Subject: Cibachrome printing (was Re: spotmeter questions)
Reply-To: ian@rats.demon.co.uk
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Date: Fri, 11 Dec 1992 14:15:15 +0000

In article <47iu02bN2eOf01@JUTS.ccc.amdahl.com>
   bjs@RUTS.ccc.amdahl.com (Barry Sherman) writes:

> I wrote an article about the demo shown by Ray McSavaney in which he varied
> exposure and development of some b/w negatives and then produced prints
> which looked nearly identical.  Ian Young responded with his own comments.
> I responded to Ian's comments.  (Got all that? ;-)  But I forgot this one:
> 
> >I'm pretty sceptical about these claims.  In particular, if you
> >underexpose and compensate with less exposure at printing time, you're
> >going to end up with your textured shadows starting higher up the
> >scale.  _I_ regard that as a very significant change; perhaps you don't
> >(in which case, you should lay off the Cibachrome for a while until you
> >recover :-) )  
> 
> I see the smiley and also have deduced that the author is probably considerably
> more knowledgable photographically than I.  And we're really largely in 
> agreement on most points, I was just regretably unclear in my original posting.

I'm afraid that you were too easily fooled by my famously pompous
writing style into believing that I know more than you do.  This
certainly isn't true about Cibachrome, from your previous posts.  It
probably didn't help that I feel that more than one smiley per message
marks one down as unbearably nerdy; perhaps this comment really
deserved a few more...

> But I'm bothered that that implicit in this statement appears to be the belief 
> that Cibachrome will necessarily produce muddy detail-less shadows and overly 
> dark mid-tones.

I would certainly make no such claim regarding Cibachrome.  I, too, have
seen Cibachromes which don't have this problem.  My point was simply
that underexposure is an information-losing process (for negatives _or_
transparencies) and that the best you can do after underexposing
something is end up with flat shadows.  You can't fix underexposure by
clever printing because the information is just not there.

> I will grant that 
> distressingly many of the Cibas that I see *do* have ghastly muddy shadows

Sounds like you and I agree again :-)

> But those shadows are symptomatic of poor printing, not a condition inherent 
> in the material.  The solution is very simple.  Just take the time to burn the 
> shadows adequately to assure detail.  (Remember, this is a reversal process so 
> we increase exposure to lighten.)

Well, this introduces an interesting new track to the discussion (I've
changed the subject line to avoid boring everyone who wants to talk
about spotmeters) which involves the reasons _I_ have problems with
Cibachrome.

I've never had a big problem with overall contrast with Cibachrome
(take a vacation in Scotland and you will quickly find out why, unless
of course you can find out in advance which particular Tuesday Summer
will be held on) partly because the low-contrast material was available
over here much earlier than in the US, so I've always been able to use
it.  But my style of B&W work involves a fair bit of waving of hands,
cardboard and bits of wire while making the print and basically I found
it impossible to make this work for Cibachrome.

> Granted, much of the time the shadows are too small and numerous for 
> traditional burning and this has to be accomplished with contrast masking,
> which is really just a way of doing finely gradated dodging the of highlights 
> so as to permit giving the shadows adequate exposure.

Is it really? I think there is a difference, which works in favour of
masking and against traditional dodging and burning with Cibas.

Consider a really boring transparency which has a light grey and a dark
grey half to it.  You wish to make these tones the same.  If you do
this by dodging or burning, you need a basic exposure time of, say, at
least 10s.  If you now burn in the darker side (to make it lighter) you
can do it in density terms but _it_will_change_colour_, maybe quite a
bit, because Cibachrome has really nasty yellow/blue reciprocity law
failure at these "long" exposures.  My suspicion is that if you use a
mask, where all parts of the print are getting the same exposure
_time_, this problem won't arise and the two halves will both end up
the same colour.  Comments?

[Aside: yes, I'm aware that all colour materials have this kind of
problem to some extent, and I've experienced it with EP-2 paper in
extreme cases, but with Cibachrome it seems to be much, much more
severe.  The only figures I have seem to indicate that Cibachrome
deviates about five times as much as other papers.]

> And masking is somewhat 
> of a pain.  Sometimes more than "somewhat".

Hence the reason why we see so many naff Cibas in the world: most
people (myself for one) can't afford to go through the pain of making
all those fuzzy masks that just apply to the places we want to burn or
dodge, so when we have to print from slides, we end up compromising, or
just printing slides which we know will be "spot on" for the Cibachrome
process, or using colour negative when possible.  Anyone seen any
colour negative material in readyload yet?.

> But the point is that there's no more reason to have "textured shadows starting
> higher up the scale" with Cibachrome than with any other process.  It just
> takes a little more effort to avoid it.  Well, ok maybe it takes a lot of
> effort sometimes.  But it can be done.  In fact, I've printed a couple of
> transparencies in which there were areas which appeared nearly black on the
> light-box but I was able to open them up to what I would call mid-tones
> and reveal detail in them which could be seen only with difficulty on the light
> box.  Entirely possible.

I apologise for any inintended slur on the honour of the Cibachrome
process, and I promise to be more careful in future.  And to use more
smileys.

   -- Ian

Total smiley count: 1

Cibachrome, of course, doesn't exist any more.  Some marketroid has
decided it ought to be called Ilfochrome Classic.  But you all knew
what Barry and I were talking about anyway.