From: Katharine Thayer (kthayer@pacifier.com)
Date: 09/10/02-05:43:22 AM Z
Sandy King wrote:
>
> Indeed. Stuart Melvin's prints do show a lot of detail. But does not
> the appearance of detail come from the first platinum layer? For
> example, if you compare three-color gum prints made with cyan,
> magenta and yellow gum layers the appearance of sharpness is much
> less than when you use a cyanotype for the blue record instead of gum.
Your post arrived just after I pushed the send button on mine; if I'd
got yours first I wouldn't have sent mine. I really thought that your
post wasn't serious and that we could at last agree on something and
move on, but I guess I got it wrong, and now I'm in an argument I don't
want to be in.
I wish we had image-sharing capabilities here, because I'd really like
to see Dave Rose's tricolor gums from in-camera separations that he
mentioned the other day in the context of CMYK and gum printing. I
suspect that the softness you've seen in most tricolor gums up to the
present has more to do with the limitations of digital output than with
the gum process itself, since most people working in tricolor use
digital separations.
Last winter, needing to make a change in gum printing paper (due to a
change for the worse in the paper I was using, combined with a direction
in my own work that called for more smoothness and subtlety than the hot
press watercolor paper I'd been using could provide) I ran dozens of
test gum prints, contact printing from a 4x5 negative containing very
fine detail. I was even surprised at the fineness of detail that the gum
could hold from a small contact print, and I've never been one to argue
that gum can't do detail. The limiting factor was the paper, not the
gum.
kt
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