Re: solarplate images up on my website
Hope I was clear about David's approach. When I worked with David this past spring in Florence he was creating an image, converting it to greyscale, then printing it on OHP using all colored inks (NOT black only) at 2880 printer rez. My sense is that doing polymer plate with inkjet has a dependency on the fact that inkjet does allow light to pass through somewhat, as opposed to imagesetter transparencies which are dead-black dots. This image translucency interacts and affects the screen exposure/dots to a certain degree. Where the screen dot overlaps with an image dot, you've got a slightly harder black dot than you would without the image exposure step, since there will be a little light coming though the transparency even in the 100% black areas of the image (since inkjet isn't truly opaque). If you only exposed the screen without the image exposure, the blacks you'd get would be different - perhaps exceedingly rich with a tooth beyond what you want. That's my theory at any rate. I just know when testing to get a proper exposure time to get a solid black with the screen, and did, once I determined the optimal exposure time for the image, I wound up backsliding a little and changing the screen time in the end. Currently it's close to 50/50 for me, but the screen time being slightly less (10.5s screen /11s image at 5K watts). Jon Christina Z. Anderson wrote: Jon, I should have been more specific--no black ink used in the colorized neg, greyscale neg using all inks like you're talking about, below. I am very interested in what you say about David Hoptman because I thought he was using color ink only...also, he is the one that uses a 2/3 (!) aquatint exposure to a 1/3 positive. Dan Welden has an example of an image in his book that is done, for instance, with a 1mn45sec aquatint and a 10sec (!) positive exposure on p. 87. That blows me away. This is why I wonder about the question of image determining in part the choice of aquatint time.
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