Why am I looking for Dmax? I was curious how my densities compare to traditional wet darkroom prints and I thought it would be easier to find Dmax numbers for those than Lab as the labs and producers used to measure it with densitometers.
Now I can go to the print forum and ask about typical densities. Thanks for help everyone!
In my past life as a prepress tech for the screen printing industry, I had to use a Stouffer stepwedge to calculate development time in the darkroom for color seps, reproducing logos from business cards, processing continous tone B&W photos into 80-100 lpi line conversions so they'ld print beautifully on fabric and plastic.
Seeing it was dark in the darkroom I couldn't use my eyes to judge when to stop development so I had to rely on the Stouffer wedge to show step 5 before it went black where the rest of the wedge below 5 looked completely black. Switching to the light table to judge proper exposure I could now see all the 20 or so steps that I couldn't in the darkroom.
Why is "Grandpa Graphic" relating this to you? Because you folks are trying to determine making pictures by the numbers (for accuracy, consistency?) with no consideration to changing luminance levels as demonstrated in my "darkroom to light table" demo.
Numbers are a guide, not empirical evidence that you are coming up with a sure fire way for developing a process reproducing reality in a print with any consistency and precision.
Your curiosity will be satisfied of course but you won't be able to use any of the data on a consistent basis because a print looks best when you look at it under the same light not as a densitometer sees it which isn't the same as our eyes perceive density.
IOW you haven't factored in the luminance level the print's density will be viewed so the numbers become meaningless.
