Beyond Calibration 2

By Christopher Schneiter
In my last article, Beyond Calibration, I talked about the problem of having an image look fine on a monitor, but then printing very dark. This is due to a lack of shadow contrast. My suggestion then was to put a lightening curve onto the image to lighten and increase contrast in the shadows.
If you remember this image:
 
 My problem was that most of the tones in the image were very low key, causing the whole image to print dark. By applying this curve,
 the mid-tones and shadows were lightened, allowing the image to print properly.

 THE MISSING LINK
As usually happens, shortly after the last article was published, I ran across information that caused me to rethink this technique. While teaching a class on printing technique, the class completed a project creating threshold curves. As always, as I looked at the results from the threshold curves we were doing, I started making more connections.
The images that were created had a familiar look. They had air. Y...