Anyone having success with digital negs out of a Canon Pro series printer?

[calebarchie]

I would be interested in doing a test if you are up for it... I would send you a image for your method, you make a paper neg and send back to me I will make from the same file two negs one silver and one inkjet and I would make two sets of three prints on glossy silver paper, one set for you and one set for me.. I would be very interested in the resulting prints.

Bob,

I am not currently set up to do such a test unfortunately . All my equipment is in storage whilst completing studies and finishing the container (check sig).

However, it is Michael P. Rosenbergs process that I follow out of all the various systems I have tested. His is specifically tailored to silver gelatin. Perhaps you could ping him for a test? I would be very interested in the results although I don't think it would quite stack up to your real negs through the lambda.

Bests,
C

 

[Bob Carnie]

Ok so I am interested in others here who may use this method as I have seen posts before with claims that the prints are outstanding.... I am skeptical but not naive enough to test it for myself to see visually myself the difference.

Any takers.. I do not know who Michael Rosenberg is and I would not want to make him think I am confrontational.

 

[Adrian Bacon]

I make inkjet digital negative and silver gelatin digital negatives on ortho film.. In both cases I find excellent resuts.

I am a bit confused.. when you say paper negative are you suggesting that the ink is laid down on the paper surface and with that PRINT you make a contact through the print to silver paper receiving the image. I would imagine these prints would
be very soft , but since I have never done one I am curious to learn about this.

That's what I do, via post 18. I wouldn't categorize them as particularly soft. Comparing them to a print made via an enlarger, they're at least on par, though you do need to use paper that doesn't have a rough surface texture, which is why I prefer luster or glossy paper. Inkpress makes a nice luster paper that is RC coated and doesn't have back printing that I've had good success with.

 

[Adrian Bacon]

I would be interested in doing a test if you are up for it... I would send you a image for your method, you make a paper neg and send back to me I will make from the same file two negs one silver and one inkjet and I would make two sets of three prints on glossy silver paper, one set for you and one set for me.. I would be very interested in the resulting prints.

I can do that. I have a canon Pro-1000, I can make the paper negative via the method I outlined in post 18.

 

[Bob Carnie]

I can do that. I have a canon Pro-1000, I can make the paper negative via the method I outlined in post 18.

Ok Adrian could you PM me with your email and we can set up to do this, I would be interested in seeing the difference.. I am moving my Lambda this month to a new location so the silver neg will take longer but we can start the process ..

Bob

 

[calebarchie]

Michaels process is fairly more involved especially regarding tonality and ink calibration just bear that in mind. You would only be assessing the physical aspect of using a paper negative rather than what the system is capable of with Adrians prints.

He doesn't bite.
http://www.mprosenberg.com/digital-negatives

 

[Adrian Bacon]

Ok Adrian could you PM me with your email and we can set up to do this, I would be interested in seeing the difference.. I am moving my Lambda this month to a new location so the silver neg will take longer but we can start the process ..

Bob

I just sent you my email

 

[Adrian Bacon]

Michaels process is fairly more involved especially regarding tonality and ink calibration just bear that in mind. You would only be assessing the physical aspect of using a paper negative rather than what the system is capable of with Adrians prints.

He doesn't bite.
http://www.mprosenberg.com/digital-negatives

My method relies on my printers ability to self calibrate to the paper, which is why it all happens in the realm of an RGB ICC colorspace. Canon’s hardware and software is very good at reproducing what you see on screen with what you get in the print, as long as you’re in a color managed environment.

 

[Bob Carnie]

I just sent you my email

got it.

 

[Lachlan Young]

I suspect Lachlan does not have much experience with digital negs and silver gelatin otherwise he would be aware of the issues of using clear media. The prints are not soft as the ink side is in contact with the paper, however the dot pattern is diffused and no longer visible. The advantages of this is with the correct coated media you can lay much more ink without pooling and those other problems associated with an acetate. You need to do a lost of testing to find the best paper without markings on the back and without course fibre texture, I have found Red River paper to be great for this. It is definitely worth experimenting with this for sure.

To clarify; making a digital negative as you would normally, but on glossy inkjet paper rather than pictorico, not printing on the silver gelatin paper itself. This only works for silver-based and not uv process.

I'm with Bob on the skepticism. I've run lustre paper to make digital negs for silver gelatin & got the paper texture problem, which seemed to go away with Fotospeed digital film. This was several years ago & I haven't had the need to try again. I could run a piece of a different luster paper in my Pro 2000 tomorrow & see how it does. I'm very demanding about the quality level because I have extensive experience of how good the direct output of the Canon is & how crisp a well made enlarger print should be.

 

[calebarchie]

My method relies on my printers ability to self calibrate to the paper, which is why it all happens in the realm of an RGB ICC colorspace. Canon’s hardware and software is very good at reproducing what you see on screen with what you get in the print, as long as you’re in a color managed environment.

Except it needs to be calibrated for transmission or reflection off final print, rather that reflection straight off the printed digital negative. Luckily it seems everything is pretty linear for you, not sure exactly how you are handling the curves though.

