I’ve been wanting to work with Tyler Boley for years. He is the pre-eminent digital printmaker in town. His company, Custom Digital, makes gorgeous qaudtone, black and white digital prints for fine art photographers.
At a hundred or more bucks per print, I’ve been waiting for someone else to order one of my prints so I could see what Tyler could do. A corporate art buyer has bought one of my panoramic Mexico images for a restaurant. They want it big: 38" wide. Finally, a chance to have Tyler show what he could do.
Here’s what I’ve learned so far.
One, a drum scan introduces its own artifacts to the process. I had Cosgrove Editions, another jewel in the Seattle digital scene (they specialize in high end scans and pre-press file prep), scan my negative. It’s a juicy, big file, and they made their corrections with Photoshop layers so I could change their mind about what looked good (more on that later). The thing with a drum scan is that it is very harsh and unforgiving. The look is like a print made with a condensor head enlarger, meaning contrasty with accentuated detail. Like golf-ball sized grain. I print my silver prints with a cold light head on my enlarger. It is a diffuse light source, which gives creamy tones and really minimizes the film grain. The look from the scan is different, meaning I’m seeing a lot more in the negative than I’m used to.
I did a little burning and dodging on the scan (Here’s how: make a new layer, select soft light as the mode, check the box to fill it with 50% gray. Then use the brush with either the white (to dodge) or black (to burn) to adjust areas of the image. Use a greatly reduced opacity.) I also made some global changes with a level and a curve layer. Cosgrove had made some adjustment curves on a couple of areas already, to corral in the highlight detail in the background and preserve the shadow detail in the figures.
The first proof was off. The midtones in the background were dead and flat, and the grain structure was uneven—prominent in the shadows up to about Zone IV, then flat and nearly non-existent in the midtones. The transition was abrupt, in that way that often marks a print, unattractively, as digital. I could see that the file needed further work.
I proofed it on my own printer, using Quadtone RIP. Tyler uses Jon Cone’s Piezography inkset, which are multiple shades of black ink in place of multiple colors. My print had less contrast, less dmax, (density in the blacks), but was softer in feel in a not unattractive way. The transitions between tones was gentler. The background adjustment layer needed a complete reworking to get a normal looking contrast gradient in there. Cosgrove had erred on the side of preserving highlights. Since the shot was backlit, those could look blown out—I needed the trees and the figure in front to have a zip in them. I also ran Noise Ninja to reduce the grain, which helped minimize the transition issues.
I see another proof tomorrow. The image looks nothing like the silver print, but that’s not the point. I’m learning a new language.
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