Roadside flora ~ Jay, NY - in the Adirondack PARK • click to embiggenIt seems that every time the topic of digital printing vs. wet work printing comes up, somebody always feels compelled to state that with digital printing all you do is "press the PRINT button." Whereupon he/she is taken to task by the digital printers in the crowd who state that there is more to it than that.
Well, I'm here to tell you, assuming that you have paper and ink in the printer, pressing the PRINT button is exactly all you have to do to make a print. It's as simple as that. No wand and/or cut out hole waving, no chemicals, no rubber gloves, no time and temperature precision procedures, no water, no drying, and no lights out. Nope, just keep the lights on and press the PRINT button. Sooner or later, a print comes out of the printer.
The making of finely crafted digital prints is as easy as it gets when it comes to making a beautiful object. However, if you want to make a beautiful picture, that's a whole other story.
There is no other perfectly and plainly visual proof of the computer adage, "garbage in, garbage out", than there is with the results of pressing the PRINT button. What you get out, is exactly what you put in and making what you put in is where the craft of digital printing resides. IMO, it is the absence of craft at that stage of the game that is responsible for a digital print judged to be inferior to a finely crafted classic C print.
IMO, leaving aside the digital medium's much superior ability to render a far wider color gamut (and the after capture ability to work the same), the three most important skill/craft factors employed in the making of the files from which to make digital prints that have the look of finely crafted C prints are; 1) sharpening, 2) highlight and shadow "protection" / refinement, and, 3) color saturation.
Once again IMO, it is in these 3 areas that digital prints made from digital capture often betray their digital nature. That is, digital files and the resultant prints are very often over sharpened (sharpness has become a fetish in the digital world), over saturated, and often lacking subtle highlight and shadow detail.
Color negative film was (and still is) the film leader in dynamic range (wide latitude), subtle color rendition, and smooth tonal transitions. Finely crafted C prints made from properly exposed color negatives rendered those characteristics with what I would label "grace and dignity". Maybe not considered so for the screaming Velvia crowd but for those wishing to express their vision in a realistic fashion, color neg/C print was the way to go - although, for the moneyed crowd, dye transfer prints were the pinnacle of classic color printing.
That said, the digital print medium is fully capable of rendering all of the desirable visual characteristics of the color neg/C print classic printing medium as long as the file from which a print is made has those characteristics. And if it does, all you have to do to make a finely crafted digital print is to press the PRINT button and relax.
However, recognizing and then imbuing a digital file with those characteristics - characteristics that are not necessarily native or natural to digital capture - is the key to making ink on paper pictures that are also truly beautiful objects.
More on the how anon.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 11:03AM 