I'm with Bob on the skepticism. I've run lustre paper to make digital negs for silver gelatin & got the paper texture problem, which seemed to go away with Fotospeed digital film. This was several years ago & I haven't had the need to try again. I could run a piece of a different luster paper in my Pro 2000 tomorrow & see how it does. I'm very demanding about the quality level because I have extensive experience of how good the direct output of the Canon is & how crisp a well made enlarger print should be.

Sorry, I forgot this was a canon oriented thread. In that case, you won't be able to linearize the inks to best utilise this particular system anyway. Unless perhaps if you used Ergosofts $$$ RIP. Generally when you use acetate/film the dot pattern is pretty pronounced depending on how you have layed the ink down, my experience is limited to Epsons 1.5pl heads with pigment inks and even then I could see the dots clearly. IIRC some canons used dye inks where the effect may be less noticeable, it also depends on the type of silver paper used; really shows on glossy rc compared to fibre.

I had to go through a lot of genuine and obscure brands of paper to find the best one for the job, just look at it with a loupe on a light table to determine any texture or not. If testing again, try go for a glossy resin coated inkjet paper instead.

 

[Adrian Bacon]

Except it needs to be calibrated for transmission or reflection off final print, rather that reflection straight off the printed digital negative. Luckily it seems everything is pretty linear for you, not sure exactly how you are handling the curves though.

Reflective is effectively twice the density of transmissive. If you’re linear in reflective, you’ll also be in transmissive (or close enough to it), just half the density of what you measured.

In terms of whether you can see the dot pattern, i make a 600 pixels per inch print which gets put down on the paper at 2400 dpi. If there is a dot pattern, it’s small enough that I can’t see it in the silver print. I’m not sure what resolution you’re printing at, but 2400 dots per inch is well past where I’d expect to see anything when viewing at normal viewing distances.

 

[calebarchie]

Reflective is effectively twice the density of transmissive. If you’re linear in reflective, you’ll also be in transmissive (or close enough to it), just half the density of what you measured.

In terms of whether you can see the dot pattern, i make a 600 pixels per inch print which gets put down on the paper at 2400 dpi. If there is a dot pattern, it’s small enough that I can’t see it in the silver print. I’m not sure what resolution you’re printing at, but 2400 dots per inch is well past where I’d expect to see anything when viewing at normal viewing distances.

I am getting mixed up with uv process sorry, its been a while since I did all this. Normally, you are supposed to calibrate off the final print eg reflective, but if this works for you then it works. You can only see the dots when the negative is printed on clear film, and I'm inspecting prints with a loupe of course rc glossy where it is most prevalent.

 

[Adrian Bacon]

I am getting mixed up with uv process sorry, its been a while since I did all this. Normally, you are supposed to calibrate off the final print eg reflective, but if this works for you then it works. You can only see the dots when the negative is printed on clear film, and I'm inspecting prints with a loupe of course rc glossy where it is most prevalent.

The key takeaway, is when I make a paper negative, I’m effectively making a black and white inkjet print, except the image I’m printing has been inverted and the full black to full white tonal range has been compressed to match what will print from full black to full white as a grade 3 on Ilford MGIV. I’m not trying to reproduce what an actual film negative would look like because I’m already in an ICC colorspace that has a 0 to 100 percent display luminance range and the image has already been tone curved to fit within that tonal range by the colorspace/editing software. It really is by and large what you see on the display is what you get in the print. If the highlights are too bright on the display, they’ll be too bright on a positive inkjet print, and they’ll be too bright if contact printed via paper negative. If you got the tonal range right on the paper negative, white on the display is white on the silver print, and black on the display is the maximum black you get on the silver print, and all the tones in between fall into their respective place relative to that tonal range on the silver print.

 

[Lachlan Young]

Oh? Like what kind of issues? On what printers? Using what software?

Not looking to get into an argument here, but at least with Canon’s latest Pro (1000,2000,4000) printers, as long as you are within an ICC colorspace, and you use Canon’s printing software, the gamma of the colorspace is automatically corrected for and not a cause for concern, at least in my experience, and I’ve made a ridiculous number of prints.

Re: paper negatives: this is purely just my personal preference because it makes it easy to get reproducible results with my printer, though, all that being said, the only time I go the digital negative route is if the client wants a silver gelatin print for “archival” purposes, otherwise, I just do a standard inkjet black and white print, which Canon’s latest Pro level printers do an excellent job with.

I put this to the test this afternoon on my Pro 2000. It's an excellent printer and I've run kilometres of paper through it, and have a very good idea of how capable it is of delivering a very crisp print with superb colour handling. I used Hahnemühle Photo Luster 260gsm because it was what I had on hand. I used the chroma optimiser (which gave a decently smooth mild lustre finish) and made the final prints on Ilford multigrade classic FB. For the record, the file I used was scanned on a Flextight scanner in good working order and printed at 600ppi. It was from 6x7/ 120 and sized to about 5x7 to make it a reasonably tough test of the claims of tonality etc. I have previously printed the file on various papers on the Canon & optically printed the negative at about the same size in the darkroom on Multigrade Classic.

