A carbon relief is produced by a significant inscrease in the negative's
contrast, i.e., density. All negatives, digital or otherwise, are made of
dots if you look at them through a loupe/microscope with enough power.
>And one issue that we haven't really talked about a lot (or at all) is how
>fine a resolution your process can resolve. Remember that we are hand coating
>our emulsion. No matter good we think we can coat, the coating is not done by
>machine or through some chemical process, so there will be unevenness in our
>coating, so it might not be able to resolve the higher resolution. Take for
>example, just 600 dpi, each dot size is 1/600 inch, or about 0.04 mm! To truly
>be able to print that, your coating must be able to resolve half of that, or
>0.02mm.
Indeed. With most processes the resolution won't depend on the coating or
the original negative as much as the final support itself. Many extremely
impressive prints have been made with paper negatives, themselves made from
small, grainy negatives. Such is much of the work of José Ortiz Echagüe.
Luis Nadeau
NADEAUL@NBNET.NB.CA
Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada
http://www3.nbnet.nb.ca/nadeaul/