Digital BW, The Print

I was just at Aardenburg-imaging.com and they have a new series of Epson K3 tests going on using color tinting when printing. All prints were made with an Epson 3880 on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Ultrasmooth 308. Tests were printed Neutral, Cool, Warm and Sepia.  The first set of results are now posted. It  should be very interesting to see how color tinting will effect the life of the print. As many of you know this site is now a free/donate website. If you visit this site and find the information has value to you please help Mark out with a donation to help him continue his testing work. 

Best Wishes,
Gary Wagner
www.garywagner.com

Amen to supporting Mark. I just sent in a renewal.

Paul

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "garyphoto6" <gary@...> wrote:

>
> I was just at Aardenburg-imaging.com and they have a new series of Epson K3 tests going on using color tinting when printing. All prints were made with an Epson 3880 on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Ultrasmooth 308. Tests were printed Neutral, Cool, Warm and Sepia.  The first set of results are now posted. It  should be very interesting to see how color tinting will effect the life of the print. As many of you know this site is now a free/donate website. If you visit this site and find the information has value to you please help Mark out with a donation to help him continue his testing work. 
> 
> Best Wishes,
> Gary Wagner
> www.garywagner.com
>

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "garyphoto6" <gary@...> wrote:
>
> I was just at Aardenburg-imaging.com and they have a new series of Epson K3 tests going on using color tinting when printing. All prints were made with an Epson 3880 on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Ultrasmooth 308. Tests were printed Neutral, Cool, Warm and Sepia.  The first set of results are now posted. It  should be very interesting to see how color tinting will effect the life of the print.
>

Besides the ABW presets for Neutral, Cool, Warm, and Sepia, the study also includes the full range of tinting at the extremes the Epson driver allows in ABW mode, i.e,  six additional samples printed at maximum cyan, max red, max green, max magenta, max blue, and max yellow on the ABW color wheel. While most printmakers would find those extremes far too indelicate, Epson software engineers made sure the tinting range extended far enough that no one would complain they wanted more! By testing these boundary conditions along with the poplular preset values, the study should tell us what, if any, reduced lightfastness results may occur when one adds more color to the photo gray colorants in ABW printing mode. By running all the samples side-by-side on one test unit, I've reduced the testing variability as much as possible.  At 10 megalux hours where we are now in test, it's too soon to draw conclusions.  We should see trends emerge over the next year as the testing racks up another 50 megalux hours of exposure and more.  Because yellow is the weakest single colorant in the Epson K3 set, my hypothesis would be that cooler tones. neutrals, and near neutrals will fair better than much warmer tones, but by how much is anybody's guess.

The ID #s for all samples in the study are ID#227-236. You can also filter the database list for [paper/media][contains] "ultrasmooth" to narrow the list down mostly to this study. Click on the report field to download the reports. You need to log in to the site in order to download these reports, but as Gary noted, becoming a member of the AaI&A digital print research program is free.

cheers,
Mark
http:/www.aardenburg-imaging.com