Re: digital negative possibilities for gum
Katharine, As I said in my post, "In fact, my idea is to explore that softness and slight "grain" more, just as I advocate using a grainy film developed with Rodinal in my Experimental Photography classes to get students away from a Tmax-100-only mindset." I actually think the slight grain effect has a charm to it. And as I said in my very original post: "If not printing with a cyano underlayer, you can get an acceptable print with no curves, neg just inverted and printed as is, and adjust the layer with exposure, development, pigment load, brushing. But all of you already knew that, I'm sure I'll be told. I prefer the all inks unbitmapped to the bitmapped--I think." The "I think" is the qualifier here. The soft grainy charm is kind of...endearing. And third, personally, as I have said, too, I find the curved layers preferable. Fourth, I am intrigued by maybe using this method as overlayers for cyano or pt/pd, and my original reason for trying bitmap resulted in an entirely different reason for pursuing it further. Fifth, for the record, it was in Livick's book that I ran across the statement that "dotty" negs produce the bests prints. p25--even though I don't understand what he means by "The solid, little dots of color add to the light fastness of the image..." he goes to explain that one should ADD dots to the negative, even...p. 26. Even though I don't agree with some of what Livick concludes technically with gum, there is no refuting that his prints are stellar--so his practice is working. So whatever the case may be, I get to lead a wonderful class of 20 astray in Nacogdoches TX this coming week when I travel there to teach gum and mordancage, and will present them several different negative options for gum, including this lowly bitmapping.... AND I GET TO MEET CLAY HARMON'S ALT GROUP TOO!! WHOOHOOO! I am excited!!! Chris ----- Original Message ----- From: "Katharine Thayer" <kthayer@pacifier.com> On Oct 19, 2006, at 9:30 PM, Christina Z. Anderson wrote:But in a quickie gum demo and with those who want to try gum for the first time, it could be useful for sure.I'm sorry to keep asking this, but I still don't understand why you would consider going to bitmap (which would add another step and subtract valuable information from the file) even for a quickie gum demo or for students, since in the same post, you reported and showed that printing the inverted channels as a regular greyscale works well for tricolor gum, even on cheap transparencies, just as I've been reporting and showing for years. So I'm still just puzzled, why would you go to bitmap if you didn't need to.
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