RE: RE: Digital negatives for gum printing

[Larry Roohr <lrryr@home.com>]

Here's my two cents.

The pictorico system produces wonderful, full scale, with great tonality,
b&w prints. Get your photoshop file right and just chunk em out to your
hearts content. I love the piezo, but miss the process of hand making prints
and appreciate the uniqueness (non-repeatability) that hand made prints have
as objects.

So for me the best of both worlds is getting that photoshop pliability with
images, and the piezo tonality and ease onto a negative for the hand made
printing processes.

Using regular epson inks and the epson driver a while ago, I found the curve
needed to get high density's way too extreme for peace of mind given 8 bit
images and output to the printer. Also the Epson driver seemed to always put
a contrast bump into the mid tones that I couldn't predict or control. And
then there were the dots. All this was done with step wedges, a
densitometer, and a loupe. No images were made and evaluated. Maybe I threw
the baby out with the bathwater.

The piezo got rid of the dots, the mid tone bump, and the extreme curve on
pictorico transparency film. All my objections gone. Unfortunately I also
have banding coming and going on my 1160 with the pictorico (very little dot
gain), it's small enough that it doesn't show up in my gum prints, but does
in the ziatypes. There may or may not be a cure for this, I'm working on it
among other things.

Last nite I made some 'cheap HP paper' oiled neg's and with a curve got a
nice linear ramp up to a 1.2 density, no banding, with the piezo driver.
Haven't checked yet but I doubt it would be as sharp as the pictorico for a
ziatype, it's probably fine for what I'm doing with gum. Don't know how the
Epson driver would do here, I'd probably find some problem with it with my
densitometer/loupe/etc but likely (and reportedly) it would make fine gum
negatives.

So, if (big if) I can get rid of the banding I'll have a desktop negative
system for my ziatypes that delivers 8 lpmm for ziatypes with complete
control over tonality to the negative. I already have this for gum, don't
know if I would have had it already without the piezo but I'm not looking
back.

And then, after all my trials and tribulations, there's Dan out there doing
just fine with his orange epson driver nag's, and Paul Roarke who makes
wonderful quad inkjet prints with the epson driver and the MIS inkset.

But the piezo works for me, and I do appreciate the inkjet quadtones I can
make with it. So who knows?

Larry