I like your improvements in the magazine. Keep up the good work.

Let me answer the obvious question that cynics might raise concerning the excellent Chris Woodhouse article, “The Copy-Print Process.” The question is: “Why not just take your photographs with film in the first place?” Of course, the reason for starting with digital color images is time and money, mostly money when the time needed for the whole process is analyzed. One can take several dozen (or hundred) images of the same subject using different exposures, cropping, camera angles, focal lengths, etc., with a digital camera for far less than the out-of-pocket cost of even one roll of film and developing. Then, after a shoot, the resultant images can be downloaded to a computer and refined prior to final processing.

I would like to add more detail to his comments on ink jet printers. I have observed in my own work the banding effects covered in the article. For purposes of discussion here, I am defining the banding I noticed to be bands that are obvious under 10X magnification and can be barely, if at all, seen up close with the naked eye. An approach to getting around this problem that works for me is to use my ancient (five-year-old) Epson Stylus Photo 1280 printer to directly print black-and-white on Epson Ultra Premium Presentation Matte paper or any other of the Epson glossy or semi-gloss photo papers. This printing is done at the highest resolution the printer will print, 1440 dots/inch, using the BLACK INK setting on the PREMIUM GLOSSY printer setting for all of the papers. I’m using a Mac with OS X v 10.4.11, so I don’t know whether equivalent Windows software exists. I have to fool the printer into thinking that it’s printing on premium glossy paper to get the best results on any paper, including uncoated watercolor and matte papers.

Mr. Woodhouse’s data and my own experience show exactly why the banding phenomenon is exhibited, which occurs because the paper advanced in uniformly equal steps through the printer. The Epson printers I use, the aforementioned SP 1280, a Stylus Photo 300, and a really old Stylus Color 3000, have software included that produces a pseudo-random dithering of the sprayed ink dots. Unfortunately, using all four or six ink colors (Different printers use different colors of ink.) to produce a black-and-white print gives a color cast to the print that varies from image to image (for me, at least) in spite of my efforts at careful profiling. Software for all three printers has settings calling for the use of either black or black plus color inks. However, the SP 300 adds some color ink to the black regardless of the setting, so that’s not good, and the SC 3000 doesn’t have enough resolution for my usual black-and-white needs.

The Sp 1280 uses black ink only on the BLACK setting, so problems with color cast and print fading are avoided here because the Epson black ink setting does contain black pigment even though the color inks are dye-based. The drawback with this approach is that the resolution of the printer using black ink only is lower than when the other five colors are used to fill in some of the spaces between the black ink dots. The result is that the prints have a very slightly grainy appearance similar to photos shot with Tri-X 400. The 1440 dpi setting coupled with the random dithering totally eliminates the banding effect, which is visible at lower resolution settings. This compromise limits the maximum print size I can get to 13″ x 44″, which is more than adequate for my needs. If I ever need a larger print, I can send the digital file out to any of several competent labs near my home.

Also, I found that printing black-and-white using all four or six colors, depending on the printer, produced the slight banding defined above on the SC 3000 and the SP 1280, regardless of resolution setting. Black-and-white prints produced by using all six colors on the SP 300 showed less banding (but bad color casts) at a resolution setting of BEST PHOTO (1400 x 2800 dpi). At the PHOTO RPM setting (2800 x 5600 dpi) all banding went away, but the color cast problem remained. Therefore, if I were to use one of these SP 300 prints as the positive print to produce a copy negative, I would expect results that would only be limited by the resolution of the film used to produce the copy negative.

A person might also be inclined to nit-pick the author’s use of dodging and burning instead of the more conventional Photoshop method of isolating various areas of the image on different layers for adjustment and then blending the various layers together to get a desired result. Personally, I was never very good at dodging/burning or even printing with chemicals on paper, so I gave my darkroom equipment away about 12 years ago and went digital. However, in the final analysis, all of the digital manipulation commands in all of the image editors out there are only different means of adjusting the numbers associated with the pixels so that images produced on the print media meet the user’s requirements.

All in all, I found the article to be useful, instructive, and very interesting.