Katharine Thayer (kthayer@pacifier.com)
Sun, 10 Jan 1999 07:00:05 +0000
Judy Seigel wrote:
>
> On Mon, 30 Nov 1998, Luis Nadeau wrote:
>
>> ******* To get enough density on the acetate, all four colors had to be
> > used but the resulting negative was not a perfect neutral grey. He
> > found that by adding a certain tint he could make substantial contrast
> > adjustments on his pre-coated Palladio paper.*******
>
Sigh. Every time I think we're getting to the end of this, Judy has to
throw another grenade over, just to be Judy, I guess. (and it's
interesting to note that everytime she does this, she starts a new
thread). If she can't shut me up by the force of her argument or by
making fun of me, she'll divert the argument so she can feel like she's
won even though she's actually shot the wrong man.
Look. First of all, Luis' remark is about printing on acetate. We have
never, through this whole discussion, been talking about printing on
acetate. When Campos & Davis (does this person have a name?) asked "Is
anyone successfully printing on transparencies from an inkjet?" no one
answered in the affirmative, so I assume that no one is doing that. This
discussion has been about what happens when you convert an RGB file to
CMYK, which is that one way or another, the C,M,andY densities are
changed to allow for the addition of the K. There are RIPS that allow
you to have more control, but that's a much more sophisticated
discussion that you can follow on Epson-inkjet and doesn't really belong
here. Here we're talking here about the standard CMYK conversion
settings that most people here are using.
I don't even understand why Judy thought it was such a victory to find
"proof" that the inkjet driver makes the separations, (although as I've
said my experiments indicate that might not be entirely the case; the
CMYK space that's sent from Photoshop seems to enter into the
separations somehow). Does she know for a fact that for instance an
Epson CMYK space would be more conducive to gum somehow than a photoshop
CMYK space? More specifically, that the way the Epson adjusts CMY to
allow for K is better somehow? Why would she think it would be? The
Epson space will be created to maximize printing with Epson inks on
Epson papers with Epson hardware; is that *more* or *less* like gum
printing than the Photoshop settings which are intended for commercial
printing presses, printing inks etc? Beats me, if you know the answer do
tell us all. (I've been here too long now I'm starting to talk like
her!)
I started this whole argument by saying that using the CMYK model for
making color separations for gum printing doesn't make sense to me. In
the course of teaching myself how to print gum, I studied everything I
could find about color gum printing, and it was always about three
colors, and I used three colors and it worked just fine, and I've been
doing it that way ever since. Through this whole tedious discussion, no
one has given me a rational argument for doing it. People have nitpicked
unimportant details and derailed the discussion to side issues, but *no*
one has laid out for me why it makes sense to do use a model developed
for commercial printing presses and printing inks, to create color
separations for gum. I'm not telling anyone else what to do, I'm just
saying that in my mind, it doesn't make sense. You're going to have to
make a better argument to persuade me.
For me there's an aesthetic consideration in addition: To my eye black
is a dead color and deadens anything it touches, and adding black to a
picture is not something I'd want to do. Others may not feel that way; I
respect their eye and just ask them to respect mine. I'm a painter and
would never use black in a painting; I make darks as black as any black,
but they're created by mixing saturated complements. That way I get a
black that has some life to it.
Look, we start with a color photograph on film and our goal is to turn
that into a gum print. In order to do that we have to make various
compromises. Most of us don't start by taking separations in-camera with
filters; for me it's mostly not an option because a lot of the negatives
I'm printing were taken 20 years ago before I ever heard of gum, and
because a portion of the work I do is making gum prints from customers'
photographs, so I mostly have no option but to start from already
existing color film or a color print.
We make the compromises we're comfortable with, and we'll each have a
different line we won't cross. I'm comfortable scanning the color
photograph and converting it into an RGB file; apparently Bob Maxey
wouldn't be. In my search for a method that would give me the effect I
wanted, I spent some time working digitally and decided that digital
wasn't going to make my socks roll up and down, as far as digital
manipulation and digital output, but once I discovered gum, since I was
already working digital it made sense for me to create the contact
negatives digitally. I'm *not* comfortable going another step farther
from the negative to CMYK; frankly I just don't know what that computer
is doing to the RGB values and don't trust it to do the right thing. If
I were going to create CMYK separations, I would want to spend several
months studying the finer points of RIPS and CMYK conversions and the
Gamut of Gum, as someone suggested, and I'd want to have total control
over all those curves, and in the end I would have created an ICC
profile for gum printing. I don't see myself spending the time to do
this because I'm happy with my own method, but Judy, go for it.
Katharine Thayer
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Sat Nov 06 1999 - 10:06:41