Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/09/20

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Subject: Re: [Leica] Meta Photokina - warning! heretical contents!
From: John Brownlow <john@pinkheadedbug.com>
Date: Wed, 20 Sep 2000 15:59:56 -0400

on 20/9/00 3:20 pm, David Binder at dbinder@sympatico.ca wrote:

> Read Jon Cone's (creator of the piezography system) 'Higher Grounds'
> thread at 
> 
> http://www.egroups.com/message/piezography3000/332?threaded=1
> 
> For reasons he describes, digital cameras provide results that are
> *better* than film. If true, then the filmscanner road is less than
> ideal with respect to image result.
> 
> -David Binder (not looking forward to a battery dependent future)

Interesting. When Jon Cone talks, I listen!!

I think a lot of it depends on how you acquire your images. In a field? In a
studio? On the street? Your choice of equipment is determined by many other
factors than simple image quality.

However, that article does reveal something else which I have started to
discover for myself and which I know will drive some folks here to issue
fatwas or burn me for heresy but here goes...

My Epson 1160 with the piezo software is capable of rendering MORE detail
than a photographic print.

I mean tonality here, rather than fine detail. I mean it can make a print
that has more shadow detail and highlight detail than a photographic print.

How do I know this?

Because an ongoing topic of discussion among piezo users is 'how you make a
piezo print look like a photograph'.

Here's the answer, basically: you throw away information.

You crush the blacks  so that what would ordinarily print as 98% gray prints
as 100% black. In doing this of course you are throwing away shadow detail.
However that's when it starts to look like a photo.

If you use the piezo system to produce a technically accurate print of a
negative, with b/w points set correctly, gamma dialled in right, midtones
lifted to where you want them, with all the full range of shadow and
highlight detail on display...

... it doesn't look like a photograph.

Wierd eh?

- --
- -- 
Johnny Deadman

http://www.pinkheadedbug.com