Selenium w/2880

[GCHA]

Advertisement (gone after registration)

Has anyone had any luck creating a "selenium" tone with the Epson 2880 printer on either Epsons' Ultra Premium Matte or Velvet Fine Art papers, or any other Smooth white cotton paper? And, what are your settings? I would like to avoid going through to much paper experimenting!

Thanks,

Gary

[Advertisement]

The Leica Q3 is available for pre-order at B&H Photo Video and Adorama

[thompsonkirk]

I don't use that particular printer, but there are a number of ways to do it, depending on whether or not you want a uniformly warmer tone (regular selenium toning), or the very slight effect of 'split toning' that appears when you use dilute selenium toner for archival processing, & the silver of the shadows picks up more of the toner than the highlights.

 

Both your Advanced BW printing mode & the Harrington Quadtone RIP will let you make prints that look like regular selenium toning.

 

For the slightly split-toned effect - slightly differential warmth in shadows & highlights - a number of folks on this forum have turned to the Greg Gorman method. (Search for Sharookh's beautiful BW work!) I've been using the Gorman method recently.

 

The heart of this method is making a layer that selects the shadows (only) & allows you to pick a shade of brown to use for a tiny bit of toning. You can pick either of the dark browns from the PS Swatches palette & then adjust the tone &/or opacity of the Fill Layer to get the 'selenium' shade you want. Of course you have to print in RGB mode to get the desired effect.

 

You can search this site for brief instructions (with one error - they say to use a solid-color adjustment layer, but it should read solid-color FILL layer).

 

Or you can Google 'Greg Gorman BW conversion' & download a .pdf with full instructions for how to create a Photoshop action that performs all the steps.

 

As to papers: the Epson matte isn't 'archival' - which may be your expectation if you're accustomed to selenium toning. The VFA lasts longer & makes gorgeous BW prints, but IMO it's a bit off-target to emulate a darkroom technique on a textured paper.

 

The 'classic' standard for beautiful darkroom prints, slightly warm-toned with the effect of 'archival' selenium toning, was Agfa's Portriga Rapid. BW inkjet prints on Hahnemuele Photo Rag can come very close to Portriga 118, the matte surface. The surface preferred by fine-art photographers was Portriga 111, & you can come very close to this now on the new glossy inkjet papers that use PK ink.

 

I've tried a batch of them & have concluded you can't quite hit the 111 mark, but can come pretty close. The surface texture that best matches it is Epson's Exhibition Fiber, but this paper is loaded with optical brightening agents. The other close match is Harman Glossy FBAl, which is a little bit glossier in surface texture, but IMO acceptable. And this comes in two versions: the original one with OBAs (but a gentler dose than EEF); and a newer warmtone version. The latter, with the Gorman conversion method, IMO looks the most like The Real Darkroom Thing. Those who disagree probably choose a PK paper with a little less gloss, from Innova, Ilford, etc.

 

Kirk

 

PS, my general idea is that inkjet prints are a medium in their own right & really don't have to look like darkroom prints - but you asked!

 

(PPS, for the Photoshop-obsessed: Maybe the Gorman method is unduly complicated (though it's certainly simplified with an Action!). I haven't got around to experimenting with this, but in theory a simpler way would be to make two layers representing the shadow & highlight halves of the Luminance range. You can do this with Ctrl-Alt-~ (tilde) on a PC, which selects highlights; & this can be inverted to select shadows. (If you use a Mac, Apple has recently reassigned the Cmd-Opt-~ function to another function, but you can search their website to find out how to change it back.) Then with a Levels Adjustment Layer attached to each of the Luminance layers, you could modulate the tone of shadows & highlights separately. The advantage of this over the Gorman method - again in theory - is that you could make the initial conversion with a LR or PS BW Adjustment Layer & thus use this layer's sliders like filters, to alter the balance of colors - for example, Y 'filter' for darker sky, G for lighter foliage. I miss this in the Gorman method.)

[Photoskeptic]

For all the different toning options, I recommend "Advanced Digital Black & White Photography" by John Beardsworth, a Lark book. Almost any toning application can be applied using variations of the split-toning process.

[GCHA]

Thanks for your great in depth pose about toning technic. I very much appreciate the info. I am using Picture Window Pro 3.5 as my main editing tool, which does not have the same capabilities as PS. So, any toning that I do will have to be with the Epson Print Driver with he Advanced B&W mode enabled. I have gotten close to the tint that I like, but have not quite achieved that Selenium look! Hopefully, it will happen before too many sheets of paper are expended!