Digital BW, The Print

> From: Djon [mailto:westsidemaurice@...]
>
> It isn't "pervasive" throughout photography, though the usual suspects
> (Macbeth et al) would like it to be, and no, it doesn't "work" so much
> as distract: clear on most digital photolab forums.
>
> Profiling is mostly a workaround that pretends numbers replace highly
> developed visual skills ...  aspiring digital photographers are taught
> that the truely miraculous ez-as-pie technology with which they've
> been gifted needs to be made complex by mostly-incoherent-priests
> (present company excluded, of course :-)
>
> Profiling is irrelevant to *most* who do digital printing.

You may be a wonderful photographer who produces beautiful prints, but this
is a load of nonsense. You may have failed to get good results from
profiling, but many of us have succeeded. When I hold my prints up next to
my screen, they look about as close as I can imagine getting between
something that emits light and something that reflects light. And they look
that way because I have a good monitor, a high-quality spectro for
profiling, calibrated room lighting, and a knowledge of how to use it all.

As to digital photolabs, from everything I read, it sounds like many if not
most of them are former chemical photolabs who have been forced by the
marketplace to go digital, but know no more about color management than the
people who give them JPEGs out of their point-and-shoots.

I will agree with one point, though, and that's that highly developed visual
skills will always be necessary. For one thing, if your profiling isn't
working, your visual skills will be needed to discover that fact. But when
that happens, it isn't magic--there's always a reason, and it can be fixed.

--

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