From: Joachim Oppenheimer (joachim@microdsi.net)
Date: 04/24/03-06:47:33 AM Z
It is worth considering Harald Johnson's comments in his recently published "Mastering Digital Printing" on the subject of TRANSFER FUNCTION. He states that this was created to help printers compensate for dot gain and that it is seriously flawed in comparison to PS curves, chief of which is that there is no way to preview the image in transfer function (page 150). Joachim
-----Original Message-----
From: Ender100@aol.com [mailto:Ender100@aol.com]
Sent: Thursday, April 24, 2003 1:16 AM
To: alt-photo-process-l@sask.usask.ca
Subject: Digital Negative Curves—The Lost Transfer Function
Judy, I noticed in Post Factory #8 you thought you had lost the Transfer Function when you upgraded to Photoshop v. 7.0. I admit it, I took it, but I am going to give it back to you. Instead of selecting PRINT, select PRINT WITH PREVIEW and look in the lower left hand corner for one of those pop up menus—it will either say COLOR MANAGMENT or OUTPUT—set it to OUTPUT and Shazzaaaammm!! In the sec ond column you will find highly prized, much sought after Transfer Function. Now you won't have to open up Photoshop 4.0 to put the final curve on your file. That should speed up your workflow a bit!
I think there was a time, a number of versions ago when the Transfer Function gave you more control than curves, because it allowed you more control points. Transfer function still has 13 control points counting the end points—however, CURVES function now gives you 16 control p oints including the end points. I like to use CURVES function.
If you OPTION/CLICK on the grid in the CURVES FUNCTION window, it will give you a finer grid.
If you click on the bar below the grid that swaps the direction of the curve, you can have it display the % of a point OR the gray level (0-255), whichever you prefer. Notice that when you click on a point on the curve, there is an INPUT and OUTPUT box where you can directly enter values for input and output in percentages OR in gray levels, whichever you desire.
If you are working with an 8 bit grayscale file, you can just add an adjustment layer for the Alt Photo Curve of your choice. Then you can save the curve with the file and it can be undone at any time later.
If you are really cool and keeping your files always at 16 bits, just do the curve, save it, print your file, and then undo before saving.
Hope this is helpful.
If someone has already addres sed this issue, I apologize for wasting your bandwidth—I seem to be one of those folks on the list that doesn't get all the posts to this newsgroup. Thanks, I guess to Big Brother AOL. I suspect that Sam Wang can read everything that I type on my computer.
Mark Nelson
PS: Has anyone tried to paint with a level 10 (0-255) in Photoshop Grayscale File and been successful? Try testing it with the INFO Box afterwards and see if it still registers 10 on the gray scale. There do seem to be a number of levels you can't access—darn and they are in the highlights of the negative! I ran into this while making the Mother of All Step Tablets. Judy, it's a Rolls Royce now, not a Cadillac. hehehehee
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