Introduction 

 

Price and time pressure in laboratories is increasing. A nearly unlimited number of quickly changing film types make good and stable print quality ever more difficult. Successful laboratories have to attain perfect print quality for all film types at the first go and without waste. It is only possible to achieve this, when the printer is balanced with standardized negatives of all processed film types in the lab.

Colour-Science offers you the most powerful printer balancing tool available, to control slope, density and colour balance for all film types. With the Colour-Science Printer Control System you save money and obtain the best overall customer prints at the first go.

 

Colour-Science Printer Control Negatives have been carefully designed in over ten years of extensive and continuous research. All printer control negatives and reference prints are produced with the utmost care and are controlled sensitometrically. In addition, each strip is checked densitometerically before shipment.

Most printer and film manufacturers not only recommend the Colour-Science Printer Control System, they also use it themselves.

 

Application 

 

Most printers use three levels of exposure to set up density, colour balance and slope. For this reason, our standard control negatives consist of a normal exposure, a two f-stop underexposure and a three f-stop overexposure. Many different types of control negatives are available, such as Superover control strips for Fuji labs, and strips with up to twelve exposures.

To set up your printer, the normal exposure print is adjusted in printing times and filtration values until the print density corresponds to the reference print. Then the under and overexposed frames are printed in order to adjust the slope settings. The aim is to match colour balance of both prints with the normal print. With these steps you will have achieved the printer balance. The colour and grey scales make colour shifts more visible.

The design of the negative provides symmetrical peripheral areas, so that a slight displacement in the printing gate does not affect the printing characteristic.

Colour-Science Printer Control Negative Strips allow you to adapt overall colour balance and density level according to personal taste. Certain laboratories prefer a darker or lighter balance or a warmer image tone. Perfect production print quality to your preference is of the utmost importance rather than beautiful test prints. On a certain day, if the production seems especially good, it is recommended to print the test negatives at that time and to keep the resulting prints as an individual standard. All film types should then be printed to this same standard of colour balance and density.

Slight correction over all channels can be done later by adjusting the master channel.

 

The scene 

 

The scene is the result of over ten years of extensive research by Colour-Science in a close collaboration with film producers, photo laboratories, printer manufacturers and photographers. It represents the "average" of user negatives. This is why Colour-Science printer control negatives perfectly represent daily production in photo labs.

A production out of tolerances immediately shows up as a change of contrast or a colour crossing over (different colours in light and dark grey pattern).

 

Colour-Science unique background grey scale allows a precise visual control when the test prints are shoved together. The large grey patch in the center is used to compare your test prints with a densitometer. Colour rendition and saturation can be checked using the six colour fields. The model is used to evaluate the important rendition of skin tones.

 

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