I don't think I've made myself clear.
I *think* they may be identifying relatively underexposed
*regions* & boosting the (printed) brightness locally in
just those areas of the image, giving the same effect as
wet-chemical-age dodging. Art suggested a means of doing
this in his reply to my message...
>>two bit image (on or off, black or
clear). A threshold level is selected to determine at what
intensity
the result flips from clear to black.... applying
levels to the "non-masked" or selected area to lighten those
shadows. <<
If I were designing the filter, I'd then twiddle the
brightness only for blocks that exceeded a certain size,
thereby leaving the rest of the otherwise satisfactory image
unaltered.
This is, of course, very different from any adjustment
applied to the whole image. It's addressing only relatively
underexposed *areas* of the image. Ed's Vuescan Help file
talks succinctly about the choice between highlight & shadow
detail when printing automatically...
>>The decision of whether to capture the intensity range of
the clouds or the person in the shadows ......usually made
by a computer in the film minilab when printing the
negative. <<
What I hope Bonusprint's (Agfa's 'Dimax') LCD mask printers
are doing is looking for *big* blocks of dark tone, and
brightening them. It'd leave the rest of the image as it
was, but reveal the detail of 'the face under the hat'. This
would be an automatic attempt at what I used to do with...
>>the time-honoured method of waving your hands
about over the printing paper.<<
I'm asking the experts whether or not something like this,
that looks like an innovation to me, is actually well
established already, and exists as a digital filter I can
acquire (or encourage Ed to adopt), to expedite the process
of inkjet printing from filmscans.
I know I can do this in image editing software; I'm after an
*automatic* method that works for many images.
Alan T
----- Original Message -----
From: Tony Sleep <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, November 09, 2000 12:07 AM
Subject: Re: filmscanners: Selective LCD masks in colour
printing
> Sounds good to me:) The C21st catches up with unsharp
masking at long last!
>
