My wife specializes in hand-colored black-and-white photographs. She wants to get out of the darkroom and do much of the process digitally. We need a film scanner and a printer. Friends have recommended either the Nikon Coolscan III or the Polaroid Sprintscan LE or SE (all are in our budget range). She wants to continue the hand-coloring process by hand and not by computer. This is the toughy: Is there a printer that produces black-and-white photo quality prints on a medium that will take the photo oils or photo pencils without smearing? I was thinking of Epson EX, Alps 1300 or a laser printer. (I'm getting a Mac G3 as the computer). Suggestions?

-- Kirby Pringle (pringle@mail.advancenet.net), November 11, 1998

Answers

Hi Kirby,

I'm a professional photographer/imager that has a friend who does hand tinting of photos. I know that fiber based works the best and that's pretty hard to find nowadays. I output traditional photographs using a $40,000 digital printer called a Sienna. That's a little overkill to purchase for your purpose, but we just opened a new web page that will allow people to upload their digital files to us for true photographic output. If you take these traditional photos, you can use any of the available McDonald retouch photo sprays and use oils, pastels, pencils, anything that has been available for the past 20-30 yrs. If your wife wants to get wild, get painter and learn how to do that and she will open a new vista of possiblilities that she could never have done with traditional materials. She could even manipulate in Painter, send us the file, we could output traditional prints and then she could continue using oils,pencils, etc. over the computer enhanced one for a totally new 'look'!! I'm not a traditional artist, I'm a photographer, so I fudge and use Photoshops abilities where I couldn't do it with natural media and I'm pretty good at the hand-tint effects just using photoshop. Combining a natural artistic ability can produce some absolutely amazing creations!

One nice thing with our photo-printer is if you ever want to create a 'limited' edition, you can manipulate in Photoshop, send it to us and then have reproductions that all match exactly. For one ups, you can also use the Epson ink-jet printer. The one that has 6 inks will creat absolutely stunning results. The draw back is that it's slower than the second coming, so if you needed to make 10, it'd take around 90 minutes. I discover with the ink-jet prints, if you spray with retouch lacquer, the ink will melt if you apply it like you do a traditional print. I learned that if I spray a very very light mist, let it dry for 60 secs., another very light coat and repeat that for about 5 coats, you can eventually make a good coating that can be manipulated with pencils, oils, etc.

Please feel free to go to our new web page @ pictureprint.com . Feel free to e-mail me if you have any questions. I love talking about all digital stuff to people and am glad to help.

Phil Pool

PS We just got the new Minolta Dimage Scan Multi film scanner and it's an incredible scanner. I believe it's about $300 more than the Nikon and trust me, it's worth it. The Nikon is great, we even have one here and I love it, but there's one thing it can't do that our Minolta can.... It can scan negatives up to 6cm x 8cm in size!! You can take professional negatives and get beautiful scans from it. We had a $15,000 drum scanner here that died and my boss wasn't going to spend the $5,000+ to fix it, so we trashed it and I recommended he buy the Minolta, well... it's works great. You could even start a little side business by going around to the local professionals in town that don't want to invest in that much, but would love to get their negs into photoshop and don't want to spend the huge sums that a lot of service bureaus want to for a scan of a big size. We charge $20/scan on it and it takes about 2 minutes. Our fancy drum scanner would take 7 minutes and it would take that amount again to prep the neg and drum, mount it etc.. a real pain. We looked at 2 $10,000 scanners (one a baby drum the other a regular film one) and a really nice drum called a 'Flextight' that you didn't have to mount on the drum, it did it automatically. The flextight was the best, but the only real difference was in the deep shadow area. If you're doing a lot of black cats against black backgrounds, the flextight was better. We didn't have to worry that much, so we saved $15,000 and got the Minolta. Three of my professional friends here in S. CA. have taken my recommendation and also purchased the Minolta and they've been very happy. I feel I should call Minolta and get a commission!!

-- Phil Pool (pep44@mailexcite.com), November 11, 1998.

Phil (and Kirby)

Oi! What an answer! GREAT suggestion about the multi-spray technique with photo lacquer on the inkjet prints!! Just the sort of info you can't possibly get except from someone who's done it. Depending on your price range, check out the Nikon LS-2000: It's pretty amazing even with deep shadows. We should have an LS-III Nikon in shortly after Comdex, and Minolta has committed to getting us both the Dimage Dual and Dimage Multi, although we probably won't have those reviews up until Mid-December at the earliest.

Also, I've sent some samples through a Sienna printer like Phil mentioned and found the results to be noticeably better than a photo- quality inkjet: The colors still came out richer on the photo paper, particularly the greens and blues. That said, modern 6-color inkjets produce astonishing results at very low cost...

Good Luck!

-- Dave Etchells (hotnews@imaging-resource.com), November 11, 1998.