Digital BW, The Print

With all of this discussion concerning dots, grain, BO printing, 
etc., I thought I'd share a bit of my experience using quads. I 
currently am printing with an 1160 using the VM inkset (substituting 
the Gen 4 black for MIS black) and using Paul's curves with some 
adjustments some minor adjusts, along with some adjustments to 
contrast and brightness in the printer dialog box. My papers have 
been EAM, EEM, and Satine. Anyway, I have no problems with dots, 
apparent grain, posterization, digital artifacts if 

1) I start out with a correctly exposed, developed, and scanned 
negative. What I mean by correct is that the image that results from 
the scan must have little or no noise in the shadows and no blocked 
highlights. Also, there should be no muddieness in the grays. 
Further, grain must not be clumpy but, rather, orderly -- best, 
actually, when grain is minimal but orderly. (BTW, I'm working in 
35mm and use a Sprintscan 4000) The negatives that come closest to 
these conditions for me have been Agfa APX 25 (developed in Rodinal 
or TMAX developer) and TMY (developed in Xtol or Tmax developer). 
I've experienced good results with other film-developer combinations, 
but these two seem to have worked best for me.

2) I make minimal changes to the scanned image. Global level/curve 
changes should not create local tonal imbalances, noise, etc. If 
changes to specific areas are need, I create a duplicate image, 
change that image to 8-bit to enable all tool use & layers, create a 
layer mask to select the area I want changed, save the selection, 
THEN load that selection into my original 16-bit image and make the 
appropriate curve adjustments to change that area. Unsharp mask 
should be used sparingly -- I sometimes don't use it at all -- 
because it can destroy tonal subtlities as well as create artifacts.

3) For printing, I try to keep my file size above around 460 ppi 
(usually around 720). In general (and obviously), the greater the 
resolution and the finer the grain, the larger you can go -- with APX 
25 I have no problems printing 12x8 and getting acceptable results, 
with 400 speed film printing at that size becomes more problematic.

Chris Hargens