Digital BW, The Print

First, think of making a levels adjustment as deciding paper exposure to 
get good blacks and whites in the darkroom. Then, think of curves 
adjustments as deciding on paper grade. Creating a toe and shoulder 
aren't bad things - your darkroom prints certainly have toes and shoulders.

If you want to maximize your results, you'll probably have to improve 
your capture by using raw mode and keeping your images in 16-bit as long 
as possible.

Other than that, it takes a lot of practice. Not a lot of your darkroom 
skills translate directly into lightroom skills. You have to learn it 
all over again. Patience, and lot's of captures/prints, and lots of 
reasearch are what lead to improvement, IMHO.

BTW, you have calibrated your monitor, yes?
--
Hogarth Hughes



>
> my suspicion is that what's wrong is that too much of the print is in 
> the midrange. if i
> tweak the image with curves, and use an S-curve to increase the 
> gradient in the midrange,
> there is a notable improvement in the overall appearance of the print 
> (at least to my taste),
> but of course a loss of detail at the extremes.
>
> it doesn't seem right to be doing this adjustment, because presumably 
> Paul Roark could
> have incorporated it into his curves. and the images look far more 
> vibrant on my monitor
> than they do on paper. maybe i'm just expecting too much from an 
> inkjet print? or am i
> missing something really basic? for example, i've been making the 
> assumption that
> preserving the entire dynamic range is a good thing, but perhaps i 
> should be more willing
> to 'squeeze the levels' and lose detail at both ends for better 
> midrange contrast? also, i'm
> shooting in jpeg; maybe switching to raw would give better results.
>
> any comments and pointers would be very welcome.
>
> /daniel
>
>