Re: humidity and gum coating (was: Re: palladium bleeding once again
Well, humidity has definitely solved the bleeding problem for the most part,
and I just finished a new curve to match the longer tonal scale of the
humidified paper. It is way long--9 stops worth...if I could finish with
all this palladium snafu now that my darkroom is more humid I'll see if it
makes a dif in my gum coating success, too. Whew.
Chris
----- Original Message -----
From: "Katharine Thayer" <kthayer@pacifier.com>
To: <alt-photo-process-l@usask.ca>
Sent: Saturday, September 02, 2006 9:23 AM
Subject: humidity and gum coating (was: Re: palladium bleeding once again
Chris, this makes me wonder if anyone has ever tried humidifying paper
for gum coating, to make the coating easier in dry climates. The reason
I'm wondering this is that my humidity, ordinarily >90%, has been way
down for the last couple of days (17% yesterday afternoon) and I was
having a heck of a time getting a smooth coat with my usual straight gum
(no added water) mix. I decided that if this keeps up (unlikely) I'll
need to start adding water to the mix, but your troubles with palladium
gave me to wonder if anyone has reported humidifying the paper to make
the coating easier. I do know that I once coated and printed on wet
paper, just to see if it could be done, and it coated beautifully and
printed fairly well, except for a sort of mottled effect in the
background. Here's the test print I posted at the time:
http://www.pacifier.com/~kthayer/html/wetcoat.html
At any rate, that combined with your explorations around palladium have
led me to musing about whether humidifying might give a better result.
Katharine
On Sep 1, 2006, at 10:10 PM, Christina Z. Anderson wrote:
Well,
Happy Labor Day weekend everyone! It may be a true "labor" weekend for
this
household after all, because my daughter is having her baby in my
bathtub
any day (or hour) now. Hmmm...that sounds strange....we do have
hospitals
in MT....ohhhh, never mind...
At least I got somewhere today with the bleeding issue. My Platine
shipment
came in and I was ever so excited to see if the new batch would be
different
and not bleed. Alas...it still bled like crazy.
SO, it helped that Mark Nelson said that at the Formulary (also in
MT--similar humidity) they had to do two things to get good prints on
Cot
320 this summer: humidify 30 minutes before coating and 30 minutes
after.
I've watched the humidity all summer and it has hovered around 30%.
I messed around with the humidity and Everclear variables--using
Everclear
or not, humidifying before and not after coating, humidifying after and
not
before coating, humidifying both before and after. I built myself a
makeshift humidity box with a couple of trays and stuck a gauge in
there,
too.
(Of course in the meantime throughout these tests I am racing first to
the
hardware store for screening and then to the liquor store for my flask
of
Everclear...I thought of downing the bottle on my way home.)
What I found was it was most important to humidify after coating, more
important than Everclear or having the paper humidified before. If I
humidified before coating, the paper tone was greyer and duller. If I
humidified after coating, for 30 minutes (70% humidity) while the paper
was
drying, there was no bleeding. So it must be as Clay suggested--the
stuff is
drying too quickly on the paper surface and not sinking in enough. It
was
so bad on a couple of my test sheets tonight that I could literally take
my
finger, wipe the wet surface of the print, and have black stains on my
fingertip. I was losing quite a bit of density in the print all over,
including highlights, and even had serious staining/bleeding into the
highlight area, too.
So tomorrow I am going to have to develop a new set of curves with this
after-coating humidity factor, and will continue this procedure to see
if,
in fact, the bleeding completely stops. I just have to find someone to
build me a drying/humidity rack, now....
I'm still puzzled, though, why during the last couple years I never
experienced this, and now I do. If someone has a friend at Arches,
could
you ask if their paper sizing has changed in the last year?
BTW, that green ink on the Epson 2400 is sure as heck dense.
The end.
Chris
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