Canon iPF & digital negatives

over the past 2 year or so I have been making digital negatives with my iPF 5000 and for the most part I have been okay with it. I have used Charthrob , color arrays, and PDN. I have been most successful with PDN but limited to adding a little contrast agent to get just at paper white with palladium and Kallitype. The printer's driver and LUCIA inks just don't build the UV blocking quite well enough without getting tangled up the printer's pretty rigid profiles. I then bit the bullet and bought TrueBW a fairly inexpensive RIP type program built for Canon iPF printers by Bowhaus. Of course it wasn't specifically designed for printing digital negatives. It was designed to replace the Canon's driver and profiles to allow the user the capability to build their own "profiles" with regards to monochrome printing. I am able to use this program with some similarity in principle with QTR techniques howbeit in an all graphical interface. Basically you control all twelve of the printer's ink channels, the "profiles" are in fact a composite formula script for printer channel controls. You can start de-novo from scratch and build your own profile using the graphical splines and channel level sliders. I chose instead to start with and edit one of the profiles supplied with the program. To answer the question about how much ink can you lay down I did a little experimenting and learned quickly that you can easily over soak any of the versions of Pictorico. Once you have arrived at a formula and strength you print the built in step tablet(target) on your chosen media and print that negative in your your chosen alt. process. Once dry, you have to use a reflection densitometer and read the steps into the program which in turn will compute a linearization curve for you, all in graphic form. You then add the computed curve to the profile you developed. You now have a linearized profile to use with TrueBW to print your digital negatives. As with QTR the original image file is not manipulated by a curve but instead the real work is done in the TrueBW printer's driver. Well now I can make digital negatives suitable for pure palladium and pure kallitype printing. Of course I have a bit of fine tuning to do but I am having fun again. The original TrueBW program had some annoying bugs that needed some work arounds . The latest version has been beefed up and no bugs to report..... sweet. Long story short, if you have a Canon iPF printer and you are sold on the QTR way of making digital negatives and you don't want to buy Epson printer you're in luck.

Interesting stuff. I'm curious, what are the dither patterns like from your printer? Have you had tried any negatives for silver gelatin? I seem to remember reading that the print head on the IPF series had a much finer nozzle array than the x800 series, and have always wondered if that might help to mask dither artifacts on digital negatives.

Long story short, if you have a Canon iPF printer and you are sold on the QTR way of making digital negatives and you don't want to buy Epson printer you're in luck.

Not exactly. You forgot to mention True B&W is available only for Macintosh. I was interested in IJC/OPM years ago but Bowhaus only seemed to support long-obsolete printer models. I finally gave up on them.

Colin Graham said:

Interesting stuff. I'm curious, what are the dither patterns like from your printer? Have you had tried any negatives for silver gelatin? I seem to remember reading that the print head on the IPF series had a much finer nozzle array than the x800 series, and have always wondered if that might help to mask dither artifacts on digital negatives.

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I haven't tried negs for silver gelatin yet. I am just starting to study dither patterns since reading about others experience here on their machines. The standard inkjet prints of course are wonderful using this software. The patterns formed on the digital negs seem very unobstrusive so I have to study them under magnification. Some color combinations will product some "graniness" and this is what I'm studying even now to see what is the ideal color combo. I have done pure Green, pure red, pure yellow negs but what I have noticed is that if grain or dithering issues pop up, the addition of even small amounts of a second color almost always improves things. More on this in a more organized post is in my plans....

pschwart said:

Long story short, if you have a Canon iPF printer and you are sold on the QTR way of making digital negatives and you don't want to buy Epson printer you're in luck.

Not exactly. You forgot to mention True B&W is available only for Macintosh. I was interested in IJC/OPM years ago but Bowhaus only seemed to support long-obsolete printer models. I finally gave up on them.

Click to expand...

sorry should have mentioned that fact .... in the FAQ section of the web site they answer that a pc version of the software is under development .....

Well I got tired of testing and chose the linearized profile I thought looked best in the TrueBW software along with a scanned image I made in the backyard and printed my first pictorial digital negative. I did a standard Kallitype print with it and ... I was quite surprised and pleased ! Obviously I will need to use this profile on a varied number of other image files before I am completely sold but so far so good. The image is in the gallery @ http://www.dpug.org/gallery/showimage.php?i=1209&c=17 .... I am convinced that the software would be a great tool in the hands of people more knowledgeable than I am about making digital negatives. I also believe that it is far easier than PDN to get a handle on. I would like to do a tutorial on how I modified the use of the software to suit the purpose of making digital negatives rather than it's standard purpose of printing monochrome prints. Again, something good for owners of Canon iPF printers !

so far my profile is holding up quite well for making digi negs with TrueBW software. I haven't seen any problems with the fairly large dumps of inkjet pigments using Pictorico. That said I am not confident that the other OHP films will be able to handle the hefty LUCIA pigment loads as well. I will try Canon's clear transparency Film soon although I think there are going to be some puddles . I like that material because it seems to general more local contrast easier than other films....

Your gallery images are looking great. Seems like you've hit on a very workable system for Cannon. Kudos.

Thanks Rob, as soon as I can make a wider subject selection of digital negatives using my current profile I will try to evaluate its strengths and weakness and tweak the profile as needed. I can say that the linearity of the tonal range is very good. The smoothness of the tones is very good. So far I haven't noticed any appreciable dot gain, graininess or dithering issues. Once I get Kallitype dialed in I'll start probing other printing processes ie, albumen and Pd/Pt and cyanotype .