Originally Posted by
Sasquatchian
"While your statements about flexibility of curves and reversible changes are all true, I find that with inkjet, I also have to think about things such as bleed, ink viscosity, paper absorbance, metamerism, dithering algorithms, individual ink curve crossovers and a whole host of other things that I don't have to deal with when working with silver gelatin. The focus of your argument for a digital/hybrid workflow entirely revolves around the ease of use that 'curves' give, but you leave out the context in which this happens. It is the context and its vast number of parameters that need to be controlled (partly with curves, partly with other measures) that make the issue complex, and that also make the difference between a mediocre print and an actually good print."
Whatever are you talking about? Bleed? Ink viscosity? Paper absorbance? Really? No, you don't have to worry about ANY of that, maybe in 1995 but not today. A good custom profile takes all of that into consideration and gives you a choice of rendering intents as a bonus. I started making inkjet prints in the late 1990's after over forty years of wet darkroom prints. Both require a certain attention to detail and technique but neither is that hard if you have the patience. Twenty years ago you had to make your own profiles or the results really did suck and maybe your arguments would have been valid, but today it's a far different landscape, pun intended.
I had an exhibit of music portraits a couple of years ago, all printed on an Epson 9900, mostly from drum scanned black and white negs and color transparencies. Set a gallery record for print sales and no one knew they weren't darkroom prints unless they read the print info sheets. Even had people ask me how I managed to make such great looking prints with no dust spots and the dude could not believe it when I told him they were all digital prints. I was a really good darkroom printer but today, my Epson prints are far better, both black and white and color but especially black and white and negs that were once difficult to impossible (and we've all had those) are now better than ever with the ability to render new interpretations that were simply never possible before.
"It's not so difficult in the digital domain to get a nice rendering for a computer screen. Getting it onto paper is a whole different story, and that's a story you don't tell and barely reference. But let's not forget it's a story that is at least as important as the convenience of mouse-clicks when it comes to making quality prints."
Again, and I'll repeat: That might have been true twenty years ago but it is simply not the case today. Get a good monitor calibrator or better yet and Eizo and have some custom profiles made of your favorite paper, control your ambient edit room lighting and have proper print viewing light, which you need for any type of print anyway, and the screen to print matches are really uncanny. Hell, even the screen to offset printing press matches are that good too, even to the point where often I don't even make a proof. But when I do make an Epson proof for offset, the color match to the printed piece is better today than it ever was in the mid 90's using Match Print or Agfa proofs from film. And that's all done with custom profiles. It ain't rocket science. It's all doable with a little effort, and like anything worthwhile, it's worth putting in the effort.
If they still made Forté Poly Warm Tone Semi-Matte paper, I might still be making darkroom prints but now with inkjet, the choice of papers is almost too extensive and I just don't miss being in a wet dark room at all anymore. Not even the romanticized version of it. Do whatever makes you happy and whatever give you what you consider the best prints are but don't lay your own problems with digital on the rest of the world.
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