Another plug for Mark Nelson's PDN.

Hi folks,

I must put in another plus for Mark Nelson's wonderful PDN system.

As some of you know I am a carbon printer. No, that is not an Apple
carbon printer, nor an inkjet carbon printer, but a carbon printer
from the school of 1865. I have been doing it a long time, with a lot
of pleasure, but low productivity.

Because of a writing project I did not do any carbon printing for the
past 8-10 months. However, during that time I began using Mark Nelson
Precision Digital Negative system with kallitype and palladium
printing, with quite a bit of success.

About two weeks ago I decided it was time to give up the distractions
of the lesser processes and return to carbon, but this time I decided
that I would do it with digital negatives. I can't tell you how
exciting this has been. The consistency of the digital negative
approach allows me to do things that were to this point impossible in
my carbon printing with in-camera large format negatives, and at the
same time reach some degree of productivity in my work.

My approach to this point has been to scan my large format and ULF
negatives ( Epson 4870 and 836XL), do tonal corrections in Photoshop,
and print the digital negatives on Pictorico ( and on that
wonderfully inexpensive Ultraclear OHP that Chris Anderson has talked
about here on the list).

I know there are people who will tell you that nothing beats an
in-camera original, and those folks will no doubt take their opinion
to the grave. But I am here to tell those folks that they are
mistaken. For my book nothing beats an in-camera large format or ULF
negative that is scanned and tonally corrected in Photoshop and
printed as a digital negative to the precise requirements of your
process.

Mark Nelson's PDN system allows me to do the above. I am still in
the learning curve with this system but the potential is almost
unlimited based on what I have seen so far.

Sandy
Received on Tue Feb 15 21:43:52 2005