Digital BW, The Print

Agreed.  Although I am surprised you prefer the look of the second curve.
The slope of the curve (gamma) has been dramatically flattened and an image
will look washed out and lack contrast.  Put another way, the whole image
has been brightened so that the image detail at the margin can be restored.
In  the former, the tonal relationships are preserved as much as possible
but yes there is loss of shadow and highlight detail because it is beyond
the scope of the ink-media combination.   I am also not sure how the
mid-point is affected in the second scenario.  That is, is the curve
straight or curved around a stable 50-50 midpoint?  I will bet that most
people when confronted with the second scenario when soft-proofing end up
applying an s-curve that deepens the dark areas of the print and lightens
the lighter areas in effect making the resultant combined affect of the
image much closer to the former scenario (test this by doing the second and
then altering this curve until you are happy with the look of the image
again.)  Personally, I would find it an easier workflow to have the former
happen....highlight and shadow detail gets clipped to reflect the minimum
dmax of the paper and maximum dmax of 100% black.  I could then decide how
much I was prepared to lighten the image and lower contrast to restore some
of the detail at the margin.  Anyway, food for thought.....

From: "Roy Harrington" <roy@...>

You can get an idea of the differences with a few small PS experiments.
Take a nice full range B&W image.  Go into adjust curves.
Drag the 0,0 point to 10,10 and drag 100,100 to 80, 80
You ought to have a horizontal lines from 10,10 to the edge and
80,80 to the edge.  This is the change you are proposing.  Click Preview on
and off to see the changes.  Shadows and Highlights
are clipped but the mid range stays the same.  Now move the points out to
the edge along the horizontal lines.  The
Input values will now be 0 and 100.  This shows the other way.  It
lightens the picture but there is no clipping.  Its a personal choice which
you like, but my tendency is to go with the
readjustment to avoid clipping.




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