Polymergravure plate tone
Chris - I agree with Jon. I've always bought my plates from A&V directly, kept them cool and in the dark and found that the KM73s had MUCH more plate tone than the Solarplates (which were stored in the same conditions). This is something I like and one of the (many) reasons I switched to Printight. Jon - Interesting point about Boxcar having to break open larger quantities and the effect it could possibly have on a plate. I recently had an order arrive from A&V where the colour of the plates was distinctly different from other batches I'd received in the past. Normally I order full box quantities - 20 plates - but in this instance I only needed 6, so who knows how these had been stored. Susan - On Mar 9, 2007, at 10:04 AM, SusanV wrote: That is SUCH an "intaglio printmaker" thing to say :o). I'll take that as a compliment! A "proper" printer at last ;-) Keith. On Mar 9, 2007, at 10:53 AM, Jon Lybrook wrote: Christina Z. Anderson wrote: I got some good points out of her book to be sure. One was the fact of plate tone within the varying plates--solarplate having lots of plate tone and others having none.Not so. I just opened a fresh 20 pack of KM73s (yummy). I tried to keep them as out of ambient light as much as possible this time as I was troubleshooting some other issues. Unlike my last batch which I was pretty casual with, I tried to keep these in the dark as much as possible. The result: quite a bit of plate tone. Too much in fact. I read in Dan Welden's book this can be mitigated by flashing the plate after screen/image exposures with sunlight for 1-5 seconds. Could be that since this batch was so fresh, and the fact that KM73s are more sensitive to light than solarplate I've just been introducing a little burnout to the highlights all this time through my sloppy workflow... Granted I have Box Car ship them to me direct from Vreeland, and I don't think they've been opened since leaving the factory in Japan. If you buy a small stack from box car, they've had to open a larger pack to sort and send them to you, and who knows if they do that in the darkroom or where...
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