Re: Digital negatives for gum printing

["Gordon J. Holtslander" <holtsg@duke.usask.ca>]

Hi:

A friend of mine is trying out gum printing.  To get started he printed
out a negtive on transparency film on his laser-printer at work.

He got a decent looking single coat gum print on his first try.  He asked
me if this was cheating.

Gord

On Thu, 2 Aug 2001, Katharine Thayer wrote:

> 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
>

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Gordon J. Holtslander		Dept. of Biology
holtsg@duke.usask.ca		112 Science Place
http://duke.usask.ca/~holtsg	University of Saskatchewan
Tel (306) 966-4433		Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
Fax (306) 966-4461		Canada  S7N 5E2
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