Response to Mortensen and Gradation

That sounds interesting. I don't know if it solves all problems because we have something of a basic problem with N- developments. Eventually, when we deal with extremely long luminance ranges, the paper is unable to accomodate the entire luminance range. Thus, our attempts at all kinds of measures to try and get the neg to print 'normally', whatever that is. But the problem is that if you have a luminance range longer than the papers luminance range, its problematic. Note I'm not talking about the exposure scale of the paper - I'm talking about Dmin to Dmax of the paper - if we say about 2.1 density units, thats about 7 stops. If your subject luminance range is more than 7 stops, you will lose something at one end or the other. So, we try various measures to try and get everything in, but that raises the other bugbear. The only way we can accomodate a longer subject luminance range with the paper is by reducing the local contrast in some area or the other (lower slope to the transfer function). Depending on the approach taken, typically we either get muddy highlights or muddy shadows. If one is able to drop the slope of the curve uniformly, one presumably loses local contrast uniformly across the whole scale, although I think that's preferable to losing an excessive amount at one end. DJ

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