digital negatives and spectral density

I have been working on digital negative making and have just stummbled upon the

indexed color mode. I enjoy this mode because it allows me to choose different

colors for my shadows and highlights. I was wondering if anyone had any ideas

on what colors are best for the shadows, midtone, and highlights. Plese keep in

mind that i will be printing on either the epson 2200 or the epson 7600 final

prints will definatly be done on the 7600. Any thoughts on the colors or

printier choice are most appreciated. Also if it helps i am contact printing

these onto the Ziatype

Any help much appreciated

Jen Gioffre

There's so little traffic on alternative processes and digital negatives on photo.net that the administrators closed the alternative process forum and dumped all the old threads into this one.

 

You'll have a much better chance of getting answers to questions like that one on http://www.hybridphoto.com/forums/

 

For what it's worth, I do my digital negatives on a 2200 loaded with 6 different dilutions of black. the UV stopping power of the Epson color inks changes at random.

I'm just curious, Jennifer, why you think that indexed colour mode has any advantage over straightforward 8-bit RGB? (Apart from being storable in GIF file format.)

 

In RGB mode, you can vary the curve of each colour channel, to give any variation you like between the shadow and highlight tones. I do this as a matter of course for normal paper printing, since most ink/paper combinations don't give a neutral greyscale without some tweaking.

 

Also, the number of available levels in indexed mode is only 256, whereas, in theory at least, 8-bit RGB is capable of 16 million. Am I missing something here?

I was using index color mode to create a color cast over the negative to hopefuly block uv light. I got the idea from dan burkholders book on digital negatives. He has a section on Spectral density using an orange color, like using a safe light of sorts. Recently i read an artical by Clay Harmond and he ios using a green color to replicate the a Pyro Developer stain. So, i was hoping to use the index color mode to replicate a smooth transition of this color cast. After many test I feel that using a screen layer works just fine. Thanks for the replies

Joseph, where do you get your six different dilutions of black for the 2200?