Re: Digital negatives
Jack Fulton (jfulton@itsa.ucsf.EDU)
Mon, 24 Jun 1996 10:23:52 -0700 (PDT)
Just for folks' interest .....
Yesterday I was fortunate to go visit Hewlett Packard and work w/a friend
who is aiding in developing ink jet printers and now digital cameras. he
developed a program (DOS only ... I'm a Mac person) which outputs a FM
patterm, or Frequency Modulated, or stochastic pattern, similar to the
Burkholder bit map dither.
The idea is to first scan a nicely made print rather than a negative and
do so on a flat bed @ 600 dpi obtaining a 20 meg file for B/W. With the
program, which, in a way, is like a correction or even perhaps similar to
a contrast reduction mask, the information is corrected and when printed
(there are various tweaks for the printing to pay attention to different
surfaces and types) the final image is VERY similar to the print you wish.
I/we have not tried it for negs (he works in 4x5) but it seems to be a
good possibility.
The draw back is having the output on ink jet due to possible banding. The
blow-up we got was about a meter by a meter and a half from a 35mm image
originally printed about 7x9 inches.
Just for all of your interests ... I'm not much more knowledgeable about
it all than I've explained.
Jack
***The eye is the Pencil of Nurture***