Digital BW, The Print

I have used Pictorico Hi-Gloss White Film, as Dan Buckholder suggests, to
create 8x10 negatives and have been quite successful printing them. The
problem is, of course, that you might look at the prints that I think are
good and you may think they suck. The is a huge range in what people think
are good prints. Other people thought my prints looked good, so I'm not
completely wrong.

The printing times are long - a couple minutes at F2.8 for about 11x14
coverage. I think the contrast is very good, though. The trick was making
sure that the printing time was long enough for the print to have a really
black Dmax, but no longer.

I used some of Dan Burkholder's process from his Inkjet Negative Companion
download
(http://www.danburkholder.com/Pages/main_pages/book_info_main_page1.htm) but
added a detail from D. Krehbiel
(http://kcbx.net/~mhd/2photo/outneg/outneg1.htm) to establish my exposure
time. The trick is to use the interneg step wedge that Dan Burkholder
provides, but modify it with an absolute Dmin patch (for the negative) by
adding cutting a hole in the negative, and then also creating an absolute
Dmax patch (for the negative) by adding black tape to the interneg. Then you
slowly increase the exposure time until the clear patch of the step wedge
prints just as black is the Dmin patch from the hole in the film. This is as
black as the paper will print. As a final check, the negative's Dmax patch
with the tape should print as white as the black patch of the step wedge,
which should be paper-white. I was able to get sufficient density with the
UC inks to do this with Ilford Multigrade IV RC paper with a #2 filter.. I
was amazed to be able to see the difference between 0% and 2% patch of the
step wedge, and also the 100% and 99% patch in the print. The only remaining
tweak, which I did not perform, would be to see if the 50% patch was really
50%.

The real question is "is all this effort worth it?" I have decided that I
will only use interneg's if I need the absolute blackest blacks, or need
glossies without bronzing. The QTR prints look awfully good, and are
painless.

Steve Bye


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Steven Karafyllakis" <steve@...>
To: <DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 5:10 PM
Subject: [Digital BW] New digital inerneg material




Anyone out there still working on digital internegatives? A few
weeks back I got a few sheets of a film called Super Clear/IJ from
Michael Pach and Adveturecam Photo. I've tried it a couple times at
this point, and I'm pleased enough with it to ressurect that
particular project. I had been trying Pictorico products, but
remained unsatisfied: I hate printing through the almost opaque
white plastic paper, and the OTC showed printer artifacts: the
printer dots where very clearly delineated, it showed microbanding
when normal paper wouldn't and the film itself was milky, lowering
the effective contrast, and has a lot of microscopic flaws. Also,
and probably most important, the Pictorico won't build much density
or color saturation. It seemed no matter how I went about it, I
could get enough density, spectral or otherwise to get good
contrast. Not a problem if you're using variable contrast paper, but
I need the internegs for printing the hand coated emulsion, which is
a grade two at best.

OTOH the Super Clear is, as its name implies, much more clear, at
least in part because it is thinner, so carefull handling is a must.
On the plus side, it is capable of producing much better color
saturation, especially in the yellow range where the Pictorico was
very weak. That makes it easy to produce an orange negative of
enough spectral density to make a snappy print on VC fiber paper at
a grade 2-2.5

Also, it shows printer dots less, and doesn't seem prone to showing
microbanding either. I think this is becuase there is a bit more dot
gain, which softens the edges of the printer dots a bit. Obviously
this also means slightly lower max sharpness is possible, but the
difference is not visible to the naked eye, and you have to look
carefully even with a lupe to pick it up. The lower grittiness is
definitely visible to the naked eye, and quite pleasing.

There is one catch: the material is available in 100 sheet boxes,
and while the price per sheet is much lower than Pictorico, that's
still a good chunk of change. Michael has agreed to split the
packages into 50s that's a lot easier to handle, and puts the cash
outlay close to what you'spend getting into Pictorico.

Hope this is of some use & interest

Steve Karafyllakis






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