Grey Scale Step Wedges
This small lightweight Photoshop plugin gives you the ability to very easily create grayscale step wedges for black and white printing. Using step wedges in the print workflow is an ideal way to evaluate how your paper - ink, and printer respond to different shades of grey which is ideal for any black and white printing process.
After printing the step wedge, we carefully examine the patches and especially the adjacent patches to ensure that we have good tonal separation. What we do not want is the have adjacent tones clumped together especially down in the shadows or in the highlight region.
Create Step Wedges On The Fly
All three-step wedges are created on the fly and can be produced as and when they are required, thus cutting down the need to allocate disk space for them.
The two most common step wedges are the 11-step one which is useful when evaluating tones against the zone system, and the 21-step version which is an extension of the 11-step version only this one has 21 steps with 5% increments between each step.
The 51-step wedge creates patches with 2% increments between them which allows you to really narrow down the tones with a little but clear separation between them.
Step Wedge Options
Located in the upper right-hand corner of the plugin flyout menu lies two sets of options for the step wedges.
Options include:
- Use Large or Small Patches
- Different layouts for the the 51-steps
Black And White Print Target
The plugin also includes a black-and-white print test target which is used to evaluate tone smoothness, shadow detail, and highlight paper tonal response.
The black and white print test target has been designed to print onto A4 and US letter-sized paper.
Treat the teat target as you would a normal photograph, and print it in exactly the same way.
After allowing dry downtime, under good lighting, examine the target looking for any inconsistencies especially in the smoothness of the tones as we go from black to white.
Use the lower left image to evaluate shadow information and use the four squares on the right to evaluate highlight information.
Zone System Scale
The plugin also includes a zone scale which highlights all full and half zones.
Beneath the zones are the RGB numbers which can be used in conjunction with your photograph to easily identify zone placements.
Built In Videos
The plugin incorporates a built in custom video player where you can watch any product videos which have been recorded.
To access the videos, press the small ☰ icon in the upper right hand corner of the plugin.
Compatibility
- Adobe Photoshop Version 24 and newer
- Windows 10 and newer
- macOS
Step Wedges
