[Leica] Hybrid Imaging & Printing

[hoppyman at bigpond.net.au (G Hopkinson)]

Thanks Tina and Walt.
Re-reading my post, I can see I wasn't clear.

I understand the channel mixer function and I use that with success to
create monochrome images from Colour originals. Especially if I have an
Ansel pretension moment (we can all dream). 

Hoppy PESO moment
http://gallery.leica-users.org/analog-images/anselwannabe

Still not just for scenics, but also really good skin tone control in
portraits (different channel mixes of course).

http://gallery.leica-users.org/analog-images/Mina_BW
OMG, he's used a flash! Guilty as charged, testing out TTL off camera
functions with a Contax lead.

Colour to monochrome is the reverse of what Tina is describing.
I can see the advantage of being able to choose what the scanner has
interpreted as the RGB channels from the monochrome.
 
What I should have expanded on, was that I had thought this would in a very
prominent off colour (too cyan?) result in the raw scan data (I would expect
the scanner to compensate for the presumed orange mask by changing the green
and blue channel exposure)
Continuing that train of thought, I'm guessing it won't matter because you
are mixing the channels and can change to any combination that provides the
result you want, as long as the information is there. Another good reason to
always use 16 bit per channel.

After all of that fun, then the printing decisions. I'm up there with you,
Walt regarding money ploughed into Adobe pursuits! I'll check out that
author and your ink recommendation.

In any event that was just my theorising. Evidently Tina's method WORKS very
well. I need to go expose some more film and do the scanner theory/
experimentation when I'm out of light (and chores on this holiday weekend
here). Just developed some HP5 from my little Contax T3 so more fodder to
learn from there.

Thanks again
Hoppy


-----Original Message-----



From: Walt Johnson <walt@waltjohnson.com>

Kinda like red filters and a blue sky? Do you use the channel mixer to 
do you work? There are dozens of ways but this seems to be one of the 
most reliable. Cannot recommend Martin Evening's book too much. Heck, I 
could almost buy a Noctilooney for what I've spend on Adobe and manuals. 
I've little or no experience printing with all the fine pigment inks 
from MIS and Media Street except the Eboni black. I do Black Only 
printing when doing b&w and prefer it to what else I've seen.

BTW, I think (not entirely sure) with Channel Mixer you can covert to 
monochrome but still retain the color channels. Not the same as just 
dumping all but one channel and making a true grayscale..

Tina Manley wrote:

> At 06:47 PM 6/11/2006, you wrote:
>
>> The whole area of B/W as RGB is of great interest to me.
>> I interpret from your description that the image is not converted to
>> greyscale, and so effectively is a very unsaturated colour image.
>> I was struggling with the idea of the RGB channels being reproduced
>> differently.
>
>
> Hoppy -
> That's the whole point.  You can use the different channels just like 
> filters to adjust the B&W tones.  You have a lot more options with RGB.
>
> Tina
>
> Tina Manley, ASMP, NPPA
> http://www.tinamanley.com
>