Digital BW, The Print

Sorry, I don't know what else to call it. I have been printing 
strong rich sepias on the 9600 with UC's for about a year now and am 
still in business. A year spent getting everything to look the same 
as the old film/resin coated output.

This is relative ONLY to skin tone printing.

I gave up printing sepia when I dry wretched after the first look at 
a gloss UC (Pre Atkinson). Since then I have printed only with matt 
black onto matt papers such as Photorag and Torchan. William Turner 
is wonderful but like my ex wife - flaky!

I still reckon sepia is the hardest thing to manage... uses a lot of 
metermarism prone yellow. The colour changes throughout the day, 
stops you getting bored, multigrade sepia maybe. I really go by the 
numbers. Skin tones can NOT go over 215 in PS where as with colour 
you can go much higher.

I use the Atkinson profile for enhanced matt onto Photorag and I'm 
not sure how to make it better.

Here's the thing. What happens when you have a rich sepia shadow - 
lots of magenta and yellow, a strong sepia mid tone - a little less 
magenta yellow, a sepia hi-lite - hardly any ink to cover the white 
paper and OB's. The hi-lites look positively blue compared to the 
relatively linear sepia mids and shadows.

How to make the hi -lites yellower? Get Image Print and pay my Aus$5 
G's and get a pretty weak sepia. I need a man's sepia, a good strong 
spill tea on your linen shirt kinda sepia.

Maybe if I select all the hi-lites and add saturation. tried it, too 
fiddly.

Find a non flaky no Optical Brightener paper similar too Photrag 
with a warmer hi-lite. Yes please. Concord rag looks fantastic. Too 
thin and why cost so much?

How would a custom profile handle this? I guess it has to be 
progressively more saturated as the inks thin out in the lighter 
tones.

Any theories anyone?

Have a sqiz at the web site to get an idea of te strength of sepia.

Garry Sarre
www.sarre.com.au