Digital Negatives with QuadToneRIP

Demystifying QTR for Photographers and Printmakers

Ron Reeder, Christina Anderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000208856
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Techniques

Digital Negatives with QuadToneRIP is a text that fully explores how the QuadToneRIP printer driver can be used to make expert digital negatives. The book takes a comprehensive, Òunder-the-hoodÓ look at how Roy Harrington's QTR printer driver can be adapted for use by artists in several different creative practice areas. The text is written from the Mac/Photoshop point of view.

The book is divided into three parts. Part One is a step-by-step how-to section that will appeal to both beginning and more advanced practitioners. Part One includes quickstart guides­ or summary sheets for beginning students who want to jump into using QTR before understanding all of its functional components. Part Two addresses dimroom, darkroom, and printmaking practices, walking the reader through brief workflows from negative to print for lithium palladium, gum bichromate, cyanotype, salted paper, kallitype, silver gelatin and polymer photogravure, with a sample profile for each. It also includes an introduction to a new software iteration of QTR: QuickCurve-DN (QCDN). Part Three is devoted to contemporary practitioners who explain how they use QTR in their creative practice.

The book includes:

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• A list of supplies and software needed

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• A summary QTR glossary with a simple explanation of how each function works

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• A sample walk-through to create a QTR profile from start to finish

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• How to linearize profiles with simple to more exacting tools

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• A visual guide to modifying functions

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• Quickstart guides for many of the workflows

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• Instructions for crafting monochrome, duotone, tricolor, and quadcolor negatives

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• Instructions for using QTR to print silver gelatin in the darkroom

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• Instructions for using QTR to print alternative processes in the dimroom

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• Instructions for using QTR to print polymer photogravure in the printmaking room

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• Introductory chapter to QuickCurve-DN software

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• Troubleshooting common QTR problems

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• Generic starter profiles for processes discussed

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• Contemporary artists: their work and QTR process.

Learning how to craft expert digital negatives can be a bit overwhelming at the outset. Digital Negatives with QuadToneRIP makes the process as user-friendly as possible. Like other books in the series, Digital Negatives with QuadToneRIP is thoroughly comprehensive, accessible to different levels of learner, and illustrative of the contemporary arts.

PART ONE
QuadToneRIP

Figure P1.1 God Measuring the Universe, palladium print © Ron Reeder 2019

Chapter 1
Getting Started

Figure 1.1 Heather Butterfly, silver gelatin print © Ron Reeder 2019

Figure 1.2 Katie in the Pool, palladium print © Ron Reeder 2019

In the late 1830s William Henry Fox Talbot figured out how to form a layer of light sensitive silver chloride on a sheet of paper and expose it in a camera. The image he obtained was a—not too appealing—negative. To transform it into a positive he waxed the negative to make it semi-transparent, sandwiched it to a second sheet of sensitized paper, and exposed the combination to sunlight. Thus was born the negative-positive process that was to dominate photography for the next 160 years or so until direct digital capture rendered it obsolete—well, not completely obsolete.

In the interval between Fox Talbot and digital, clever people invented a surprising array of methods to make a photographic print. These methods include salt, cyanotype, albumen, platinum/palladium, kallitype, gum bichromate and silver gelatin to name a few.

For many current photographers there is still a desire to print in one or more of these antique processes. The reason is that these processes can exhibit a unique, hand-made, artisanal look that is difficult, nay impossible, to duplicate with an inkjet printer, and if you want to print in these old processes you need a negative. In fact, for most of them you need a large contact-printing negative, same size as the final print, because most of these processes are primarily sensitive to ultraviolet light and no one has yet come up with a practical UV enlarger.

How would one get that large of a negative? Prior to about 1990 there were two choices, neither very attractive. One, you could lug around a very big camera. Carleton Watkins did this with a camera that took 18″ × 22″ “Mammoth” glass plates when photographing Yosemite Valley in the 1860s. He had mules to carry them. I tried this approach, without the mules, using an 11″ × 14″ “field camera” and soon abandoned the effort. I was severely restricted as to subject matter and the so-called “field camera” never made it further than 100 feet from the back of my car.

Two, you could capture the image with a reasonable size camera, say 4″ × 5″, then enlarge the negative to contact size in the wet darkroom. To do this involved making a film interpositive, then enlarging that to the final size negative. Each step meant some loss of resolution, the possibility of dust, and strict process control to end up with a negative of approximately the correct density and contrast. I’ve tried it and it can take most of a day to obtain an enlarged negative that is more or less adequate.

This all changed in the early 1990s when pioneers like Dan Burkholder began using commercial service bureaus and imagesetters to make digital negatives from scans of analog negatives. Burkholder soon switched to printing negatives with desktop inkjet printers and a powerful new tool was invented for photographers and artists.

Digital negatives give access to all “alternative” photographic printing processes (and yes, silver gelatin is now an alternative process with all the others). Do we lose something when using a digital negative instead of an old style analog negative? I believe the answer is “no.” In fact, for some processes, such as platinum/palladium (pt/pd), the digital negative is clearly superior. Pt/pd requires a high contrast negative with a particular s-shaped curve that is contrasty in the highlights and in the shadows but lower contrast in the midtones. It is very difficult to engineer that s-shaped curve into an analog negative but quite doable in a digital negative.

Why QTR?

Multiple methods have been invented for transforming a positive image file into a digital negative. I am not competent to survey the entire field. For one thing, life is too short to become proficient in every available method. Two, I wish to avoid making misstatements about other people’s brainchildren. So, I will concentrate, instead, on the method I have helped develop, with the use of Roy Harrington’s QuadToneRIP (QTR) to drive an Epson digital printer loaded with the standard Epson K3 inkset. I favor this approach for several reasons.

• QTR gives the artist complete control over the printer’s inks. It tells the printer how much of each ink to use and what color for every tone in the image. It is arguably the most flexible method with which to make negatives for any photo printing process.
• QTR has been demonstrated to produce high quality negatives for any contact printing purpose. This includes printing in the silver gelatin darkroom, where using traditional curves in Photoshop often leads to posterization (an uneven, sometimes jagged, sometimes flat, stairstepping of tones from one to another) in the image.
• This approach utilizes commonly available Epson printers and inksets (the Epson P800 and K3 inkset are illustrated in this book). Thus, once you are done making negatives the printer is instantly available for normal, full color, inkjet printing.
• To be honest, for the most of us who are not adept computer programmers, QTR can be a bit of a steep learning curve, but I think it is worth the effort and hope this book will help you get past that barrier.

How digital printers work

Why use QTR instead of the Epson printer driver? Digital printers print discrete dots of ink. This is a problem since we want the printer to output smooth continuous tones, not a grainy f...