thinking of imagesetting

[rippo]

ok first off, total cheapskate here. so cheap that i've been using my HP 7210 All-In-One OfficeJet printer to make digital negatives for cyanotype. with 3M OHT film bought from Office Depot, no less. working with what i have for the moment.

however, it's taken a lot of finessing my digital negs to get usable results. the curve in photoshop is, to put it mildly, extreme. i think this is probably a result of the HP inks not resisting the UV enough (sunlight, by the way...remember, cheapskate!). i've gotten decent results finally, but then i tried kallitype, and have met with utter failure so far. a 2-minute sunlight exposure of a 21-step density strip negative yields darkened highlights but the dark end hasn't maxed out yet. this could be some unrelated factor, since i've just started with kallitype. but my tests lead me to the negative itself.

question #1: has anyone used HP printers to make digital negatives? any secrets or tips to share?

question #2: so i'm thinking about imagesetting. an imagesetter is a bunch of black dots, rather than shades of gray. so do i still need to worry about curves? i see various curves for cyano, kalli, pt/pd etc...but that's all for grayscale on an epson. can i expect reasonable results if i send an image as-is, converted to bitmap, to the imagesetting lab?

crazy cyano curve attached.

 

[Joe Lipka]

No answer to #1, I use an Epson printer

For #2, yes, you do need an adjustment curve for imagesetter negatives.

 

[rippo]

thanks joe. are they the same curves as al the epson curves i see floating about?

 

[Joe Lipka]

Adjustment curves are unique to the process and to the output device. (Output device would be printer or imagesetter.) Dan's book contains a CD with a many helpful items such as typical curves for many processes.