Digital BW, The Print

That's why I create digital negative. The best of both worlds. I'm currently in front of photoshop and in the darkroom. I shoot Fuji Pro and the new kodack portra. If you have these films scanned on a Fuji Frontier, you get no grain. It's beautiful. I do portraits so I like Film better.
I go in photoshop, convert to B&W, dodge burn....Then I print another contact neg on my Epson R220. I go under my enlarger and turn on the light to expose my Ilford Fiber paper (contact print). I process it in my wet darkroom and I get a print that matches the one on my monitor.
Just my 0.02...Not starting a new thread on digital vs analog debate.

PO
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: James Irelan 
  To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com 
  Sent: Saturday, December 22, 2007 4:18 PM
  Subject: Re: [Digital BW] Re: Help....



  >
  > Yeah, darkrooms...I still have my enlarger after 15 years and I NEVER
  > had to replace anything on it. I wish I had the space in my new house
  > to set it up again and forget this digital mess.
  >
  > AnnMarie

  Not sure "mess" is an apt metaphor for the digital way of working, 
  especially compared to a wet darkroom. As many of us on these lists 
  have, I came from a wet black and white darkroom background, which I 
  totally fell in love with right from the first time I saw an image 
  come up in the developer. And I still have fond memories of working 
  that way. And there still remains something inherent in the silver 
  print which even those of us now fully accepting of inkjet will 
  probably still acknowledge- some inherent quality that's difficult to 
  describe, but arguably recognizably there. And it can be expensive 
  to get set up to produce quality digital prints, the more so the 
  larger the print. Scanners and/or digital cameras with enough 
  resolution to make large prints are not cheap. (But I remember my 
  wet darkrooms and cameras and lenses weren't exactly cheap, either.) 
  Having said all these things and fondly reminisced, however, I must 
  point out that there are reasons why the many fine shooters and 
  printers on these lists are not looking back. There are hazards of 
  working with photo chemicals over a period of years, for example. I 
  knew a guy who immediately lost his hearing if he went into a wet 
  darkroom again after having printed in one for many years. Odd, but 
  true. I know there are others who have developed other problems with 
  photo chemicals over time. But for me the main strength of the 
  digital way of printing is the power of the editing capabilities in 
  Photoshop, followed by the repeatability of those results in 
  printing. Another strength is the ability to print on fine art matte 
  papers. I happen to like the look of them, not to say that I think 
  they are better than my old favorite Oriental Seagull. But Oriental 
  Seagull is no longer with us, no? (I could be wrong about this; it 
  was gone for quite a while about the time I was transitioning to 
  digital.) And I do like the look of prints on matte papers. They 
  are not the same but they are good in their own right. And if you 
  frame under glass, the gloss advantage of a glossy fiber print is not 
  as dominant. Unglassed, yes, it is still there. But the editing... 
  first of all, all your wet experience will serve you very well as you 
  edit in Photoshop. Nothing you've learned in the wet darkroom will go 
  to waste printing digitally. It will just be far easier to execute! 
  My guess is that your experience will be one where you will be able 
  to do things that previously you had to do either with filters on a 
  VC paper or with graded papers, possibly with flashing, for example. 
  Now you will be able to do those things far more easily and with far 
  more precision using tools like Curves in Photoshop. And you'll have 
  the advantage, with your experience, of knowing just what you want to 
  achieve in things like local contrast etc. Things like scratches- 
  I'm sure you've had a neg that was scratched in the holder from top 
  to bottom. This has to be the most important image you've got to 
  warrant spotting it, right? And then you've got one spotted print, 
  unless you want to try to spot the neg. How long does that take? 
  Hours? And you've got to do that for each print of that image you 
  want to make. In Photoshop you can do that same thing in maybe 5, 10 
  minutes, and then the image is saved from then on. And of course any 
  kind of blended image is far easier in Photoshop than trying to do it 
  with multiple enlargers (although I think it's interesting to note 
  that, even given these tools, nobody seems to have surpassed, or even 
  equalled, in my view, the imaginative work of Jerry Ulesmann (sp?)). 
  So what I'm saying is that instead of looking at digital as being a 
  "mess", leave yourself open to finding all the strengths and 
  advantages of it. You might be pleasantly surprised. If, after 
  working in it for a period of time where you've mastered it enough to 
  really know, and you still prefer the wet darkroom, so be it. Then 
  it's a matter of taste, and I don't disagree with preferring gelatin 
  prints for whatever reason. But I would reserve judgement until 
  you've really worked with inkjet and, for example, made a digital 
  print of one of your wet prints and found, as I have, that you've 
  been able to make an even better print, one that you've been able to 
  improve in ways that escaped you in the wet darkroom.

  James Irelan


   

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