Re: Two tricolor prints
I should add that the color for the colorized negatives is one that I
spent a lot of time establishing and refining; I'm sure this is the
right color for my printer and light source, negative material, etc.
I use this color routinely on all my negatives now, and get good
results from it for routine gum printing of all kinds. But in
studying the separations and the color layers individually, it seems
it's not blocking enough in the tricolor layers; the cloudiness seems
to be caused by color printing where it shouldn't, and neutralizing
the colors that should be there (such as blue printing on the poppies
and greying the orange color).
kt
On Sep 25, 2007, at 7:17 PM, Katharine Thayer wrote:
Here's a comparison of an image printed from the colorized and
calibrated separations, and the same image printed from separations
made by simply inverting channels and printing without further
manipulation . The jpeg is rather small because I was intending to
append it to a post on another forum, but since the question of
calibrating tricolors came up here in the meantime, decided to just
put it up on my site; at any rate it's not necessary to see detail;
the difference in the vividness of the color, which is the issue of
note here, should be quite apparent even in the small images.
I named the page rather cockily "If it ain't broke..." but it is
a little broke in fact; the greyscale separations can make a print
that's too contrasty, which is the reason I decided to see if I
could get an improvement with colors and curves. But so far, I'll
take the straight inversions even with blown highlights. This
isn't just an anomaly; I did several prints with different pigments
and proportions and got the same cloudiness on all of them.
I've been thinking for a while of switching to Prussian blue for
tricolors, and these are my first prints with Prussian; it will
definitely be my blue of choice for tricolor from now on. I'm
still playing with pigments and proportions to balance the
Prussian, but the combination I used here gives a fairly close
approximation to the original colors.
http://www.pacifier.com/~kthayer/html/tricolorcomp.html
Katharine
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