Re: Paper negative-- bad example
As I've related, my store didn't have my usual paper so I bought something else, HP Color Inkjet Paper, which turned out not to work very well. It seemed to print an okay negative, but when I went to oil it, the oil revealed dots within the paper that couldn't be oiled out; in other words, some particulate matter within the paper that didn't take oil and made the negative all gritty. But I had some emulsion mixed, so I went ahead and printed it just for the heck of it, but I wasn't expecting much and in fact I went off and forgot all about it, only discovering it when I went back last night to put things away in the darkroom and lock up. What with one thing and another, I won't be pursuing that idea of making a good comparison to show any further; I'm not interested in experimenting with more papers since I know the Epson Photo Quality paper works well, and by the time I have found some and bought it, this discussion will have gone on by. So I thought I'd go ahead and put this up with the things I posted yesterday: it's the same image, so you can compare the sharpness, and same coating mix as the one without water added, so you can sort of compare the DMax; even after 9 hours of development this image has better DMax than the one with water added. I wouldn't compare the tonality otherwise, since this one of course is way overdeveloped, and the one on the left is underdeveloped to match the development of the one with water added, which was as good as it was ever going to be. Bottom line: this is about the worst you can do with an oiled paper negative; a better paper would give you better sharpness of detail, and more attentive development would give better tonality. (The tonal inversion in the step tablet is irrelevant, because it doesn't show up in the print). So this is kind of the low bar for digital paper negatives to surpass. http://www.pacifier.com/~kthayer/html/Water.html Someday I'm going to come across this and wonder what the heck these different things are doing on the same page. kt
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