Re: Dichromate dilution and speed

Clay,

What kind of digital negatives are you using, service bureau or inkjet?

I have definitely found that service bureau negatives, half tone ones
at least, allow very little control of contrast in printing. Or
density either for that matter. This is both a good and bad thing.
You can be off with exposure by a lot and still get a good print, but
making adjustments for either density and contrast can be very
difficult. This has been true for me with both carbon and palladium.
I have not worked with stochastic negatives so don't know how they
behave.

On the other hand, digital negatives produced by inkjet printers
behave much more like continuous tone negatives than half tone
negatives. They are quite responsive to small changes in exposure and
to contrast controls and with both carbon and palladium I have not
found them to be much different from regular in-camera continuous
tone negatives, though they print a little faster for sure. My
impression is that most of the people on this list talking about
printing with digital negatives are using digital inkjet negatives.

Sandy

>>I also think perhaps the nature of the digital negative (on/off vs.
>>continuous tone) impacts the results Chris reports.
>
>FWIW, diginegs in pt/pd behave very differently during printing
>than in-camera negs. The control of contrast through restrainers in
>either the sensitizer or the developer seems to allow a lot less
>fine control when using diginegs. I suspect that the reason for this
>is, as Judy stated, the fact that a dot is either 'on' or 'off' in
>these negs. It takes one helluva lot of restrainer to make a big
>change in the contrast of the resulting print.
>
>Clay

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