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Paper Chase - Ilford Galerie Gold Fibre Silk - part 2 of 1 2 3

by Mike McNamee Published

Monochrome Performance

As you might expect, Ilford place great store by the monochrome performance of this media. It measures up well to silver halide!

Metamerism in the neutral greys was typically low for this type of coating and Epson UltraChrome K3 at 1.5 ΔE Lab (D65 to Tungsten on 50% grey). The Dmax was 2.17. The grey linearity curve was straight all the way down to the deepest shadows, which blocked at about 15 RGB points and a lightness value of 5.8% with this profile. The profile mapped the greys directly to the white point and so everything looked very clean and neutral.

Digital Toning

Ilford publish a method for digitally toning, by modifying the print RGB values in Photoshop before printing in colour. The prints provided in the press pack were truly impressive but we doubt they were reproduced by exactly following their method, as printed in the literature. The basis of the method is to set a coloured layer above the image layer and set it to 'overlay' in the blending modes. This has the effect of setting all the image to the hue value of the colour layer. When we attempted this we found a much bigger difference in our sepia and gold tone attempts than the sample prints. This was borne out when we measured their actual prints. The sample prints were only 4° different in hue whereas we observed twice that difference when following the instructions. The values should therefore be considered as starting points and some careful experimentation will be needed to exactly mimic the beauty of a gold-toned print. We wonder if a better technique would be to use a Pantone colour on a solid colour adjustment layer to achieve consistency. No instructions are given as to the RGB colour space to translate a monochrome into, ahead of digital toning, we got quite different effects using either sRGB or Adobe RGB. Using overlay as the blending mode increases the average luminance of our test image by at least 11 RGB points and so adjustment of the tone range is a must when you apply this method. Again, treat the printed values as a starting point.

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last update 09/12/2022 14:55:08

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