Katie

Excellent, look forward to seeing it in person this weekend

Excellent!

Very well done, as always, ian!

Ian,
I just started using arches plantine and wasn't happy with the density or the speckling I was getting by using a brush. I switched to using a glass rod which seem to allow more material to saturate the paper. Now I like the paper because of the density in the dark areas and the border which I use to judge how dense it can get. And the tonal range seem really nice. I will be scanning and placing that pic on the site soon.

michael andersen

Ian,
what do you mean by composite scan. Are you using a polaroid and scanning then making a larger neg. or is this a 11x14 neg versing the earlier one that was a polaroid. confused?

I like both images for what they are. non comparible. I do both silver and PT/PD on the same negative for different reasons and looks. and on Some both work very will.
mike a

Lovely Ian.

Hi Michael. By "composite scan" I mean that I've scanned both ends of the print seperately then glued them together in Photoshop. It's too big to scan in one pass with my scanner. I also used to have density problems with Arches Platine. It wasn't the brush though, it was simply using too little solution - nowadays I use 2cc of solution for a 10x8.

Ian, just to be clear, I don't discount the achievement in making this image using an 11x14 camera (and I'm guessing you must be using some hefty strobes to get the DOF!), my point is the scan on the screen can't convey more than a miniscule fraction of the particular quality of an 11x14 Pt process contact print so we can't comment usefully on any aspects of print quality in this critique gallery. The digicam reference was to point out how little of the print quality can be conveyed in a small screen image and wasn't relevant to the content of the image.

let me join the chorus of admirers of this image -- very nicely composed, lots of energy and tension, and i love the high key feel ...... i also emphathize with you over the hassles of scanning pt/pd in rgb -- they sometimes come out too magenta, sometimes too green, and almost always develop weird color artifacts once converted to jpgs and reopened ..... for that reason i'm going to post them in grayscale for a while till i can figure it out .... again, thanks for the great image and the discussion

rich

Sorry DaveOttawa, I misunderstood you. You're right: print quality requires a leap of faith that is difficult unless you've seen an original to compare it to.

rbergeman - with a calibrated scanner I get reasonably consistent results from my Photoshop workflow. I usually include a bit of pure white in the scan which I use with the Curves "Set White Point" tool (that gets rid of most of the scanner's colour aberations, or at least gets the image fit for purpose). Then I use another Curves layer to match the contrast as best I can. And finally I use a Hue/Saturation layer to desaturate the scan by 10% to 30%. Very rarely do I need to do any colour changes - if I do then I use very small tweaks with a Colour Balance layer. Hope that helps.