U of S | Mailing List Archive | alt-photo-process-l | Re: two questions about gum

Re: two questions about gum



Oh, if you're talking about those prints, then absolutely the pigment shouldn't be reduced. But I thought he was talking about something else, since neither of those prints is at all dark.

And I agree, the danger is when people start calibrating for one- coats and then use the same mix for tricolor; that's when you can overpigment the layers and get the print too dark.

Thanks for chance to clarify,
kt




On Sep 26, 2007, at 11:17 AM, Marek Matusz wrote:

I was thinking about the two prints that CHarles has shared and I did not see the evidence of overpigmentation there. There is some evidence of color imbalance, that is the concentrations of pigments relative to each other is off. This is not surprizing in view of the pigments that he has chosen. In principle the pigment concentration of the three primary colors should be established before the first negative is printed.
So I assumed he had his pigment concentration about right (maybe that was not a correct assumption since I have not seen the print in question).
In principle I would agree with you that both should be considered when troubleshooting. This would be even more so for people coming from monochrome gum printing as they would tend to print their three primary color layers too dark. That's how I started.
Marek

> Date: Wed, 26 Sep 2007 09:21:10 -0700
> From: kthayer@pacifier.com
> Subject: Re: two questions about gum
> To: alt-photo-process-l@usask.ca
>
>
> On Sep 26, 2007, at 6:18 AM, Marek Matusz wrote:
>
> > Charles,
> > I would say you should adjust your curve and not cut your pigments.
> > Cutting down on pigment will result in whimpy and grey looking print.
>
> Since there's no standard for how much pigment to use per layer in
> tricolor gum, I can't see how it makes sense to characterize the
> result of cutting down pigment as a general statement. Cutting down
> on pigment would result in a wimpy and grey looking print only if the
> pigment was at the right concentration in the first place, in which
> case it would make no sense to cut down on the pigment. My
> recommendation for cutting down on pigment only applies to cases
> where the layers are overpigmented in the first place, resulting in a
> too dark print (where overexposure has been ruled out by calibrating
> the exposures first) . Reducing the pigment on a dark print like
> this would result in a bright, balanced print, not in a wimpy grey
> print at all. Maybe I should try to print such a print, to show what
> I mean.
> kt


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