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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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