[Leica] OT: More digital printing experiences

[Martin Howard <mvhoward@mac.com>]

One thing (among many) that the Canon i950 has going for it is that it 
is damn consistent.  Create an 11 step greyscale wedge from 100% black 
to 0% black and print this out and you have (AFAICT) 11 perfectly even 
steps from absolute pitch black (it almost looks like a carbon 
deposit!) to paper white.

As a result, I've discovered that you can use the eye dropper tool in 
Photoshop without having to measure from the print out, using either 
another (flatbed) scanner (which I don't have), or a spot meter (which 
I don't have either) and a conversion table.

This means that calibrating the output is a two-step process.  First, 
I've settled on a method of getting neutral prints with a hint of 
warmth in the shadows that appears to be consistent (amazingly enough) 
across various lighting conditions.  I use a Hue/Saturation layer, with 
the settings Hue 29, Saturation 25, and Lightness +10.  This is set to 
"Soft Light" blend mode and placed above all other layers.  This has 
the unfortunate side effect of shifting contrast around.  Print out a 
wedge and the tones will be close to neutral, but the 90% wedge goes to 
96%, etc.  Black stays black, and white stays white, but the others are 
jumbled around.

So, I create a Curve Adjustments layer, place it on *top* of the 
Hue/Saturation adjustments layer (yes, order *is* important), set blend 
mode to normal.  I then used the eyedropper on a wedge, command-clicked 
(on a Mac) on the various wedge segments to get curve points 
corresponding to those segments, and fiddled with the numerical values 
until the eye dropper told me that I have even steps between the 
wedges.  The curve looks a little odd, but print out a test print with 
these two adjustments layers, and I appear to have attained the 
illusive goal of controllable, reproducable, linear grey scale images, 
using all six inks, on a particular paper (Epson Matte Heavyweight).

For now, I think I'm happy with this and I'll spend my $195 on film, 
developer, and paper rather than in Piezography BW quadtones.

The results *are* different from a photographic print (there is no way 
you'd ever mistake the two), but I must say, I'm beginning to like the 
aesthetics of inkjet prints on their own merit.

M.

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