Scanning pt/pd prints & paper texture

Hi, I'm trying to scan pt/pd prints but it seems the scanner is picking up the paper texture along with the images. Does anyone here know how I can avoid this problem, or instruct me how the ugly texture can be removed from the scanned images? I'm using Samsung SCX 4200 and I'm not good with computing work. I'm editing (newbies too) with Gimp II software. Thanks for the help!

Scan at a much higher resolution than you need, then downsample. This helps a bit... OR, scan the negative and Gimp it to look like a pt/pd print.

I was talking recently to a photographer who is rather famous for his palladium prints and who has now completed two books. He admitted that he found that it was not possible to produce good scans for his book from original palladium prints. Instead, the books were produced from silver prints; the printer selectd inks to emulate palladium prints.

That's right, Tillman did not use pt/pd prints to make the images in his books.

I think many people use a similar approach, because the texture is too great and detracts from the reproduction when in book form.

I have heard that some people have the print photographerd with a high quality digital scanning back, and that supposedly helps remove some of the problem, but I doubt it will eliminate it.

I normally scan the negatives and then duplicate the tones of the print digitally, and apply a similar color to the prints as well. I think this is the best approach for in-house work. When I heard of Tillman's approach, I was suprised that he made silver prints, as I think that is a compromise due to the inherent differences that the papers produce.

It does make good sense when sending out for publishing though, because the printer simply has to match the print for tonality, rather than start with a digitial file from the artist, which would require them to go around and around until they get to a satisfactory result.

Tillman's sense of quality is superb, so the results he achieved must have satisfied him and made that approach the best to obtain the results he wanted in the book, even though it probably took considerably more work on his part to achieve the results in the prints that he desired.


---Michael

Thanks very much for the information. Thought I was the only one here without an answer to the print scanning problem. Think I'll go the Kerik way to scan negatives instead. Appreciate it!

Michael Mutmansky said:

Tillman's sense of quality is superb....

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No doubt.

I'm not sure how I feel about trying to emulate a platinum print with editing software though. Part of the subtle beauty of a platinum print IMO is in the textures of the paper used and the tonal range acheived. It is what it is and faking it seems useless. Why bother calling it a platinum then? It is even farther removed from what it is than any other digitized photo. For instance, I had never heard of Tillman Crane until I was sent his book by the printer. I looked at the images and neglected to read any of the text. I was completely unaware that he was a platinum printer until it was pointed out later when I was told of the troubles with reproduction. There was nothing in those reproductions that made me think platinum other that the fact they used no varnish and left the paper with a matt finish.

Bill

Bill -

I think I agree with you, but let me try to express my thoughts in a slightly different way.

As a photographer, I know and appreciate the difference between silver prints, platinum/palladium prints, kallitypes, cyanotypes, etc. And because I understand and respect the qualities inherent in those processes, and possibly also because I tend to be an anal-retentive esthete, I agree that using some kind of trickery to fake the appearance of a more complex process is undesirable.

But the situation for Joe Six-Pack is different. The average lay person doesn't know the distinctions between the various means to the common end of getting an on paper. A great example of that is the fact that for the vast majority of people today, a digital ink-jet print is fully equivalent to a print produced in a traditional chemical darkroom.

What the lay person MAY be able to discern, however, are differences in the visual and artistic impact of an image that ultimately are traceable to the technical process used to arrive at the image - tonal warmth, tonal scale, the image depth characteristic of processes in which sensitized solutions become embedded within, rather than on the surface of, the paper substrate, etc. Perceiving that these differences exist is not the same thing as recognizing or appreciating the technical processes that led to them.

Michael's comment about Tillman's obsession with quality is absolutely correct - I've seen his palladium prints, and they are breathtakingly gorgious. The reproductions in his book, while very good, can't even begin to compare with the actual prints. But images in his books aren't palladium, but through careful craftsmanship they do manage to convey an approximation of the tonalities and depth of the real images.

The original question that started this thread pertained to the problem that when scanned, the surface texture of platinum/palladium prints became dominant and detracted from the digitized version of the image. And the fact is that that is precisely why APUG exists - for many of us in this "fraternity", there is no substitue for original silver, platinum/palladium, van dyke, cyanotype, albumen, or you name it prints. Translating original images into digital equivalents is a compromise.

The point that Michael and I were making is that translating those original images into ANY other form, including ink on the pages of books and magazines, is a compromise that at best only approximates the makers original intention. And its not necessarily a matter of "faking" the image, but more of making it possible for a version of the image that conveys something of the makers emotional content to be widely available at reasonable cost. For those of us who are involved in phtography, there's a big difference, but for the ordinary man on the street, close enough is good enough.

Scott(the flying camera) has made some good scans of PL\PD prints. ask him how he does it

billschwab said:

I looked at the images and neglected to read any of the text. I was completely unaware that he was a platinum printer until it was pointed out later when I was told of the troubles with reproduction. There was nothing in those reproductions that made me think platinum other that the fact they used no varnish and left the paper with a matt finish.

Bill

Click to expand...

You would get an entirely different impression by looking at his real prints. I've struggled with a test website of my work and finally decided to go the faux route. I'm not exactly pleased with that solution but the quality is better than scanned prints.

Here see what you think:

Dead Link Removed

The site is crude but it gives me an idea of what the faux method looks like in a browser.

Bill,

When you reproduce your images in a book, what are you doing? If you send in original prints to the printer, they will scan them and then make manipulations to the digital file to emulate what you sent as the original.

Digital reproduction does not, in it's own right, have a 'signature' like the traditional processes. It does not inherently have a characteristic curve that makes it dinstictive in the same way that silver or pt/pd does. Yes, a scanner will have a response curve, and a printer may have a response curve, etc. but the digital file itself has infinite flexibility.

This is both a blessing and a bit of an achillies heel. Digital may never come into it's own because of a lack of distinct visual signature, but it can do a very good job emulating at least some of the image characteristics of other processes due to it's flexibility.

When I make a scan for reproduction or the web, I acknowledge that the paper surface will not be the same in the final, but with good digital editing I feel that I can at least reproduce the general distribution of tones from the original print in a manner that I consider to be faithful to the print.

The loss of paper texture in a reproduction or on the web is unfortunate, but I think any attempt to include paper texture in the digital file is a real problem, because the texture in the original print does not have the same aesthetic impact on the image that the digital texture will have. Looking at an original is a tactile experience, and a digital reproduction in a book or on the web completely loses that first-hand appreciation of the paper tooth, weft, color.

When looking at a reproduction, paper texture is simply more information in the file, and it is not possible to use the same sense of visual selectivity that can be done with an original print. So the texture beomes part of the image, and that is simply not the case with an original print (at least for me).

For that reason, I feel it is better to eliminate the paper surface noise from the image if at all possible. I generally print on smooth paper, and don't prefer rough paper for my prints. A printer that uses heavy textured paper may take the opposite approach, because the texture is in some manner core to the overall impression of the image.


---Michael