MorseBlog

This past summer I wrote twice about making notecards Making Notecards in the Darkroom Paper Scraps: More Notecards! In both cases I used scrap photopaper and made them in the darkroom. They have proved popular by recipients. I was contemplating making more and wanted to look at a less labor-intensive method using Giclee or ink-jet printing. The photopaper versions have been made on Ilford Art 300 paper which is a heavy 300 GSM 100% cotton rag paper from Hahnemuhle the German art paper maker. It has a pleasant coarse texture like water color paper. In the past I have made C-prints on Fuji papers but never ink-jet. Peak Imaging my go-to film developer and print maker does make ink-jet prints and exclusively on Hahnemuhle ink-jet papers. So I decided to dip my toe into this world. I ended up selecting 4 different papers to see what they were like.  Hahnemuhle Photo Rag 308gsm Hahnemuhle William Turner 310gsm Hahnemuhle Bam...

Introduction In my first post on this subject I resolved the image problems I had related to scanning and getting the color space wrong. In the end I made C-prints to evaluate the differences and figured out which colorspace got me the best results in a print as well as online.   Looking at even the best print I thought it was not as 'bright' as I expected. I decided to make another round of experiments. This time I would attempt to 'brighten' the files in various ways in order to see what happened when they were turned into C-prints. Was the original image the best that could be done with the limited color gamut of the C-print process or could I eke out more?   I also wanted to know what would happen to a less than optimal image if I let the color lab make their 'lab optimizations'.  Methodology Original Image I used the same base digital file which was my favorite: Epson color space to sRGB conversion. This master image was a 3200 dpi scan of an Ektar 5x4 neg...