One year ago today, I posted to this group an offer to share BTNS with any brave soul willing to try a completely new way of calibrating digital negatives. Unlike other calibration methods, BTNS is based on a mathematical model of tone reproduction. I began work on BTNS nearly five years ago in response to a challenge to apply the ideas of Phil Davis in his 1981 book Beyond the Zone System to the hybrid digital/analog darkroom. Since then, BTNS has been used for all the cyanotypes (classic, new, and simple), platinum/palladium, and (most recently, by Sandy King) for carbon transfer. A complete BTNS calibration takes only one trip to the darkroom. This low calibration overhead encourages experimentation.
BTNS has some rather unusual hardware requirements compared with other methods. You'll need a uv transmission densitometer, a spectrocolorimeter, a set of Stouffer step wedges, and a printer that can adjust ink density (any Epson 3K printer will do, since BTNS does not use QTR). The software runs on Windows and Mac and requires Excel 2016 or later. Anyone who has used Phil Davis’s BTZS system will already have met the hardware requirements and will find BTNS to be a logical evolution of the concepts introduced in BTZS.
If you're interested in learning more about BTNS, let me know. We'll schedule a demo over zoom and I'll send you the BTNS manual.
BTNS has some rather unusual hardware requirements compared with other methods. You'll need a uv transmission densitometer, a spectrocolorimeter, a set of Stouffer step wedges, and a printer that can adjust ink density (any Epson 3K printer will do, since BTNS does not use QTR). The software runs on Windows and Mac and requires Excel 2016 or later. Anyone who has used Phil Davis’s BTZS system will already have met the hardware requirements and will find BTNS to be a logical evolution of the concepts introduced in BTZS.
If you're interested in learning more about BTNS, let me know. We'll schedule a demo over zoom and I'll send you the BTNS manual.