Re: How many gum layers (Re: ferri sesquichlorati)
Disclaimer: Can´t keep up with the speed an with of this debate, but had mostly written this, so... Hi Katharine To me what you write sounds like a mixture of the two approaches I mentioned, which incidentally is exactly what I wanted to hear :-) Thought that this probably would be the approach that utilised all options in terms of creative printing (as opposed to making copies). But have not seen a "formal" description of it. The methods, as described in one of the books I have, assumes normal negatives (that is "normal" as in grade 2 silver paper). I don't think that is particularly important as one obviously can adapt things quite a lot. I have more or less only been printing greyscales, as in lamp-black, Stouffer and gelatine, for the last couple of years. The way I express things may have become a bit scaled sort of... :-) Halvor On 10/24/06 11:32 PM, "Katharine Thayer" <kthayer@pacifier.com> wrote: > Halvor, I've not seen either of these approaches, but neither of them > makes much sense to me. > > I assume here we're talking about printing a negative that exceeds > the short tonal range that gum is capable of in one printing. > > The usual recommendation is multiple printings using more pigment and > less exposure for the shadows, and less pigment and more exposure for > the highlights. This works well for me. (I don't think it matters > what order you do it in. I like to lay in the highlights and > midtones first, with a less-pigmented emulsion and a longish > exposure, and then put in the shadows with more pigment and less > exposure. But I can imagine someone wanting to put in the darks > first (easier registration, for one thing) and the lights second; I > don't think it makes any difference.) > > Then there's a school of thought that says you should make a contact > negative that brings the tonal scale of the original negative down to > the short range of gum, but that's never made sense to me because > you lose so much of the subtlety when you do that; I prefer to print > all the tones in the original negative. So far, the only way I've > ever seen to get subtle tonal gradation throughout a long tonal > scale (with the one exception of Marek's back-printed flowers) is > multiple printing, as described above. > Katharine > > >
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