Canon
> 24-70 L zoom (my first experience with a digital SLR).  I
> converted the raw
> files using Capture One to 12-bit tif and printed as b&w on the Epson 2200
> with OEM inks.  I did as much as I could in Capture One, sharpened with
> Photokit Sharpener, converted to untagged grayscale and printed
> (for reasons
> I don't understand, if I convert the RGB file to grayscale before
> printing I
> get a very neutral b&w print with no metamerism.  This makes
> little sense to
> me since I think the files are sent to the 2200 as RGB, but there it is.).
> The main adjustment I made in Photoshop CS was soft-proofing for Epson EEM
> and printing with the untagged gray profile as the print space.

When I first installed the 2200 Windows drivers, I seem to remember that I
got different results sending a grayscale file to the driver, as opposed to
an R=G=B color file. I have no idea why.

I'm not surprised you can get decent B&W from your 2200, but I can't make
heads or tails of your color management. What do you mean by "untagged
grayscale" or "untagged gray profile"? The print space is supposed to be a
profile that describes the printer, not the image, so that should always be
one of the Epson profiles, whichever one is appropriate to the paper, ink
and resolution. Of course, in B&W, any profile mismanagement simply applies
some sort of unintentional curve to the image, which may accidentally give
you pleasing results. It's better, though, to get your color management
straight, so that you get good screen-print matching.

My experience with the 2200 is that it's not quite dead nuts neutral when
using color inks. RIPs like ImagePrint do an even better job, by using
mostly black ink, and only enough color ink to neutralize the tone.

> The thing I
> noticed is that 11x17" image size prints were remarkably clear
> and sharp at
> 180 dpi (required because of the small 36mb converted raw file).
> They have
> excellent tonality and depth.  As a crude comparison, they seem like HDTV
> compared to your run-of-the-mill telly.  This is as compared to 360 dpi
> prints from b&w 35mm scanned on the Nikon 4000ED with a variety
> of films and
> good glass.  I am surprised at this result with such a low dpi setting.
>
> I have read that this is possible because the digital camera files, though
> small, have less extraneous noise.  Another factor I have read is
> that with
> the smaller Canon 10D sensor, you are using the best part of the already
> good Canon L glass.  Any thoughts or pointing me to other sources
> appreciated!  So far it looks pretty encouraging, since I don't
> make really
> large prints.

I think the main difference is that with film, all degradation (noise, color
inaccuracy, defocusing) is doubled by the need to go through the scanning
process. My film scans (which are all color, mostly slides) always come out
much grainier than my 10D images. However, the Nikon scanners also tend to
emphasize grain a little, compared to other brands, because the strongly
colliminated light results in grain aliasing, where grain finer than the
scanner resolution mutates into grain at the scanner resolution, instead of
being averaged out.

--

Ciao,               Paul D. DeRocco
Paul                mailto:pderocco@...