Digital BW, The Print

Clayton

> I have never really understood the
> technicalities of what we're doing (the gamma-this and log-that just
> makes my eyes glaze over), so my own pathfinding has been a mostly
> intuitive process based on years of darkroom experience.

Technical skill should not get in the way of a artistic creativity.  It
should, though, accompany artistic creativity and so allow its realisation.
(A painter with the best visualisation ever who can't mix paint to achieve
colour will never produce much - and a paint mixer without visualisation
want achieve much either!)  If you have it, read once again Ansel's
introduction to "The Negative" for a more eloquent presentation of this
point of view.  Understanding of process and equipment enables creativity.

The basic technical aspects of the other thread are not that hard.  I am not
a maths guy - in fact if you go back to the initial parts of that thread you
can see my asking to be refreshed on basic maths questions in order to
understand the basics. About a year ago I had asked how the LAB values that
I see in the Info Pallette when passing the eyedropper over a step wedge
related to the LAB readings I took when I starting to explore making my own
QTR curves. I did not receive a satisfying answer and if I recall correctly
someone even said that they didn't think there was meant to be a
relationship. You can see that in the recent thread called "Tonal Range
Recording" I originally asked how one can relate print densities with PS's
0-255 curve scale - ie how do I relate a printed step wedge (my print space)
to my PS workspace. I was kindly pointed to Normen Koren's site.

A walk through his site, in particular the pages on Monitor Calibration and
Gamma, really got the penny to drop for me - an understanding of what is
meant by gamma, linearization etc and how film, displays, photographic paper
and ink on paper all have a common ground. (There is a lot on the other
pages eg MTF stuff that I don't understand but it is not core to this
discussion.)  I don't even have a background in film so when I looked at the
tonal response curve charts for film and photographic papers on the site
these were totally new for me.  You have years of darkroom experience which
should put you way ahead of me.

If nothing else read the two subsections under Monitor Calibration and Gamma
entitled "Gamma and black level" and "Why Gamma?".

> I have also been following this
> discussion with a lot of interest, but while the theories make sense I
> still couldn't quite see the practical application and have had an
> uneasy sense about it.

There is a very real practical application.  One could modify the way a RIP
such as QTR works, linearising to the workspace gamma over the range of
pixel values that can be printed (rather than the full 0 to 1).

> 
> This is exactly what I eventually arrived at (but from a non-technical
> approach), hence my workflow practice of setting the printer profile
> to "Same As Source" and choosing a document space profile to get best
> WYSIWYG.

This is quite hit or miss and if something doesn't fit they way you would
like you are stuck - you are not able to explore your creativity!

We are all busy people but if you love your craft or hobby I think you would
be well rewarded taking the time to understand the technical aspects of its
implementation - and particularly tying together your existing knowledge of
the darkroom environment to its digital equivalent.  They really are very
very similar with identical principles but just different values.  I would
suggest the knowledge is already there but the connections to the new work
area have not been made.  It's all there for the understanding in two easy
bites!

:-)

Steve