The tonality and density of the print resulting from the paper negative is not bad at all, and the density is fine. There are flaws related to paper fibre transmission, but those are apparently surmountable. Where the problems lie are in the way the stochastic dots translate into 'grain' in highlights (aka where more ink loading is needed, albeit it is slight enough that many people working with something like 35mm TX might assume that it looks fine) and the fundamental sharpness of the print. It looks good compared to Epson negative scans or enlarger prints made on cheaper, less rigid/ less critically focusable kit, but when examined reasonably closely it has visible sharpness issues compared to enlarger prints made on solid, well focused machines or scans from high end scanning kit - and the output on FB paper from the Lambda for that matter. I may retry next week with a vacuum contact frame, but I'm not sure it'll really make much of a difference. The Canon printers have multiple custom ink limit profiles built in & the heaviest of these might be worth experimenting with to see if it can solve the highlight granularity issue. I should also note that the negative was as sharp as an equivalent positive print off the printer is.

I also tested ProPhoto RGB against one of the 2.2 gamma colourspaces, and as I suspected at the outset, it gives about a grade of difference. The 1.8 lands on G3 and 2.2 on G2. As it should. There's nothing wrong with working towards G3 optimisation, especially as a harder grade will give better acutance etc.

 

[Adrian Bacon]

I put this to the test this afternoon on my Pro 2000. It's an excellent printer and I've run kilometres of paper through it, and have a very good idea of how capable it is of delivering a very crisp print with superb colour handling. I used Hahnemühle Photo Luster 260gsm because it was what I had on hand. I used the chroma optimiser (which gave a decently smooth mild lustre finish) and made the final prints on Ilford multigrade classic FB. For the record, the file I used was scanned on a Flextight scanner in good working order and printed at 600ppi. It was from 6x7/ 120 and sized to about 5x7 to make it a reasonably tough test of the claims of tonality etc. I have previously printed the file on various papers on the Canon & optically printed the negative at about the same size in the darkroom on Multigrade Classic.

The tonality and density of the print resulting from the paper negative is not bad at all, and the density is fine. There are flaws related to paper fibre transmission, but those are apparently surmountable. Where the problems lie are in the way the stochastic dots translate into 'grain' in highlights (aka where more ink loading is needed, albeit it is slight enough that many people working with something like 35mm TX might assume that it looks fine) and the fundamental sharpness of the print. It looks good compared to Epson negative scans or enlarger prints made on cheaper, less rigid/ less critically focusable kit, but when examined reasonably closely it has visible sharpness issues compared to enlarger prints made on solid, well focused machines or scans from high end scanning kit - and the output on FB paper from the Lambda for that matter. I may retry next week with a vacuum contact frame, but I'm not sure it'll really make much of a difference. The Canon printers have multiple custom ink limit profiles built in & the heaviest of these might be worth experimenting with to see if it can solve the highlight granularity issue. I should also note that the negative was as sharp as an equivalent positive print off the printer is.

I also tested ProPhoto RGB against one of the 2.2 gamma colourspaces, and as I suspected at the outset, it gives about a grade of difference. The 1.8 lands on G3 and 2.2 on G2. As it should. There's nothing wrong with working towards G3 optimisation, especially as a harder grade will give better acutance etc.

RE: gamma: Just out of curiosity, what software did you use to print the paper negative with? I always use photoshop and push to Canon’s print studio pro, then from there select the appropriate paper, and then select black and white for the output and the highest print quality with clear coat the entire page.

Some of the sharpness issues you ran into may be due to having paper that is too thick/stiff. I’ve found that the thicker/stiffer the paper negative is, the more pressure you have to apply to get it to uniformly stay in firm contact with the bw paper. It seems counter intuitive, but “cheaper” flimsier paper tends to give better results, as long as there’s no back printing and the paper itself transmits light in a relatively smooth and diffuse manner. Also, just like with anything else, you do need to sharpen the image appropriately for the output before you make the paper negative. The output is the silver print, not the paper negative, so normal print sharpening used for a positive inkjet print won’t necessarily translate to the silver print the same way it does when the same image is printed directly to a positive.

 

[calebarchie]

@Lachlan Young Glad you are finding some success with it, you just need to trial some other papers till you find a good one as Adrian says. Yes the 'grain' is most evident in the area with less link and printing on film exacerbated this along with having less ink-holding capacity/not diffuse in nature. A good RIP can control the way it lays in down QTR for epson but unaware of any canon equivalents, perhaps canons software is good enough who knows. I did mention Ergosoft but that is a whole expensive system for us hobbiest unless you can find a dongle for earlier Prostudio versions but may not support latest printers.

@Adrian Bacon Yes, my epsons don't have a built in densitometer so I have to do all this manually soft-proofing is not as effortless either but a good screen goes a long way (for ptpd atleast). I always do 'contact proofs' before printing anyway that is just me. I generally use QTR to get a base curve then manually adjust with my densitometer from there > if following Rosenburgs systems you then have to go through a bunch of steps to linearize the individual ink densities themselves - I am not sure what the canon RIP is doing under the hood there would interesting to see if it does something similar.