RE: Another Ziatype question

Loris:

In my experience, Whatman's is an excellent paper for both DOP and POP pt/pdf
printing. I do think a brief treatment in 1-2% oxalic acid is beneficial. I
can easily get rich black - Dmax in the 1.4 - 1.5 range - with this paper.

Don suggested making sure you are getting adequate exposure. I think that is
an excellent idea. Inadequate exposure can be a sneaky problem because if you
print like me, you sometimes can concentrate on getting the highlight density
right to the detriment of thinking much about the shadow densities.

Another suggestion is to make sure you are using enough sensitizer solution
to effectively coat the paper. This is the most common problem I have seen in
a lot of work. Because of the perceived expense associated with pt/pd, a lot
of people will try to get away with the bare minimum of solution that will
coat a given area, and in my experience, this is a sure-fire way of getting an
anemic print. My attitude is that I would rather have one print that I keep,
rather than five weak prints that end up in the trash. I think solution volume
is probably more important than the actual solution strength of your mix. If
you think about it, you are letting most of the water evaporate out of the
paper fibers before printing anyway, so the critical factors really are
making sure that the solutions of FO and metal are more or less balanced (so
there is no unnecessary waste of metal), and that there is an adequate total
amount of sensitizer/metal embedded in the paper fibers. Getting all fussy
about the solution's strength is a lot less important than making sure you
have enough FO/metal in a given surface area to give you a good print.

Good luck!
Clay
Received on Tue Oct 12 06:15:15 2004