Re: the look of tricolor vs CMYK
Am I serious in saying that a black made mostly or entirely of black paint looks different from a black made by glazing three balanced colors over each other? Yes I'm serious, but I also said it's subjective, and maybe it takes a painter's eye to see it. But, as I said earlier, it's a well known fact in painting, that blacks look different if you make them with black paint, than if you make them by glazing colors over each other, and that is why many painting teachers urge students not to use black paint, but to mix or glaze colors to create black. Why wouldn't I be serious about that? It's true that CMYK (here I'm talking about the default Photoshop CMYK space, not some custom-built CMYK space, as I assume most gum printers who print CMYK are still using that rather than something more sophisticated) does print some reduced value of the other colors as well as black, but the overwhelming color in black areas is black, and the black paint would overwhelm whatever other colors are there. If there was some significant UCA amount, meaning more color added back into the black areas "to produce rich, dark shadows in areas that might appear flat if printed with black ink" (quote from the Photoshop manual) then maybe tricolor and CMYK would look more similar, but the default UCA amount is 0%. Katharine On Jan 30, 2007, at 4:09 PM, Keith Gerling wrote: "With a tricolor, the blacks have undertones of color and life, and with CMYK, the blacks are just sort of flat and dead. " hehehehe Oh, I think she might be serious.... Katherine? Are you serious? I can't tell any more. -----Original Message----- From: Katharine Thayer [mailto:kthayer@pacifier.com] Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 4:52 PM To: alt-photo-process-l@usask.ca Subject: the look of tricolor vs CMYK On Jan 30, 2007, at 8:49 AM, Katharine Thayer wrote:As for whether CMYK all in gum is tricolor, no, it's got four color layers, :--) and besides, it also looks different from tricolor gum. It was very easy for me, going through the gum galleries in alternative photography, to pick out the tricolor gums from the gum over cyanotypes from the CMYK prints. I can't even quite articulate how they're different, but they're different.Driving around looking at real estate today (you know how sometimes an answer to a problem will pop into your head when you're thinking about something entirely different) I realized that what makes a CMYK print look different from a tricolor gum print is the blacks. Watercolor painters are often cautioned not to use black paint, but to make their blacks and other darks by mixing or overlaying colors, because black paint gives a dead flat look, whereas the mixed blacks are livelier. It's the same thing with gum prints. It's an ineffable thing, but you can tell the difference. With a tricolor, the blacks have undertones of color and life, and with CMYK, the blacks are just sort of flat and dead. It's a subjective thing; maybe not everyone could see the difference. But to me it makes the two kinds of print easy to distinguish. Understand, I'm not ranking them; I'm just saying they're different. I can imagine places where that dead black would be exactly the look you might want. Katharine
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