Sandy King
Hi Sandy,
After many weeks of working at it, today finally we got back great digital
test negatives that printed beautifully in platinum. Vladimir and I are
finally on our way to printing the portfolio! Come by and we'll show you.
The service bureau that we finally settled with is pretty incredible in
terms of willingness to work with fine art photographers It's
called Island Imaging. The address:
Island Imaging
10607 Highway 707
Myrtle Beach, SC 29575
Phone 803.215.2152 FAX 803.215.0897
The contact person is Scott Blaylock. His e-mail address is
PentaxPix@aol.com. This service bureau offers the usual myriad of services,
from drum scanning to Iris printing, but what interests me is that they are
the only one I could find who would gladly print "bitmap" negatives, i.e.
random dot screens the user generates in Photoshop, as Dan Burkholder
suggests in his book "Making Digital Negatives for Contact Printing." Funny
thing is that the service bureau that Burkholder recommends in the book no
longer makes "bitmap" negatives, so it was quite a find to have one right
in our backyard. Scott is great to work with, partly because he is a large
format photographer himself. The imagesetter at Island Imaging that our
negatives were first output from was not working perfectly, so Scott redid
it on the Scitex DOLEV - I sent him files at 1270 dpi and the DOLEV was set
for 2540 dpi, and every single dot was cleanly defined! The smooth tones in
the prints were simply gorgeous!
Will such negatives print well in carbon? "Only time will tell," but I have
no doubt that they will, since the tight dot pattern made the random
halftones seem almost continuous-tone.
Sam