digital negs - why so complicated?

[Ray Heath]

for my first efforts at making high quality digital negs for silver gelatin i assumed i would need Epson, OHP, colour and curves, my first results have made me reconsider

Epson - surely any contemporary inkjet printer will have enough resolution, and i can't afford a new printer

OHP - my HP Photosmart 8230 marks the surface with multiple 'tram' lines, and the image seems to be very thin

colour - a coloured neg seems to 'muck up' the grades on VC paper

curves - curves are actually worthwhile, they allow far more detail in the lighter tones, i used the folberg curve that came with Dan Burkholder's book

my best results have been with coated inkjet paper, but i also like the graininess of plain paper

so please explain why do the inkjet neg making 'experts' make it overly complicated

 

[sanfrancisconudes]

Epson - I've made some surprisingly nice digital negatives from a $80 Canon, but other printers in that class didn't work at all. It's a crap shoot. It's not so much the resolution as that many processes require quite a lot of UV blocking capability and some printers work and some don't. I have no idea if silver gelatin is more or less picky than some of the other processes. You might find it works for some things and not others.

OHP - Office Depot transparencies work well but I've tried others that block tons of UV light. It's a bit of a crap shoot.

color - may or may not help or hurt depending on your printer.

curves - matters sometimes more than others, in particular without a good curve you might very well have some images that work OK and some that don't. As an example contrasty images might look fine.

It's a bit of a crap shoot. If you grab some random printer and some random process and print a negative without doing anything, you'll probably get some kind of semi decent result. Then again maybe you won't, or maybe it will work with some images and not others, and if you're inexperienced it's hard to know where the fault lies. So you start gravitating towards "best practices" which means everybody who does this a lot ends up using a relatively limited set of products and techniques that are known to work.

 

[gr82bart]

Hey Ray,

What's an Epson, OHP and a folberg curve? What's an HP Photosmart 8230? What makes paper VC? Who's Dan Burkholder? Why do you coat paper with inkjet? How do you grade paper? What do grades do?

Your posts sounds complicated, so I'd hate to see what the experts do.

Regards, Art.

 

[Ray Heath]

Hey Ray,

What's an Epson, OHP and a folberg curve? What's an HP Photosmart 8230? What makes paper VC? Who's Dan Burkholder? Why do you coat paper with inkjet? How do you grade paper? What do grades do?

Your posts sounds complicated, so I'd hate to see what the experts do.

Regards, Art.

yeh thanx

 

[gr82bart]

yeh thanx

Well? I am just asking innocently.

Regards, Art.

 

[Ray Heath]

Well? I am just asking innocently.

Regards, Art.

yeh it is already complicated, so my original post asks why make it more so?

 

[Joe Lipka]

It's like anything else in photography. You can make it as complicated or as simple as you want. I have been doing digital negs for about ten years. My approach is very technical and involves reflection densitometry for testing.

One of my friends could no longer get the reversal film he used for years and had to "go digital". I saw his first efforts and they were beautiful. I asked him whose method he followed. He replied that he made his negatives in Corel Paint. He inverted the image and played with the contrast sliders until the image "looked like a good negative" and then he printed it. Works either way.

Silver gelatin prints from inkjet negatives won't look as good because the silver gelatin paper has good resolution. Alternative process prints have a paper surface to "hide" the lack of resolution of the inkjet negative.

 

[donbga]

so please explain why do the inkjet neg making 'experts' make it overly complicated

Ray,

The results you show are anecdotal. Print a digital step tablet and measure and plot the values. The resulting plot will most likely not be linear. That's why a process adjustment curve and/or colorized digital negatives are used.

Don Bryant

 

[Ray Heath]

sorry Don, i don't understand any of that, do you

whether my results are anecdotal or otherwise what i wanted to produce was a reasonable silver gelatin print from an inkjet neg using the simple knowledge and materials i had on hand

i don't normally print step wedges i don't see any aesthetic value in them

 

[donbga]

sorry Don, i don't understand any of that, do you

whether my results are anecdotal or otherwise what i wanted to produce was a reasonable silver gelatin print from an inkjet neg using the simple knowledge and materials i had on hand

i don't normally print step wedges i don't see any aesthetic value in them

Okay if you beleive you have done that then there is no need to discuss this topic, at least with you.

For those of us that do print digital step tablets we know that the tones of the printed step tablet are distorted unless some form of compensation is made to the step tablet to correct that problem.

Don Bryant

 

[sanking]

sorry Don, i don't understand any of that, do you

whether my results are anecdotal or otherwise what i wanted to produce was a reasonable silver gelatin print from an inkjet neg using the simple knowledge and materials i had on hand

i don't normally print step wedges i don't see any aesthetic value in them

One prints step wedges as part of a process of testing and calibrating materials. It is widely practiced in regular printing on both silver papers and with alternaive processes. Folks print step wedges when calibrating digital negatives for the same reason, not because they find aestetic value in doing so.

Your results are definitely anectoal and tell other readers nothing but for the apparent fact that you personally appear pleased with them. That information has limited use for the rest of us, which is too bad because the fact that you are getting satisfactory results from a HP printer is interesting.

Sandy King