moRE: The Wonderful World of Kodak IE

[v.bromfield@xxxxxxxxxx (Vaughan Bromfield)]

I used to do Cibacopy work at a colour lab. Cibacopy is a direct reversal
process whereby "photographs" are made directly to paper without film. The
material uses its own chemistry and is a particularly high contrast
material. Interesting stuff. It's intended for tungsten illumination. You
can use it for stat prints from transparency, but only with pre-flashing
and the quality is only fair: but they are quick and cheap.

Anyway, we occasionally did sample boards for interior designers and
architects: the baords had a piece of all interior finishes on them:
carpet, aluminium cladding, interior and exterior paint swatches, leather,
fabric for chairs and curtains, bathroom and floor tiles, even mirrors --
all glued to the same piece of board for presentation.

We could *never* and I mean *never* get all the colours of all the
materials matching at the same time. Carpet in particular we could never
match, since it always imaged as magenta, regardless of its eye colour.
Since the interior designers were never pleased with the copies we always
got them there to OK the final colour and density compromise.

The cause of the colour shifts: our only guess was the IR sensitivity of
the Cibacopy paper, or some anomalous but predictable response from the
range of dyes used on different materials especially carpet.

We tried getting IR blocking filter gels, but could not locate any.

Something else: the architects often used to lay coloured film over their
drawings to illustrate building colours. The film is made by Pantone and
others. For one big contract (a hospital tender that was to be awarded on
TV) the designers decided to save a few bucks and buy a cheap alternative
to Pantone film cause Pantone is expensive.

We all soon found out why Pantone stuff is expensive: the cheap stuff was
grey to the eye, but photographed red-magenta (yes, that pesky old IR
again!) and we couldn't correct it without blowing the blacks into
Cyan-ville. Since they had left the reproduction to the last minute
literally, they had to present redish coloured images of their grey
building to the premier on TV! So much for saving a few bucks...

Vaughan

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| Vaughan Bromfield                  |                         |
| ITD Education Consultant           |                         |
| University of Technology, Sydney   |  Phone: +61 2 9514 2176 |
| P.O. Box 123                       |  Fax:   +61 2 9514 1169 |
| Broadway  2007   (Australia)       |  V.Bromfield@xxxxxxxxxx |
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Topic No. 11