[Alt-photo] Re: try one

[Matti Koskinen]

On 15.8.2013 1:08, raven erebus wrote:
> I had actually forgotten I made a tutorial...
>
> http://trollop.com/etching/etching.html
> It has pictures of my images and the resulting etch.
>
> I got the image close to what I wanted by thresholding in photoshop
> and then played around with the various printer settings until it
> printed nicely. I wanted to avoid that news paper look.
>
> The laser printer doesn't exactly print a half tone (round dots). It
> prints black or nothing. In otherwords it doesn't print gray scale. If
> you don't threshold your image you'll see spotty-ness that isn't
> exactly a halftone. The settings for the printer changes the handling
> of that computation.  So I just printed with each setting and used the
> results I liked best. I haven't seen banding. That sounds like it
> might be specific to your printer?
>
> My laser printer is vintage 1995. If I had to guess... that's probably
> the key factor in making this work.
>
> I just used regular laser printer paper which is quite glossy.  And
> after a soak came right off with a little gentle rubbing.
>
> With transparencies there's gum Arabic to deal with. I didn't try
> it... maybe heat doesn't melt it? Also I figured plastic plus iron
> would be bad news.
>
> I set the iron to the very hottest setting which on my iron was cotton.
>
> There's a product I was going to try called laser tran that is
> supposed to work great for this but I haven't tried it.
> http://lazertran.com/
>
> After I transferred I did an aquatint using an airbrush. (I don't have
> access to one so I haven't actually done this in a couple years)
>
> best,
> Raven
>
Thanks,

first I expected to get the newspaper-style image from printer, so my 
earlier tests were using bitmap diffusion dither settings, but then I 
just printed from PS directly to laser, and the result was truly nice 
greyscale image. My printer prints stochastic pattern, and the dots are 
even smaller than a single dot from PS  bitmap, so making a negative and 
printing on a textured paper cyano or tempera, there are no visible 
dots. This of course depends on printer and its driver. Using an old 
laserjet 1100, which had only parallel port, I had to use usb-parallel 
port adapter, and printing from Mac the driver uses ghostscript as the 
raster driver, so the images were really coarse newspaper-style. But 
this newer (new, heh, they were about to dump it from my wife's work) 
and win7-driver, the results are great.

I've been trying to find good settings for printing and transferring to 
copper. Ferric chloride must be bought directly, they don't mail it, so 
real etching must wait. But the tiny piece of PCB I still have, can be 
used over and over again, in the quest of getting toner right.

My transparencies are especially for copiers and lasers, not suitable 
for inkjets, so I think they're just plain mylar without any coating. 
But I think I have somewhere some sort of paper you use, so I'll give it 
a try.

Seeing your intaglios made my very jealous :-)

best

-matti