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Carbon Pigment technology, also known as quad-black or "Piezography," was developed recently as an alternative to the IRIS process. IRIS printers utilize dye-based inks and print at relatively low resolution. These inks have been found to lack the kind of print longevity initially claimed. Alternatively, pigment inks suffer far less from exposure to both visible light and UV than dyes, and they can be loaded into today's state-of-the-art high resolution printers.
These prints are beautiful to behold, with the ability to display fine shadow and highlight detail and with extremely smooth values. They exceed the tonal rendering capabilities of silver-gelatin prints, and are dotless to the eye. |
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Metamerism |
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| Carbon Pigment prints do not exhibit the problem of metamerism, which most of the colored pigment inks possess to some degree. Metamerism is the tendency of a print to shift its color balance according to the type of illumination it is viewed under. This is particularly troublesome with black and white prints made with CMYK inksets, as the smallest variance in color balance is readily detectible. Furthermore, the fade resistence of the different color pigments is not generally equal throughout the inkset. While these differences may be very small, not noticeable in full color prints, it can mean that black and white prints will color shift over time as the weaker pigments break down. | ||||||||||||
Our Solution |
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| At Cirrus Digital Imaging we print with ConeTech's PiezoTone monochromatic inksets. Composed of finely ground carbon particles, they produce prints which are both neutral across the tonal range and free of metamerism. The inksets contain shades of gray and a solid black, there is no color to balance or break down. Carbon prints have a much longer lifespan than do dye images, current testing has determined their longevity to be in the realm of 100 years, properly displayed under glass. Specialized RIP software is employed in production. Provided your scan or file is of high enough quality, your print will manifest all of the smoothness and tonality that was present in the subject, On top of all of this, you can do all of your contrast control, retouching, burning and dodging in PhotoShop. What could be better... |
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