Bob and George,
I would be glad to print negatives for you both on 16x20 media. Only pay for shipping. I have done this for others.
Mike
Bob and George,
I would be glad to print negatives for you both on 16x20 media. Only pay for shipping. I have done this for others.
Mike
Ok - I will send you back the neg I make same size so you can see what I am up too.
George if you want to supply the image I am ok with that as well
BobOriginally Posted by Michael Rosenberg
I would love to test your system as well Walker.
let me know
thanks
Bob
Hey Michael I see your from the Durham NC area, two of my friends have just moved there and are setting up a bit of an art center.
I hope to visit them soon.
Bob
Bob,
Please stop by when you visit. Where are they setting up the art center? I am in a gallery in downtown Durham. Have them contact me.
Bob and George,
I think the best way to go is for each of you to put an image in DropBox for me to download. Then I will print them out and send you the negatives as well as a negative of the target for you to establish the exposure and development times.
BTW, the curves work for all x880 printers (I have the 4880 and the 7880), and presumably the newer printers if you don't use the other ink channels.
Mike
Mike
Thank you Walter and Mike. I have been off the grid all day. I'll send a fuller reply tomorrow. Regards, George
I don't check the LF forums all that often and have some things to add. I have been working on a system very similar to what Walker has developed for Piezography. The way he uses linearize-quad and ICC profiles is kinda genius. I built my own quad linearizer before Roy released the linearize-quad app and just use my own for everything now—prints and a modified one for negatives. The quad files from my smoothed/linearized QTR curves look pretty different than the PiezoDN curves and I am anxious to see how differently they end up printing.
129 steps: I can say that using 128-256 steps is definitely better than 21 and 51 steps—not so much for linearizing the midtones (which is the easy part) but for getting perfect gradations from 0%-2% and 98-100%. That is where the extra steps that break the gray scale into less that 1% increments is really helpful. I also have to add that the data smoothing with that many steps is totally necessary—I had the same issue with my system at first—but it doesn't do anything to drastically alter the shape of the linearization curve that is created.
I did some tests a few weeks ago on Lodima contact printing paper using 5 shades of selenium inks and my method of making smoothed curves and my own linearizer (without the simultaneous GO). The subtle highlights and shadows are perfectly smooth, but some of the tones between 40%-60% still have a grainy look similar to what I found with the older PZDN inkset and a Photoshop correction curve. I am setting up a 1430 tomorrow and a 3800 with the new PiezoDN on Monday for a few quick initial tests, but am then setting up a second 9900 as soon as possible so I can to get closer to the ideal printing conditions. My hope is that with more overlap along the whole scale the new PiezoDN system will get rid of that graininess. I realize the 4900-9900s might be ideal, but in some ways using the 3800 is a good real world test of the profiling system as a whole.
M Rosenberg: I saw your prints several years ago at the Michael and Paula workshops... How do your gelatin silver prints from your digital negatives compare to those analog enlargements?
Walker and Bob Carnie: If I can get a negative linearized for Lodima with the new PiezoDN system when I am in the darkroom monday or tuesday I will send up a few sample prints.
Personal Site — http://www.richardboutwell.com
Black and White Aesthetics, Editing, and Printing — http://www.BWMastery.com
Richard,
Good to hear from you! I have kept up with you on your web site over the past few years.
The images with the digital negatives are the same quality in terms of grain, smoothness of transition of tones, and identical in that you can't tell it is from a DN. In another sense they are better because the image is not projected through an enlarger lens and does not suffer from diffraction, and thus resolution is better; but I can also control sharpness through PS. It is possible to make a digital negative that is too sharp. Of course when I printed before, particularly the Tobacco Factory series, I was dealihg with large contrast ranges and had to control for shadow and highlight details by using USM, sharp masks, dodge masks, and burn masks,
The issue of grain was a problem I encountered when starting out. I realized that there was two causes of grain: First was depositing enough ink in the lighter tones to result in the ink droplets to overlap on a microscopic scale (certain the drops from the print heads were very fine). The second was I needed a negative material with a surface structure that allowed more ink to be deposited and dry quickly. For the latter, I found that OHP and white film had a coarse structure (I read up on this), I realized that glossy thin (cheap) print paper had the desired surface structure and works very well. The only caveat is that it takes a little longer for exposure - a non-issue. The paper is UV opaque, and so won't work for alt-processes.
