Luis Nadeau (nadeaul@nbnet.nb.ca)
Fri, 08 Jan 1999 16:16:10 -0400
At 1:10 PM 99/01/08, Judy Seigel wrote:
>On Fri, 8 Jan 1999, Walt Goettman wrote:
>>
>> This effect is typically a duotone where a second black plate of a
>> different black is used. The second plate usually has a lower
>> contrast. Note Lee Friedlanders "Nudes" were tri-tone and Richard
>> Benson has been using five and six colors but this is not cmyk.
>
>OK, I'm going to stick my neck out which may draw some better information
>from the woodwork. From what I understand about the kind of printing done
>for a mass magazine like Time or Newsweek (granted, my understanding of
>the process on a sliding scale of 1 to 100 would be about 12) is that it
>would be very unlikely to do a duotone as part of its press run, which
>would mean stopping the presses & changing ink... and as there are usually
>about 6 or 8 pages to a plate, at least in the type of printing I'm
>familiar with, that would further complicate matters.
>
>Sometimes you see an insert which is probably printed by the advertiser
>and bound with the rest of the pages, but a duotone on the press run?????
>I've never noticed any I could identify as such in a mass magazine... The
>Lee Friedlander & company repros you cite are in art books... where
>duotone or tritone might be used for all or sometimes a part of the whole.
>For instance the Drtikol catalog I have says plates x through z were
>tritones, the rest duotones ... but I doubt Time magazine !
>
>Anybody here from Time? Luis?
Your analysis is exact. There is always the possibility of an exception but
fine monochrome printing in mass circulation publications is usually
4-colour YMCK.
Anyone here remembers Camera Arts and Popular Photography? They were both
printed by the same printer, but Camera Arts was a LOT better. I asked the
then editor, Jim Hughes (who btw now spends his summers in Rockport-Camden,
Maine) why Camera Arts was so much better, with the same printer. The
difference was that Pop Photo was "just printed by itself" while for Camera
Arts, he'd go to the plant in person and supervise the entire run, working
4 hours, sleeping one hour, working 4 hours, etc., around the clock until
the job was done...
There was recently a seminar here by a company that prints inserts for the
National Geographic at, get this, 500 lpi! They look good:)
As an aside, I usually carry a Swiss Army Knife that I think has been
designed for photographers. There is a very sharp pair of scissors and a
loupe on it (plus the usual screwdrivers, corkscrew, etc.). The loupe is,
of course, a single element plastic lens, about 7X in power, but it is good
enough to identify the common printing processes. You can also use it the
check the sharpest frame on your light table, you can break open a 35 mm
cartridge in the dark, etc. Very convenient.
Luis Nadeau
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