 “You
can’t make a fine print from a coarse negative”.
That was the critical belief of Barry Thornton, well known
professional monochrome fine printer and author of ‘Elements’
and ‘Edge of Darkness’. It became his catch phrase
over the years. “If a negative is properly exposed and
processed, it is difficult not to make a high quality print”,
he asserts from decades of hard experience. That belief has
cracked.
The first hairline crack started a couple
of years ago with his hybrid digital/traditional method by
making digital contact negs with a low priced flatbed scanner
from original camera negatives. He used these digital negatives
to produce fine prints by conventional wet processing that
were significantly better than traditional direct fine print
methods – even from less-than-perfect original negs.
Then he moved on to make fully digital prints
using mainly Piezography but also M.I.S. and Lyson inks, sometimes
mixing one with the other. “It was a revelation”,
he said. “I found myself going back over decades of
negatives making beautiful prints from negatives that were
unusable for conventional fine printing”. And the results
were better than the finest traditional print. “The
digital process, if properly handled, reproduces the subtlest
differentiation in extreme highlights and shadows unachievable
with a wet processed print. And it is sharper, even from an
economy scanner, with archival qualities that are at least
as good. Anybody with a reasonably modern PC – nothing
special – can do this”.
“Of course, it took a lot of burning
midnight oil to learn the new techniques as they applied specifically
to fine monochrome work. It also took a lot of money and wasted
materials, inks, software and hardware to find the best methods.
It was like starting as a novice all over again”, he
said. “But it has been more than worth it”, he
added. “ However, I now have a new catch phrase –
‘You can’t make a fine digital print from a coarse
file’ – also learned by hard experience. You need
to know how to produce a fine digital file if you are to make
quality monochrome digital prints. The techniques are very
different from the typical colour print – starting from
the type of conventional negative to produce”.
“I know lots of other mono photographers
are either making the move to digital, or are thinking about
doing so but are nervous about scrapping years of conventional
expertise to risk the new. So I set down all the right techniques
to make the transition in a simple hands-on short guide book.
This will save transitional photographers from the pitfalls
and expense of experimenting themselves without having to
wade through daunting turgid pages of thick technical Photoshop
manuals not devoted to specialist monochrome fine photography.”
The new published short e-book (on CD) is called ‘Elements
of Transition’. This one book will probably be all you’ll
ever need to make – easy to read; easy to understand.
Please note that this book (CD) has been
reproduced for viewing on a monitor. Although you can make
a print of it the pages will not reproduce as seen on screen.
The price is just £20 plus
£2 post and packing - anywhere in the world
MonoMatch©
I am now able to offer MonoMatch© as created by Barry
Thornton. As with Elements of Transition, this is Barry's
original documents and images without change. They have not
been changed in any way and technical advice cannot be offered
as the brain behind this is sadly gone.
An extract of the document is shown below. Ordering is the
same as for Elements of Transition.
Calibrating your monitor/printer with the MonoMatch©
process to...
Make your monochrome print look like
your screen
It’s frustrating, wasteful, and
expensive in ink, materials, and time. You go to a lot
of trouble to get a high quality scan with the maximum
well-graduated tonal information. You spend hours finely
adjusting those image tones to per¬fection in Photoshop.
The monochrome picture looks exactly as you want it
on the screen. You carefully set the printer to produce
its finest quality, take a deep breath, and click the
Print button. Out comes a print that looks nothing like
the screen! You then spend fruitless hours and trial
prints flying to adjust the printer driver controls
to make the print look like the monitor, or hours with
adjustment curves on the image itself to alter the look
of the printed output. You finally manage it, but the
curve adjustment layer meant you had to work in 8 bit,
not 16, which is essential for fine monochrome prints,
and when you print on another paper, the whole frustrating
rigmarole has to be under¬gone all over again.
Though you are working in monochrome,
the trouble is caused by the lack of co-ordinated specific
colour management profiles from scanner to PC/monitor
and from PC/monitor to printer. If we were actually
working in col¬our, the problem would be worse,
yet more obvious. It wouldn’t be just tones that
varied from screen to print, but colours too. There
are generic ICC colour profiles of course, but every
device is different For instance, if you print the same
file from the same PC on two printers nominally of the
same make and type using the same inks and the same
paper, the printed results will normally be noticeably
different.
The traditional way to handle this
problem in colour is use a colour man¬agement system,
then to calibrate each device (scanner, PC/monitor,
and printer), and to generate accurate custom colour
profiles for each. This method works. Unfortunately,
if a different scanner, monitor, ink or paper is used,
each will require a new profile - and they are not cheap.
This system will make each device in the chain reproduce
colours exactly like the previous device in the chain.
If you work in colour, this is really still the only
reliable method. (Note: trying to print a grayscale
image on an inkjet printer using all the colour inks,
which is necessary to get a smooth image — using
black alone gives an unpleasantly grainy appearance
— is unwise, It is virtually impossible to get
a fine monochrome image without unpleasant and unpredictable
colour casts when printing with colour inks, but see
later comments. Use specific monochrome ink sets from
companies like MIS or Lyson or the Piezography system.
However, the process below will still work with inkjet
manufacturers’ colour inks if you have to work
this way).
In monochrome, you can avoid all this
profiling hassle and expense by using MonoMatch.
You can drive yourself silly trying
to adjust printer settings to match the final printed
image to the one you see on your monitor. Fortunately,
there is a far simpler way. Work back-to-front. Instead
of trying to make your printed output look like your
screen, adjust your monitor to look like the printed
output You can save those settings under a file name
and load them at will to suit any job you are working
on. You load this file before you start working on the
image. Then when you print, what shows on screen will
show on paper. It’s a simple and straightforward
one-off job for each type of paper, provided you have
the right kind of printed image to work from. It is
provided with MonoMatch©. |
The price for MonoMatch© is just
£15 INCLUDING post and packing - anywhere in the world.
The price of Elements of Transition
is just £20 + £2 P&P
Order both for JUST £35
Pay for your CD of "MonoMatch©"
the easy way here;
It cost you nothing extra as AWH
Imaging pays the transaction fee
|
Payment can be accepted
by PayPal, UK cheque, cash, e-transfer or payment
into a US $ account. Dispatch of CD will be completed
on confirmation of payment.
The present $ exchange
rate in the UK is about $1.7 > £1
|
Please
make cheques payable to "Andrew Hollingsworth"
|
This item is only availible from AWH
Imaging , or by post from AWH Imaging, 70 Ravenglass Road,
Westlea, Swindon, Wilts, SN5 7BW, United Kingdom.
CONTACT
| AWH
Imaging will try to answer any questions on these items.
However, it will not be possible to answer all questions
as the knowledge is, sadly, no longer with us. |
|