Chris,
The "ink grain" from the negative that may show when printing with gelatin silver papers may vary a lot between papers and also surfaces—with matte papers showing the least ink grain. I have worked with a variety of students who were testing 3-4 new gelatin silver papers because their favorite paper had been taken off the market. Some papers were just outright ugly and had the strangest H&D curves. Others were quite beautiful. In general, the graded papers seemed to work better than the poly-contrast papers. One paper that seemed to work very well and was quite beautiful was Bergger Silver Supreme. --
Best Wishes,
Mark Nelson
On Apr 9, 2009, at 11:03:11 AM, "Christina Z. Anderson" <zphoto@montana.net> wrote:
Clay,
I have had the same issues with BW printing, though I know nothing about the
QTR thingy (very scientific word)(where is it, on the web?).
A BW neg is usually magenta/yellow dots to make a red neg in my practice.
However, as anyone who has BW printed knows, the filter packs you use to
adjust contrast are yellow (low) to magenta (high). On variable contrast
paper responsive to these differences of filtration, grain results. This is
no problem for bromoil or mordancage or chromoskedasic processes but for a
fine BW print a graded paper is much better.
Which is another reason I'll print my big dots this weekend in the BW
darkroom :).
Chris
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