EPY Vs. RTPII

[Rod Stewart]

Hello kind people,

I have been shooting EPY for my copy work. Would RTPII offer finer grain? Which do you prefer? Pros/cons? Thank you for your time.

Thank you,
Rod Stewart

[Paul Moshay]

Rod, Since I use 5000k lamps I use EPN, but due to the increasing cost and spotty availability I have been testing Fuji Astia ( RAP ) and I feel it has finer grain and even though it is a higher contrast film, with a bit of "adjusting" it will maks a fine fine art copy film. With high contrast original paintings, those with detail in both the bright and darker sections, I plan to use flashing exposures to reduce the inherent film contrast. I just ordered 1500 sheets of the 4x5 film stock so I will have a lot of time to fine tune the stuff. Paul

[Paul Moshay]

To expand on my post: the Fuji Astia RAP is the 100F. Paul

[Jerry Fusselman]

I wonder if flashing is unnecessary and counterproductive now that we can use Photoshop. Looking at it from an information-theory perspective, it seems to me that flashing must destroy information in the shadow areas. I am guessing that one could easily make a Photoshop action that works better than flashing. The best action might involve Shadow/Highlight in the LAB color space.

Whether you use flashing or Shadow/Highlight to lower contrast, you will probably have weak colors in the shadow area, but they would better in the deepest shadows without flashing. In either case, you could use a simple Dan Margulis technique on the A and B channels (in LAB) to restore realistic color in the shadows. For those who might be afraid: Switching from RGB to LAB and back again causes no visible damage to a photographic image.

This point lessens one of the apparent cons of RTPII for copy work.

[Paul Moshay]

Jerry, you are most probably correct on the PS work with RAP, but I sell 4x5 and 8x10 transparencies to artists and printers and don't do any of the printing myself, so when I get a painting that has such a great density difference with detail in both the dark areas and bright areas I might have to do some flashing to bring detail to the dark areas. Using Kodak EPN it sometimes is quite a stretch for the film, and RAP being a higher contrast film, makes me consider flashing. I still have only run a test of ten sheets and it seems OK so far but there are more difficult paintings to come, I'm sure. I will post my results after the first hundred sheets. Paul

[Rod Stewart]

Mr. Moshay, how best to flash the film? Thanks.