RE: Commercial printing vs gum printing

Bill,

Did you miss my post? I offered to send you an actual print. One that will
clearly demonstrate that black can be obtained with C, M, and Y. Please
take me up on this offer. That is, if you even SLIGHTLY capable of allowing
yourself to learn something instead of merely holding to your own rigid
views.

Keith

(since you mentioned Cheney, I hope you will forgive me for mentioning that
there is more than a slight resemblance in the manner in which you both
react to opposing viewpoints)

-----Original Message-----
From: wrleigh@att.net [mailto:wrleigh@att.net]
Sent: Wednesday, July 14, 2004 12:31 PM
To: alt-photo-process-l@sask.usask.ca
Subject: Re: Commercial printing vs gum printing

OK, Katherine, you win. I give up. I surrender. You are right. You are
always right.

My initial reaction was to quote Dick Cheney, but I decided that wouldn't
do.

Then I considered a long response, but I figured who really cared about what
I've had to say, so why bother.

In the end, I decided that the information exchange here with the back
biting, criticism, and veiled insults were not worth it also.

You can hold your own Saturday Night Live skit and "talk amongst
yourselves", but I won't hear it, as I'm unsubscribing.

--
Bill Leigh
wrleigh@att.net
> Hi All,
> I've been too weary to read much of the intervening but am still
> thinking about the stuff I went through so hurriedly the other day and
> have a couple more comments:
>
> wrleigh@att.net wrote:
> >
> >I'm just saying that if you want Black or Neutral Gray, you can't get
>>there
> by just CMY, you need to use Black or Neutral Gray.
>
> This just shows the fallacy of using a commercial printing model where
> it's not relevant.
>
> The reason why you can't (or at least can't without a lot of monkeying
> around) get a neutral grey or black in commercial printing without
> adding black or neutral grey, has to do with impurities in printing
> inks, as I quoted from the Photoshop manual the other day, not with any
> discrepancy between color theory and reality as it relates to color
> photographic methods.
>
> To quote another source, which unfortunately I didn't get the URL for
> and can't find again, "The color gamut of process (CMYK) inks has always
> been a problem. Poor purity of the cyan and magenta pigments is usually
> to blame for the shortcomings in the CMYK color gamut. Cyan is typically
> contaminated with yellow and magenta, for example, graying the color and
> giving it a dull muddy appearance. The amount of contamination ranges
> between 18-26% depending on brand and density. Magenta is contaminated
> with yellow, if the pigment is rhodamine, and blue if the pigment is
> rubine. It is common practice to mix them together to obtain a true
> process magenta. While the hue may improve, the resulting mix will be
> dull and muddy. ...Color printing inks also use extender pigments --
> kaolin type clay."
>
> As near as I can determine, the most commonly used pigment for process
> magenta is lithol rubine (PR 57) a pigment not used in watercolor
> painting. The most commonly used process yellow is diarylide yellow (PY
> 12) again not used in watercolor paints. The most commonly used pigment
> for process cyan nowdays, also as far as I can determine, is pthalo, but
> as explained above, both the cyan and the magenta contain significant
> amounts of contaminants. I daresay economic factors preclude the use of
> purer pigments, and all the "color science" that Bill refers to in
> commercial printing is an effort to push inferior materials to do what
> they really can't do very well. And I also daresay that adding black is
> a much cheaper way to deal with the muddy colors than buying purer
> pigments.
>
> We are not under these commercial constraints; we can buy very pure
> pigments because we use small amounts,  and furthermore the issues of
> dot gain and trapping and out of gamut colors and all those things that
> occupy printers are simply not issues that concern us.
>
> I'm  getting to my point, which is that it may be more useful to think
> of gum printing as a branch of painting than as a branch of commercial
> printing, if we have to attach it to something other than itself.
>
> In painting, it is very easy to make a neutral grey or a neutral dark
> that's quite black with three, or more commonly with two, colors.
> Handprint lists a whole page of complements that mix to form a neutral
> grey (chroma <2 as measured by spectrophotomoeter), and as a painter, I
> never use black pigment or grey pigment but always make my neutrals by
> mixing complements.
>
> For tricolor gum printing, of course, we use not complements but
> primaries,  but the three primaries used with  intelligence can always
> produce neutral greys and a dark enough neutral black to look black to
> most reasonable people. Where a muddy brown results from the tricolor
> mix, it's due IMO to the choice of pigments or possibly in some cases to
> an imbalance in the pigment saturation among the three colors, not to
> any  great discrepancy between color theory and reality, a discrepancy
> that simply doesn't exist in gum printing to the extent that it exists
> in commercial printing.
>
> Katharine Thayer
>
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Bill Leigh
> > wrleigh@att.net
> >
> > >
> > >
> > > On Wed, 7 Jul 2004 wrleigh@att.net wrote:
> > > > ... Printer
> > > > manuafacturers spend millions to get the proper combination of
colors to
> > > > produce the proper results, and I find it extremely difficult to
believe
> > > > that someone working in their basement (or wherever) combining
> > > > approximate amounts of paints with unknown amounts of specific
pigments
> > > > can achieve what the manuafacturers are unable to do with large
expense.
> > > > Colo printing is quite analagous to gm printing, in that the printer
> > > > lays down 3 or 4 successive layers of colored ink or toner,
expecting
> > > > the combination will!
> > > >  yield the desired effect.
> > > >
> > > > Please post 2 instances of the same print, one of which was printed
with
> > > > lampblack and one with some combination of your choice of cyan,
magenta,
> > > > and yellow, which show that the color is identical. Also try
scanning
> > > > the print and see what Photoshop says is in each of the CMYK
channels.
> > >
> > >
> > > If we wanted color and effects identical to commercial materials, why
> > > wouldn't we just do C-prints or similar "color photography"?
> > >
> > > Judy