Hi,

(Mods, feel free to move this if necessary)

Been gone for a long time. Grad school finished. Then I found myself working for a print house... suddenly helping clients realize their photos became more important than realizing my own photos . . . . this is where the following question comes from.

I'm trying to figure out the bestist, most-"neutral" way to duplicate the 51-STEP-Gray (image attached) image in the darkroom.

The 51Step goes from 255/255/255 to 0/0/0 in roughly steps of 5/5/5. Theoretically when printed digitally all the steps should be even (making a real pretty and straight L curve). I'd like to duplicate that as best as possible on silver paper so that I can harvest that data (LAB)

Now, I realize that dev. combos and toning and all that jazz will make the image 51-Step come out differently. I'm ok with that. What I'm hoping to avoid is the changes in density that would occur by using filters.

I've come up with 2 solutions:

1) Have a neg made from the .tif, print it with no filter in the enlarger and develop it as I normally would.

2) Eff the neg... Using a set fstop figure out how long it takes me to get to photo black. Divide that time by 50 and then essentially make a 51-Step Test Strip.


Can ya'll see where I'm going with this? Am I making sense?

Thanks
T