Digital BW, The Print

I understand you shouldn't let the hightlights go to 100% RGB, which
would be bare paper. What IS the highest % for good bright highlights,
and still be laying down some ink?

Is this something that has to be tested for each ink/paper combo?

=Alan R.

On Sep 23, 2008, at 9:54:16 PM, handyman856 <avr@...> 
wrote:
I understand you shouldn't let the hightlights go to 100% RGB, which
would be bare paper. What IS the highest % for good bright highlights,
and still be laying down some ink?

Is this something that has to be tested for each ink/paper combo?

There is the issue of what paper white looks like with the ramp of 
grays leading up to it. With a fixed-tone grayscale system, you kind 
of have to choose papers that coordinate with your inktone, or you can 
get glaring differences (blue white paper, under a carbon tone gray 
ramp, for example). I suppose that avoiding paper white would be one 
way to minimize this issue, though I prefer to work with tonable 
systems, and ramp the tone of the grays to paper white in a pleasant 
way. Thats probably the greatest strength of Spyder3Print for B&W 
printing: the highly flexible ramps to paper white, to get the effect 
you want.

Typically there are specular highlights (picture catchlights in the 
eyes, or highlights on chrome) that should go to full white, but there 
are other "whites" that definately should not. Actually, I'm working 
on an interesting tool for photographers that is designed to, among 
other things, assist in defining the specular versus optical whites as 
you are adjusting your images. There should be a press release out 
about that quite soon, and once the release is out, I'll be able to 
talk about it in detail here, if anyone is interested.

--

C. David Tobie

WW Product Technology Manager

Digital Imaging & Home Theater

Datacolor

CDTobie@...

www.datacolor.com/Spyder3


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