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Thread: Unsharp masking

  1. #61
    bob carnie's Avatar
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    Re: Unsharp masking

    In the book Darkroom 2 Lustrum Press there is a wonderful article by Emmet Gowin about contour masking, very enlightening I must say. my copy is 1978.

    This article clearly shows a method using tissue and clear plastic above the negative plain controlling dodging and burning, taken further one could also dodge contrast up or down depending upon complexities of the image.
    Photoshop tools were designed to mimic these old methods of working..There is not much new with digital other than its tremendous speeding up of the workflow.

  2. #62

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    Re: Unsharp masking

    Thanks for that recommendation, I'll get that book

  3. #63

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    Re: Unsharp masking

    Quote Originally Posted by bob carnie View Post
    In the book Darkroom 2 Lustrum Press there is a wonderful article by Emmet Gowin about contour masking, very enlightening I must say. my copy is 1978.
    Having pulled my copy off the shelf, Gowin said he took it verbatim from Frederick Sommer & Alex Jamison - I've seen people do similar things with lighting gels, cellophane etc - more from a conceptual standpoint than from any notions of formalised masking techniques. Plenty to explore there I think.

    The Lustrum 'Darkroom' books are fantastic books & a wonderful antidote to overly doctrinaire Zone System nonsense.

    The ideological warfare being waged upthread over masking or not masking seems frankly silly - it's a tool that's sometimes the best choice for the job, but equally often not worth the time & effort & terribly easy to overdo into something that looks aesthetically awful. That said, I think there's something worth exploring with using a traditional USM to fit a neg onto a paper about 2-3 grades harder than originally intended - potentially quite an intense visual style.

  4. #64
    Drew Wiley
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    Re: Unsharp masking

    The way dye clouds react is different from how silver clusters do. So let me give just one application among the many possible, relating specifically to b&w printing. That involves the mgt of high contrast scenes. Maybe you've perfected the Zone System to decimel points, you know how to do minus and compensating development, flashing and advanced VC split printing. But with any or all of this, you're taking a deep dish pizza and putting it in a drymount press to obtain a thin crust pizza. You've brought the full range into manageable printing parameters, but at the same time have squished flat all the microtanality in between. With masking you can keep and even enhance both in the same print. I personally mask b&w prints only about 5 percent of the time. But I'll try to save some test strips or pieces of work prints for people to see. I use such techniques to enhance images that already print well, but which might sing even better masked. But only certain images are appropriate.

  5. #65
    Jac@stafford.net's Avatar
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    Re: Unsharp masking

    Does anyone make a simplified unsharp system for a stupid bloke like me? I mean something like a punch with adjustable micro variable offsets, and a printing unit to align them?
    .

  6. #66

    Re: Unsharp masking

    Quote Originally Posted by Drew Wiley View Post
    The way dye clouds react is different from how silver clusters do. So let me give just one application among the many possible, relating specifically to b&w printing. That involves the mgt of high contrast scenes. Maybe you've perfected the Zone System to decimel points, you know how to do minus and compensating development, flashing and advanced VC split printing. But with any or all of this, you're taking a deep dish pizza and putting it in a drymount press to obtain a thin crust pizza. You've brought the full range into manageable printing parameters, but at the same time have squished flat all the microtanality in between. With masking you can keep and even enhance both in the same print. I personally mask b&w prints only about 5 percent of the time. But I'll try to save some test strips or pieces of work prints for people to see. I use such techniques to enhance images that already print well, but which might sing even better masked. But only certain images are appropriate.
    If you only spend 5% of your time making masks for your prints then you have essentially made my point in my earlier analysis. You are in fact a highly efficient practitioner highly skilled in the craft and this whole post needs to be placed into the proper perspective. Of 100 prints you produce, only 5 of them you would consider masking an improvement technique. Conclusion. Masking for you is an outlier and should be properly called for what it is.
    Last edited by Michael Kadillak; 21-Jan-2018 at 20:37. Reason: typo

  7. #67
    Drew Wiley
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    Re: Unsharp masking

    It's just another tool (or tool kit) among many options. But for me, it's relatively instinctive because masking was 100 percent of the time printing Cibachrome. I have three big binders full of densitometer plots, procedural protocols, and sample prints, one volume for Ciba, one for dye transfer, and one for color neg printing. Sheets for black and white masking are also in there; but that's comparatively simple compared to color masking. It can be fun and challenging. With black and white work, it's easy to overdo. But if an unsharp mask itself happens to be too strong, a minute or so in Farmers Reducer is an easy way to fine-tune the density. I certainly don't make a religion out of masking - but what the heck, I've already got the gear and experience.

  8. #68

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    Re: Unsharp masking

    Quote Originally Posted by Drew Wiley View Post
    It's just another tool (or tool kit) among many options. But for me, it's relatively instinctive because masking was 100 percent of the time printing Cibachrome. I have three big binders full of densitometer plots, procedural protocols, and sample prints, one volume for Ciba, one for dye transfer, and one for color neg printing. Sheets for black and white masking are also in there; but that's comparatively simple compared to color masking. It can be fun and challenging. With black and white work, it's easy to overdo. But if an unsharp mask itself happens to be too strong, a minute or so in Farmers Reducer is an easy way to fine-tune the density. I certainly don't make a religion out of masking - but what the heck, I've already got the gear and experience.
    Drew, I figure your workflow... good. When a mask is suitable then with desitometer and graphs you nearly nail the mask you want, (slightly better in the dense side, I guess) and this allows to find the good point, if necessary with some Farmer's...

    This shows how straight it is if looking to graphs and having some practice...

    Seen in that way it is not as challenging as it may look !

  9. #69

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    Re: Unsharp masking

    Quote Originally Posted by Jac@stafford.net View Post
    Does anyone make a simplified unsharp system for a stupid bloke like me? I mean something like a punch with adjustable micro variable offsets, and a printing unit to align them?
    .
    IMHO this is not necessary for UM as common practice is to pin register the negative and the mask before contact exposure, so the registration system keeps it aligned again once the mask developed and sanwidched again with the pin register.

    If you use the Alan Ross described way with selective color masking for VC papers then you can use small "cross hairs" in the negative border before scanning, then the inkjet printed color mask is aligned to the negative sheet using the cross hairs as the reference, also this tells if the mask has to stretched to overlap well. Alignment is performed on a light table with enough precission with fingers, but I guess that a micro adjustment would be useful for smaller formats.

    I think that there are small "cross hairs" printed in transparent labels that are intended for graphic arts, this can be plaed in the negative before scanning...

  10. #70

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    Re: Unsharp masking

    Quote Originally Posted by Michael Kadillak View Post
    If you only spend 5% of your time making masks for your prints then you have essentially made my point in my earlier analysis. You are in fact a highly efficient practitioner highly skilled in the craft and this whole post needs to be placed into the proper perspective. Of 100 prints you produce, only 5 of them you would consider masking an improvement technique. Conclusion. Masking for you is an outlier and should be properly called for what it is.
    I'm sorry but this is like stating that because you only use the yellow #8 filter 5% of the time that you don't really need filters except for when things go wrong. Masking is a tool. Perfect negatives are meaningless if you can't print them worth a darn, and things have changed enormously in the past 20 years. The choice of papers is a FAR cry from what it used to be, so IMHO the need for masking is more relevant now than in the past.

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