The problem of having enough ink overlap and reduce grain was solved when I introduced a linearized curve in the ink descriptor. Look at the ink curve I posted earlier - you can see all the inks overlap over the full range of the negative, and differ only in slope of the individual inks. Sandy adapted part of my system for making carbon prints introducing a curve in the ink descriptor of a single ink and saw a decrease in grain in his prints. Ron Reeder had done the same for a UV blocking ink to get better shadow detail in his prints.
The need in many systems to perform extensive linearization is be because the ink profiles were adapted from those used for digital prints, where inks rise and fall on the x axis. Linearization in gray scale is an attempt to change the extent of overlap of the curves over the range of negative tonalities, complicated by the fact that not all colors block light equally. I discuss this more fully with examples in my monograph (available for download free from my web site). By the way, it took me two rounds to linearize, and any further attempts just made me realize that I was measuring the paper curve.
Mike
Hi Richard
Michael sent me a box of Lodima to test last week, what I would like to see is a test negative on the different systems as well as my image setter to compare on different papers.
I also promised him to output a negative for you to test.
Durst is coming tomorrow to install my blue laser and knock on wood I will be back up and running within weeks for film output.
I think we are all going at the same thing here, very interesting , as I get lost in the inkjet techno talk, but I have been creating image via neg or pos since 1976 printing for others, so
my strengths are in working the materials, thank goodness for the geeks of the world to figure out the math. Ron came to my shop and has been a strength for us for years, as well Sandy
always has the patience to walk me through all the tech talk.
For those making prints from digital negatives to silver I think the true test is a glossy NOT matt paper.
I have made 16 x20 prints on Ilford Warmtone Glossy, using a 4 x5 negative, then scanned the negative and made an exact size silver neg from my image setter and then contacted the negative onto Ilford Warmtone Glossy.
The resulting prints were an eyeopener for me as they were indistinguishable to my eyes, the photographer and others who have seen this.
I would love to sent a file around to others here to make their negatives to a common size then I will print them on Ilford Warmtone Gloss. Very open then to send all the negs to another worker to
do the same test on their paper of choice.
For me the proof will be on the print. I have noticed with pt pd and rag textured silver some leeway to great results, In my darkroom I have not seen the same results on glossy silver paper.
Must be noted I made the digital negs on a epson 7800 using Ron/Roy's QTR program, and I will openly admit that I believe there are others posting here that have a better handle on ink jet negatives than
I did three years ago and probably today, It would be great to be able to offer both types of negatives to my clients as output.
Anyone notice a problem with images transferring to one another when stacking a grouping of separations within the same folder?. I am using matt inks on Pictorico Premium Overhead material
and if I do not keep the negs separated for a good while I find image transfer from one another. Solved this by complete separation and sleeves for each neg, but a real can of whoopass about three months ago
when I was preparing a 60 print show. Lots of Redo's .
Re: new digital neg system from cone
((( Richard,
Good to hear from you! I have kept up with you on your web site over the past few years.
The images with the digital negatives are the same quality in terms of grain, smoothness of transition of tones, and identical in that you can't tell it is from a DN. In another sense they are better because the image is not projected through an enlarger lens and does not suffer from diffraction, and thus resolution is better; but I can also control sharpness through PS. It is possible to make a digital negative that is too sharp. Of course when I printed before, particularly the Tobacco Factory series, I was dealihg with large contrast ranges and had to control for shadow and highlight details by using USM, sharp masks, dodge masks, and burn masks,}}}}}
Hi Richard was your project on Gloss or Matt paper?, I think Sandy mentioned he attended a show and was very complimentary of the prints. Somehow I think your work was it.
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