Bit of a ramble here, but I want to put out a few comments about the current state of printmaking and some thoughts.
This post uses digital lanquage but only to to illustrate how both processes are very similar. In my mind the big difference is one process uses super fine pixels and the other uses lumps of grain to create and image.
Something that was a huge discovery for me was the pixels in high end imaging devices are actually smaller than film grain and when made into the print one sees film grain rather than pixels.. this concept for me changed everything.
Soft Light in PS is designed around the concept of local contrast in the mid tone regions.(this is achieved by making any pixel below 50 darker and any pixel above 50 lighter) which when blended in with a brush increases local mid tone contrast. What Tim is doing is creating local contrast in the Shadow Region- He also could do the same thing in the Highlight region by flashing and burn and High filter additional burn ( not to be confused with low filter burn in (which IMO softens and muddy ups the highlights. - for the mid tone regions he would be playing around with his initial contrast ratio of filters.
The use of split filtering techniques, bleaching , flashing are just tools one gathers the more you print- you also need to understand many do not require to add tools and are quite happy with single grade, no bleaching, no flashing, and burning and dodging the hard way.
Darkroom printing IMHO is much more sophisticated than PS in many ways - as we can use many tricks or usage of light that the PS worker would take years to duplicate. I currently print as much digitally as I do analogue and I can say every trick in the darkroom I have tried to duplicate on screen. There is a strong voice on this forum that digital is much easier to control, therefore less valued- I have been working in both arenas for the last 12 years and I can say that both methods are very complex and takes years to master, in fact the simple thing Tim is showing is actually a very defined set of steps in Digital to achieve which take an advanced PS worker to mimic.
One big advantage we have is the use of light, flash, multiple filters, chemical steps, reversal of tones to the point of being specific.
For example I have been doing reversal sabatier / solorization via darkroom for years- for the life of me I cannot reproduce this digitally- we can get close but pixels are on or off. film/paper reacts to light in a much different way and IMO much more creative if understood and manipulated by the printer. I have been asked to solarize some large film that comes out of my Image recorder- I am very interested how the pixel structure will react to a flash of light- I have no idea at this point how it will react.
As you can see , I am of the camp that both processes are very strong and one can learn much from both methods of producing photo prints. I feel I am a much better Analogue printer because of digital concepts, but I can also say I am better at digital as I understand the Analogue methods. ( I grew up with the old methods, but I can say that in the early 80's I could only dream of PS as it is today, there were hints of where we were going and I fully embraced the PS platform.
