Although I am pretty sure that those, who have done both and digital and
chemical darkroom work, may not agree with me, I find that the digital darkroom
is not just clicking the mouse unless of course all you are doing is printing
straight from a graphic file without any enhancement whatsoever.
Now that I have Photoshop on my laptop, I am finding the mind-boggling amount of
changes one can make on the scanned original file and most graphic files do
require some sharpening (local contrast increase as far as I can see).
As I was trying to bring out the moon and the crosses on tops of St.Mary's
Cathedral
(photo for which I shot with a lot of bracketed exposures on my OM-4T and Zuiko
35mm/2.8 shift lens in a printed version, I discovered that the sky which looked
like solid blue had some gradations of blue, which helps obscure the banding in
the photorealistic mode on my Alps MD1300 printer.
To those of you who are not familiar with the Alps printers, Alps makes several
MD-series printers, all of which can print using MicroDry ink cartridges. Each
cartridge has a piece of plastics with metallic rectangular patches which can be
read by the printer. When the ribbon runs out in the cartridge, the
printer/computer tells you that you need to replace a cartridge in a numbered
slot. This can happen in the middle of a printing job, but when you replace the
cartridge with a new one, it will complete the job without leaving a telltale
sign. The photorealistic mode prints in 600x1200 dpi on a special
"photorealistic" paper using 3 MicroDry color cartridges plus a finish
cartridge. Since the dye-sub materials are more expensive, I am trying to make
the best of the photorealistic mode for a printed version of my "Christmas"
card.
In addition to the MicroDry cartridges, some MD printers accept photo-quality
cartridges and print dye-sub prints. The printer is rather noisy, and the kind
of noise it makes depends on the type of printing.
Someone asked me by private e-mail about their new MD-5000 printer. It appears
that the MD-5000 printer is intended for a desktop color printing job rather
than a photo printing job since the dye-sub mode is only available as an option.
>From what I have read so far indicates that there has been no new features in
the dye-sub mode in the new MD-5000 printer.
Well, I have to go back to my printing job.
Tomoko Yamamoto
mailto:tomokoy@xxxxxxxxx
http://www.charm.net/~tomokoy/
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