Re: dig negs (Burkholder)

[Katharine Thayer <kthayer@pacifier.com>]

On Oct 3, 2006, at 3:15 AM, Loris Medici wrote:

> Just for the record: My results were pretty consistent, reliable and
> beatiful before reading Mark's book also. I mean you can get quite
> consistent, reliable and beatiful results without PDN too - I don't  
> quite
> understand why PDN is presented as an absolute must for this purpose?
I couldn't agree more.

To me, the test of a product or new method is the prints that result.  
If the hyperbole surrounding PDN had merit, one would expect the PDN  
system to be producing gum prints that are vastly superior to  
anything that's been made before, but  so far they just look like gum  
prints to me-- not better, not worse, than other gum prints  that  
have been made.  The gum prints, present and past,  that I consider  
extraordinary in terms of the quality of the printing, tonal scale  
and so forth, have been made from a variety of negative types, from  
imagesetter negatives to continuous tone, and there's nothing about  
PDN that's suddenly blowing everything else out of the water as far  
as I can see.

> I agree with Mark; about getting/reading both books to learn as  
> much as
> possible...

I have nothing against this recommendation on principle;  it's fair  
and if you've got both, you'll have more of a complete picture.  On  
the other hand, it may come as a surprise to some, but there are  
actually people in the world to whom $100+ is a whole heck of a lot  
of money, maybe even some people on this list who aspire to gum  
printing.  So I'd like to offer another point of view to reassure  
those people: if you can't or would rather not spend that kind of  
money, you can make perfectly acceptable gum prints without either  
system, and save your money for gum and paper.

As I said the other day, I used Dan's system in the days before photo- 
quality inkjet printers, because it was the only way to get a decent  
negative out of a low-resolution laser printer.   But since I got my  
first Epson Photo Stylus printer,  I've simply inverted the file and  
printed the negative as is.  (And if I ever decide I need to tweak a  
curve, that's what the Photoshop Adjust Curves feature is for).

For example,  a couple of demonstration prints on my site that I made  
for another purpose, but are typical of tricolor prints made from  
inkjet separations printed straight from  the inverted color file  
without added adjustments:

http://www.pacifier.com/~kthayer/html/optrans.html
(top of page)

I keep forgetting to scan or take slides of work before I deliver it,  
so I don't have recent exhibition prints to show, and the earlier  
prints made from inkjet negatives that are on my site were mostly  
made during a period (2001-2004) when my project was to print high- 
key images with very subtle tonal gradations within a short range (in  
other words, very pale very subtle images)  so they look very  
different from the saturated, more contrasty demonstration prints  
I've just showed.  But it might be worth looking at one of those in  
comparison,  to consider that there's absolutely nothing different in  
the negatives, or in the files, between these two kinds of prints;   
both examples were printed directly from scanned and inverted color  
images that were not altered in any way.  The  difference is entirely  
in the printing, in the choice of pigments and pigment  
concentrations, but also in the choice of exposure and development  
times, in order  to achieve the very pale, delicate and subtle  
results in one case, and the more saturated and contrasty results in  
the other case.

http://www.pacifier.com/~kthayer/html/skunk.html

(Both of these jpegs match exactly the original prints, at least on  
my monitor; whether you see what I see is of course not guaranteed).

Katharine