Cibachrome vs Digital Prints

[Greg Lockrey]

Are you talking about detail that can be seen with a loupe or with the naked eye?

If you're talking about a loupe, then I have no doubt that ciba would be a bit better than standard glossy paper and quite a bit better than cotton art paper.

But all these substrates can show finer detail than anyone can see with the naked eye. This can easily be demonstrated theoretically or with a simple hands-on test. Which means that differences in perceived sharpness are a factor of contrast at specific spatial frequencies ... easy to control with software, interesting to control with traditional masks!

Oh come on Paul.... you really aren't looking at a print unless you have your nose smearing the glass and a 10x loupe jammed into your eye.

[paulr]

Oh come on Paul.... you really aren't looking at a print unless you have your nose smearing the glass and a 10x loupe jammed into your eye.

I admit I like doing that!

But I started noticing that no one else looked at my prints like that. Ever.

[Greg Lockrey]

Same here.... I noticed that you have about 12 seconds of attention for a good print and 20 seconds for a great one. The observer tends to stand 2.5 times the diagonal from the piece.

[bob carnie]

I think I fit into this group.

I have printed Cibas for 25 years, and indeed made complicated masks right down to highlight separation holding masks.
I have worked on Durst 8x10's *still do* and now Durst Lambda. ( In total over 1 million dollars of gear that today I would be lucky to get 5% on the dollar.
I can think of only a few labs or operators who have daily seen the difference of traditional enlarger Cibachrome and Digital Cibachromes*Lambda,Chromira or Lightjet*
In Canada it would be Jeff Wall and Elevator*my lab*
In USA it would be Hance Partner's , Lamont Imaging and a few others .
In total maybe 10 technicians.
We stopped doing Cibachromes last year *enlarger and lambda* due to lack of demand, spotty service by the manufacturer, and cost of keeping the line going.
A digital cibachrome in my opinion totally blows away a enlarger cibachrome, due to controls in PS.
If one is doing extreme masking for the transparancy and multiple hits on the enlarger , and if all this can be kept clean during the process then an enlarger cibachrome matches a excellent digital cibachrome.

I have looked at Cibas for years(with a 10xloupe) and there is something to be said for the Cibachromes paticular colour pallette, but they certainly are not sharper than lets say Fujiflex or metallic *Kodak , Fuji* colour prints.
There is a weight to them that I like and a range of subtle colours that is hard to reproduce with any other process... but that could be said about any printing process.
There is something about Photo Rag Inkjet colour gamut that is compelling and nearly impossible to get with other media.

In fact we bought the Lambda specifically after we ran a series of cibachromes on our enlargers and a friendly labs Lambda, and to our eyes could not see the difference.
I am pretty much a print sniffer and what I see today from various output is pretty awesome and what a great time we are living in.

You need to compare apples to apples. A lot of transparencies are sharper than they
were twenty or thirty years ago. My own prints are a lot sharper than they were then too. Paper is simply incapable of holding the same level of fine detail as polyester. I am friends with some of the best of the best in digital printing - really
nitpicky types who charge serious money for their advice. And I live in the epicenter
of this kind of technology. I also have friends who have invested literally millions in
the very best of both optical and digital equipment (I'm talking enlargers in the six
figure range, and digital equipment far more expensive than that). They'd strongly
take my side in this question, because they know the limits of both approaches. I'd have to flip the coin over, and bet that you've never seen a really good Ciba. Beautiful prints can be done either way - I don't really care, but no sense prolonging a misconception either.

[paulr]

I am pretty much a print sniffer and what I see today from various output is pretty awesome and what a great time we are living in.

Cheers to that!

[Drew Wiley]

Ciba can indeed be printed digitally, though a bit of resolution is sacrificed from large
format originals, using either Chromira (bit of a grainy appearance) or Lightjet, etc.,
but nowadays is less convenient than doing something analogous on Fuji Supergloss,
which is easier to correct for gamut, cheaper, and RA4 compatible. With polyester you
get something very analogous to film itself, with resolution limited almost at a molecular
dye-cloud level. Optics can potentially resolve things very, very fine. Ever hear of a
microdot? Now in the real world most people don't need or expect that level of detail,
and most of our large-format originals have depth of field issues, but probably also
certain areas that are truly in focus and contain a lot of detail. I am certainly not
exclusive in my opinion of what prints should look like - I often print poetic 35mm shots
where nothing can be said to be highly detailed - but one of the options I do like is to
make extremely detailed color prints which are almost like contact prints. I can tell the
difference and so can my potential clients. At this stage of the game, no type of digital
printing or paper medium can achieve the same look. Approximate it, yes; make the
correction of gamut and contrast much easier, yes; but match it, no. So I intend to
make use of Ciba while it's still somewhat around. That's all. It would be nice to make
a few converts, so that this option doesn't die off completely from too narrow a market
- but photography is inevitably about constant change and adapting to it!

