Platinum Palladium Printer
The Cunningham Press
This is a scan of a digital negative step wedge which was printed onto some Permajet digital negative film. I scanned this at 2400ppi on an Epson V800 directly onto the scanner bed using the Film with Area Guide setting. No adjustments were made in the scanner software.
Looking at the 100% crop of one of the patches, it looks very noisy, is this normal when scanned under these conditions ?
Gray Scale Step Wedge
100% Crop of the lightest patch
It can be sharpened
From this sample it's clear what the inkjet does.
I guess you place the ink side in contact with paper...
If an inkjet has quality enough for you then the contact print will have near the same.
A contact print from the silver negative may look sharp even when seen with a x8 magnifier, but as human vision has limits going beyond centain point additional quality is not perceived.
My view is that your method is a good way to print on silver...
Anyway you may be also interested in reviewing the method Alan Ross decribes in his papers and workshops, that also offers an amazing degree of control while preserving the optical crafting nature of the print.
One question, what max density do you obtain with your printer on the transparency ?
One thing that I haven't seen mentioned throughout this thread is the printer itself. I have played with Ian's process to craft a digital neg for silver contact printing and the result from my Epson R2880 is quite different than Ian's using his 3880 to print the neg. My prints looks as if they were shot on ISO 3200 film, while Ian's looks like about an ISO 100 film. He actually sent me one of his step wedges to print in my own darkroom. His results are acceptable IMO; mine are not.
To be honest, the outcome I witnessed for myself was/is confusing to me, since the R2880 prints at twice the resolution of a 3880 and with a slightly smaller droplet size! Same inkset. The only reason I could come up with for the difference in our results is that the 3880 (being manufactured to tighter tolerances and having a much larger printhead) lays ink down differently vs the R2880. Long story short, I suspect the printer has a lot to do with success.
And, before anybody asks... I printed my negs at the highest resolution / quality possible on my R2880.
This is a straight reflective scan of a contact print I made on Ilford Pearl RC from a digital negative printed onto Permajet Transfer Film from the Epson R3880 using the Epson ABW Driver.
My darkroom skills are quite poor to be honest as I only started tinkering with darkroom work 12 months ago, so someone with more darkroom experience would probably be able to get more from the contact print.
This is the correction curve I used.
The correction curve was generated from a Photoshop script I made several months ago
Amazing! I have been trying for eons to print a step test and build a curve using corel paintshop pro. Out of curiosity I went to you tube and had a look at photoshop cc and the script for building a digital curve. How easy is that! I think perhaps it is time to stop being stubborn and subscribe to photoshop!
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