Digital BW, The Print

For those who want to preserve the archival qualities of black and 
white printing that comes with Paul Roark's 3MK+PK+Glop workflow but 
would like to add some subtle color washes to selected parts of 
their images I have developed the following workflow that gives very 
nice results. 

Warning! this procedure requires a minimum of three passes through 
the printer for each image and is probably not something a black & 
white purist would want to consider but I think the results are 
worth it.

Pass1 – Selected tonal area of the image to receive the color wash. 
Pass2 – Straight image print using Paul's workflow
Pass3 – overprint of pure glop/gloss optimiser across the entire 
image

The Pass1 image is created in Photoshop by selecting the area of the 
image to receive color and filling the rest of the image with 100% 
white. The selected area is then lightened so that the maximum tone 
is 1-3K (ie very, very light). I use very simple QTR curves to mix 
MIS yellow and magenta that can print anything from a soft yellow, 
to sepia or soft crimson tones in the final print by varying the mix 
of the two color curves. As the image that is printed is extremely 
light, registration with the second pass is rarely an issue and the 
combined tonal value of the 2 separate passes is not obviously 
darker than a straight single pass print. I also tend to use the 
wash in the background rather than the foreground of my images so 
the tonality of the foreground is preserved.

Pass2 and Pass3 are as per Paul's published procedure.

The completed image can evolke old-world sepia tonality or warm 
selected parts of the image to provide additional interest/contrast. 
Of course you don't have to stick with just yellow and magenta. In 
fact it might be interesting to try Blue washes in skys etc.

I use an Epson R1800 printer with the pizza wheel rollers removed. 
All of the inks are supplied by MIS. I print mainly landscape images.

Hope this is of interest.
cheers
Jim

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

> Hope this is of interest.

That interests me indeed. Not necessarily because of the color washes 
you create in this way, but sometimes a phantasize of other mixed 
method art techniques that would require multiple passing. I wonder: 
how do register the subsequent passes? How accurate can you register?

Joost

Hi Joost
The R1800 does a pretty good job of registration when feeding paper 
through the rear manual paper feed tray using A4 paper. Have not yet 
tried it with larger paper. It is not perfect and sometimes will slip a 
couple of mm which is why I overlap the final pass of glop by 2mm all 
round the image so that I do not have to worry about perfect 
registration.
I would say 95% of the time I have no problems and I have printed 100s 
of images so far. I am careful when I am loading the paper to ensure 
the paper guides are a tight fit with the sides of the paper and I 
always load the paper by applying a little bit of constant downward 
pressure with my hand on the end of the paper until the printer fully 
loads the paper. I am not sure if this helps but I guess I am hoping 
that always using the same loading technique reduces the chance for 
error/misregistration.
cheers
jim




--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "Joost Horsten" 
<j.h.j.h@...> wrote:

>
> --- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "jvircoe" 
> <jvircoe@> wrote:
> 
> > Hope this is of interest.
> 
> That interests me indeed. Not necessarily because of the color washes 
> you create in this way, but sometimes a phantasize of other mixed 
> method art techniques that would require multiple passing. I wonder: 
> how do register the subsequent passes? How accurate can you register?
> 
> Joost
>