Digital BW, The Print

Hello Gary,

I understand what you're saying but I think you missed the point on
all counts.

>1. I don't see the value of looking at prints through a loupe. 

Seeing dots with the loupe was irrelevent to the main point I was
making, that color inks are used to do the toning.  My mention of
seeing the C and M dots with the loupe was simply to underscore that
fact.  You got caught up on a triviality and missed the main point.


>2.I have been to the photo library at the University of Arizona 
>and looked at prints of many photographers considered to be the 
>Grand Masters of B/W printing. The tones of their prints are all 
>over the place, cool, warm, neutral, sepia and many that I can't 
>even describe. 

You missed the point again.  The fact that I was using a supposedly
neutral print was irrelevent.  I could have made all the same
observations by trying a sepia print.  The point is that color inks
are used to do the toning and it shows.  You can't take brown and
magenta and cyan and yellow and make something that really looks like
sepia.  You can only try to fool the eye into thinking it's seeing
sepia.  



>The whole point is, that the variations seem to be 
>appropriate for the subject matter. 

Do you honestly think I don't know that?  



>It would be a pretty dull afternoon looking only at neutral prints 
>printed BO (even with great Dmax).

If you had read some of the many discussions about BO in this forum
over the past several years, or read my articles about it, or (heaven
forbid) actually tried Eboni BO yourself on different papers, you
would know that all BO prints are not neutral.  They are all over the
map from cold to extremely warm depending on what paper is used. 
That's one of the things people who use it love about it.  We can
choose a tone that best suits the image.  We can have a whole range of
tones from stone cold to very warm, without any color inks involved. 
No subtle magenta-ish or bluegreen-ish things floating around in
there.  On a cold tone paper like Kayenta the blacks look black, not
brown with C and M mixed in.  Once you get used to that, seeing colors
isn't very convincing or satisfying.  That's all I was trying to say.


Regards,
Clayton


Info on black and white digital printing at    
http://www.cjcom.net/digiprnarts.htm