Digital BW, The Print

> John,
> Are you saying it's not possible for a reasonably intelligent person
to take
> the 4-day Black and White Digital Fine Print workshop (K7) at Cone's and
> produce gallery quality prints from artist's files in a very short time?
> 
> Best regards,
> John Moody

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Yes that is exactly what I am saying. Produce "gallery quality"
prints. Well there are a multitude of bad galleries out there that
have all kinds of horrible imagery in them, inkjet and otherwise, and
some people like that work, some don't.

What I am saying is that there is an art to digital printmaking which
is no easier than the art of silk screen printing, Cibachrome
printing, lithography printing, or platinum printing. The better the
technology gets the higher the bar is for the printmaker to
distinguish himself from everyone else. Yes, the technology gets a lot
better, it all depends on what you are used to looking at how far you
need or want to go, and who your clients are. Photo literature has
always been full of marketing of this system or that system or this
new paper or this new film, to make the job easy. That never happens. 

Printing from a perfectly conceived and interpreted file is a huge
luxury that most of us do not have unfortunately. 90% of what people
pay me to do is to interpret their files, or translate them, however
you want to look at, into a specific medium - a specific ink-media
combination with a look suitable to that persons vision and
personality for that particular context. Every image is different and
very rarely is a file "finished" when it is ready to be output. Almost
never in my experience. 

For black and white I find critical curve shapes and level adjustmets
and dodging and burning zones within the area is usually necessary for
the finest result, whether that be from the best drum scan or a sad
noisy digital camera file. That experience is gained not by a 4 day
workshop but by years of looking at and refining images and learning
to "see" things. The negative is the score and the print is the
performance. If we all had the same file to work from we could have
multiple performances, many may be equally valad, many similar, but
rarely would they all be the same. If that were the case I wouln't
want to be involved in this at all. Everything would be a mechanical
rendering of a pre-existing file. Now that would be boring beyond
belief. We could just create a robot do it all. 

John