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Master
printmaker Jon Cone is a wizard at the tinkering process. And
one of the things he loves to tinker with is the making of an
Iris print. In fact, Cone has transformed, re-invented and retooled
the Iris print as a fine-art medium-not once, but several times.
His
latest innovation is called DigitalPlatinum, and it
will surely be remembered as an important landmark
in the history of the digital art print. Simply put,
a DigitalPlatinum print mimics a gallery-quality photographic
print to such an extent that it can fool even a photographer's
eye.
"It's the first time that what I call 'true
optical quality' is present in a digitally produced black-and-white print," says
Cone. "People don't think of Iris as having a dither, but it's always been
there. A really discerning photographer can look at a standard Iris print and
know that it's really not a photograph. On the prints that we produce, that feeling
is not there."
Says landscape photographer Carl Austin Hyatt,
who has worked with the process: "They're absolutely beautiful prints. I'd
stand them up to anything."
How does DigitalPlatinum work? A very smooth gray
scale is one important innovation. New printer driver software created by Cone
uses CIElab color space (instead of CMYK) and the 3047 printer from Iris, to
CONE'S
NEW INKS AND SOFTWARE CAN BE
USED TO MIMIC TRADITIONAL PROCESSES
LIKE PLATINUM AND PALLADIUM PRINTING.
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deliver more than four times the number of gray levels than the standard
Iris software can produce. That means a lot more subtlety, and a lot
more possibilities, in tone.
The new inks created by Cone for this process
are also unique: capable of producing warm, cold and neutral tones - in a single
set. Used with the software, these can be manipulated to closely mimic a variety
of traditional processes, including platinum and palladium printing, and selenium
toning.
"My process can easily manage the complex
split toning, which is one of the most sought after aspects of platinum printing," Cone
says. "For example, the highlights and darker tones could be completely
separate from the main mid-tones. And it's completely natural looking. Just like
on a finely made platinum print, the toning seems to occur without a definite
separation."
The process uses the computer's capabilities to
produce a variety of different results. Hyatt uses the process, for example,
to make prints with a long and wide gray scale, like selenium toning. Another
photographer, Barbara Bordnick, is using the same tools to produce prints with
a much narrower tonal range, like palladium. Created with a digital back on a
large-format camera body, Bordnick's images have no film grain, which produces
an entirely new effect.
In addition, Cone is still tinkering with the
software and inks to mimic other, even more archaic processes. At the end of
last year, he invited Carl Weese, the nation's recognized expert on everything
platinum, to help him reinvent Ziatype, a printing-out process first patented
by Captain Giuseppe Pizzighelli in 1887. "These old processes have a lot
of limitations, but they are very beautiful," says Cone. "I want this
to be a virtual digital darkroom that does non-traditional processes." |
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The four
photos above by Carl Weese were prepared using Cone Editions? proprietary
software. They illustrate the range of tones possible with DigitalPlatinum
printing. |
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February 99 second page 
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