Re: dig negs (Burkholder)
"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."
Can we assume that you are basing this comparative judgment on
personal examination of the real thing, i.e. actual gum prints made
by PDN users?
Sandy King
At 12:00 PM -0700 10/4/06, Katharine Thayer wrote:
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
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