Make any paper warm tone? Or, cold?

[Paul Verizzo]

So I was running test prints on the papers I have to use as samples of what is available. I took a great B&W 1945 portrait of my mother (No wonder my father ditched another woman for her!) and printed it onto Inkpress Warm Baryta. The results were stunning! (I noted this in my thread asking if anyone's tried Inkpress papers.) I'm not going to say that the Dmax was superior to anything else available, but it was excellent, and the weird surface let it pretend it was a glossy without the issues of glossy. Think of it as a large grain random luster.

But that real captivator was that warm tone. There's a reason millions of portraits were printed on warm tone papers in the wet darkroom. All in the head, and it's all good.

It made me wish there were more warm tone papers available, and to make things worse, it appears that the Inkpress Baryta Warm is no longer available in 13x19"! Just new old stock. What a bummer.

Then the proverbial light bulb went on. I scanned a sheet of the paper and further investigation showed it to be 254-254-252 RGB. When I ran a sheet of non-warm tone photo paper through the printer using that scan I couldn't see any tonal difference. I'm certainly aware that those numbers are so nuanced that by the time the printer does its own best effort that it won't come out as planned.

So my next step was to create a jpg from Irfanview using custom color. A bit of futzing around, and I made a warm tone that I liked, as printed. I just set the printer on borderless and standard quality. Voila! Very warm tone on any paper I choose.

I made a test print of the same image, looked great! Went to the first one on the baryta, less than a week old sitting in a plastic sleeve..........something is really wrong. The deep black was gone. I ran a fresh print with the Inkpress and there is a huge difference in the two prints! Auto-fading?

But even better was the fact that my faux warm tone was best of all by a significant margin. Printed on Canon Semi-Gloss.

Obviously, you can increase or decrease the warmth, it's all in the yellow/blue channel. Download my blank warm tone image at: http://www.pbase.com/pzo/image/159091677 The black border is not part of the image. It's an effective 15"x20" size.

 

[The Hat]

I do that all the time when I need to match a particular paper shade for someone..

 

[Smile]

I never done this as ICC profile takes care of it automatically (sort of), same photo printed on 3 papers for example must look the same except paper differences if one is glossy the other not, if one has better Dmax, or better gamut that image can use. As most images have narrow gamut to begin with.

But it is great idea, except this would make any profiles unusable.

 

[Paul Verizzo]

I never done this as ICC profile takes care of it automatically (sort of), same photo printed on 3 papers for example must look the same except paper differences if one is glossy the other not, if one has better Dmax, or better gamut that image can use. As most images have narrow gamut to begin with.

But it is great idea, except this would make any profiles unusable.

Sorry, nothing at all to do with profiles, especially with making the paper warm rather minimally. That's the point of warm tone papers, in a way. Take an image you like, and print it. Obviously the Dmin will never be the same as "pure" white, but we are talking differences of a few digits on the 0-255 scale.

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

You can do that with a profile , I have seen it, and done it a long time ago, you need profiling software or a profile editor which allows you to enter/change the white and black point of the gray axis to cool or warm, and you need to limit your image data , the lightness to less than 100%, RBG 255,255,255 does not put any ink onto the paper, so it cannot change the tone but RGB e.g. 250,250,250 would print the 'white point' tone as defined by the profile - cool or warm. You print your image normally , and tone the paper at the same time. So you get the chamois look of those old fotopapers, and that one did not have a bright Dmin anyway. Or you just tone your images in Photoshop or whereever, which might be easier