[Tyler Boley]

The current state of the art of inkjet printing, by it's very nature, can not resolve original image information to the paper as well as the best light sensitive print materials, including cibachrome. How noticeable this is to the critical viewer's eye, and which is considered more satisfying depends on many many things outside the scope of the thread.
To each their own, Chris Burkett has achived an impressive look, subtable to his vision, at a very high level of expertise. Subjectively, I've never responded to Cibachromes, and find the new print materials absolutely gorgeous. Still, we have far to go to match the pure photographic outstanding performance of our light sensitive traditional craft. If you can skip the the bottom of this arduous read, you will see a Ciba sample to compare to the inkjet output earlier in the write-up.
http://www.custom-digital.com/2008/0...lity-with-ink/
Unfortunately it was a very old print, made with an an enlarger with all the potential variables involved with that. Wish I had a contact print to compare for the post.
I'm making no judgment here, just passing on info relevant to the thread.
Tyler

[rdenney]

Approximate it, yes; make the
correction of gamut and contrast much easier, yes; but match it, no.

I think all would agree. But is this a relevant measure? If that's the look you want, then nothing else will do. I wonder if sometimes we fall in love with a look, based on familiarity or mutual struggle or great mastery, and apply a value to that look based solely on that emotional bond. Yes, clients can be persuaded to share that bond if the photographer is good at expressing it.

(I'm not talking about alternative processes, where a particular artistic objective is being sought by a particular manipulation of a particular process.)

Based solely on the look of the print, I suspect most people, even sophisticated print buyers, would look for other aspects, such as the power of the image itself. Does that power depend on the difference between a state-of-the-art Ciba print and a state-of-the-art Inkjet print? I have a hard time believing that.

We spend an awful lot of time trying to prove that digital prints can be just like traditional prints. We end up giving up the flexibility that the digital process gives us. An example is a recent large black-and-white print that I've been working on for the last couple of weeks. I spent a little time trying to emulate the exact look of selenium toning using ABW, when I realized that this was a fruitless exercise. It occurred to me that the exact look of selenium toning was not that important to me, even when I made traditional prints that I toned in selenium. I toned them mostly to make sure I didn't have any green in the tones, and also to add richness to the blacks. There are a lot of tints that will do that, not just the specific result of traditional selenium toning. I ended up adding a bit of magenta, and that fulfilled my actual requirements without duplicating the design of the traditional process. When we focus on the end rather than the means, we might find that for many of our purposes (even our most critical purposes), the digital prints get us closer to our visualization and therefore provide significant advantages over traditional prints, and that the aspects of the unique look of a given traditional process that we can't match do not actually trace to our requirements.

Rick "whose inkjet prints seem sharper than enlarger prints, but not based on how they look under a loupe" Denney

[Drew Wiley]

Well, Cibas look "different", and distinction is always a plus in a crowded market. But I'd
like to switch gears a bit and ask if any of you have worked with the newer Fuji Supergloss polyester material. I was printing on it directly from negs. They claim it is no longer analog compatible, and available only in rolls. But I don't see much difference
except that the toe is steeper and overall gamma a tad higher. This would be an improvement in my opinion, because it was too flat before, even for optical enlargement (compared to Ciba), and I would prefer something amenable to masking.
Since I print using narrow-band additive filters, I don't see what the difference would
be, and why it couldn't be printed on my enlargers. I know that they altered the curve
shape a bit to get deeper blacks, but that's fine with me. Beautiful medium in its own
right. Doesn't static mount well, but a thicker base than Ciba, and with the capacity
for the same extraordinary detail (with large format you generally don't have to worry
much about tranny versus color neg in terms of sharpness, especially with 8x10!).
Any INFORMED opinions out there?

[rdenney]

If you can skip the the bottom of this arduous read, you will see a Ciba sample to compare to the inkjet output earlier in the write-up.
http://www.custom-digital.com/2008/0...lity-with-ink/

To me, a relevant quote from that blog posting is this:

it’s a completely different animal from the Cibachrome, and intended to be so.

Just as with any medium, it's more suited to our purposes in some ways and perhaps less suited in others, depending on what our purposes are.

In your first comparison, comparing the red-to-black grad with RIP to one using an Epson driver, the grain of the dithering process was indeed more pronounced with the Epson driver. I note that the display on my monitor is 5x enlargement of the print. When I moved back to five times my close inspection distance to restore the magnification to the original, I could no longer tell the difference. In fact, the RIP grad seemed to show a little banding that the Epson grad didn't, though that could just as easily be my monitor, of course.

In the comparison between the scan and the Ciba print, you describe the Ciba print (despite the acknowledged weakness of the comparison) as more "photographic".

That reminds me of a comparison I have made between a Yosemite Special Edition print (Tenaya Creek and Dogwoods) to a fine reproduction in Yosemite and the Range of Light. The reproduction was sharper at close inspection distance (unaided, of course). So, I looked again with a magnifying glass to figure out why. The half-tone screen was creating false edges around the dogwood leaves that were specular highlights in the print. At some point, the screen was unable to make a smaller dot, and a jump in tone occurred between that and paper white. The photographic print still showed gradation there, but it took a magnifier to see what was happening. To the unaided eye (even a photographer's eye), the reproduction was crisper. (This, by the way, is why I think the best inkjet prints seem to have more detail than Cibas--they don't when inspected with a loupe, but they seem to at unaided close inspection distance.) There is no doubt that the Special Edition print is more "photographic". Of course, our inkjet prints have far finer dithering patterns than even the high-quality duotone screening used in Yosemite..., so this effect will be less apparent. When comparing my own prints (not Ciba, but other traditional enlarger prints), a 5x loupe isn't enough to see what's going on.

Rick "inspecting his navel" Denney