Digital negatives for gum printing

[Katharine Thayer <kthayer@pacifier.com>]

Keith Gerling wrote:

> Well, you may not believe this, but after using several different papers, I
> found that the best for my purposes was Hewlett-Packard Multi Purpose paper
> from Office Max.  It's thin, has no pattern, has a very tight paper weave,
> and its very, very cheap.  I came to the same conclusions about some of the
> other papers: thickness causes many problems


Here's a man after my own heart, who confirms my own observations about
digital negatives for gum printing: Less is more. An old printer works
as well as a new one. (I too print my digital gum negatives on an
"ancient" Photo EX. If it works well for this purpose, who cares how
many generations of printers have come out in the two years since I
bought it?) Quadtones aren't necessary, at all. Paper works as well as
film. Plain paper works better than fancier, thicker, more expensive, 
paper, as long as it doesn't have holes or visible "stuff" in it. High
resolution isn't necessary for gum negatives. The odd thing is that I've
found that people are very resistant to these suggestions, so let them
chase the next higher-resolution printer, the next inkset, the next
profile software, the next paper, and we'll just go on making gum
prints.

Thinking about all this it occurs to me that the sharpest gum prints
I've ever made were from negatives printed on a 300-dpi laser printer. 
This brings up an interesting contrarian thought for gum printers intent
on attaining the highest-resolution, most continuous-tone negative
possible with (one assumes) the ultimate goal being the sharpest gum
print possible: Maybe it doesn't work that way for gum. A gum printer
who uses printing halftones to make his gum prints told me once that he
does that in part because gum works best laid down in discrete dots
rather than continuously. He claimed that the discrete gum-bits created
by halftones stay attached to the paper in development, whereas with a
continuous-tone negative, insoluble gum will be dragged away with the
soluble gum next to it as the soluble gum dissolves away in development,
making the edges of tonal areas indistinct. I thought it egregious
nonsense at the time (considering some of the quite sharp one-coat
historical gum prints which used, I would assume, continuous-tone
negatives) but it's an interesting question.  
Katharine