Re: CMYK separations on Adobe Photoshop

On Sun, 31 Oct 2004, Katharine Thayer wrote:

> It seems to me that I recall Judy saying sometime that she made side by
> side tests and found that a gum print from RGB and a gum print from the
> CMY printers of default CMYK separations were for all intents and
> purposes indistinguishable. That's the only test that I know of, and
> Judy can tell you whether I'm remembering that right or not.

For better or worse, I can't take either the credit or the blame for that.
In fact my experience with gum prints from actual color separations,
rather than what might be called *fake color* created from one monochrome
negative, was several years ago, and before the niceties of the practice
were discussed on the list, which is to say I didn't know I had other
options than simply to scan my color slides by the default values, bring
into Photoshop and separate by CMY (this was Photoshop 3 or 4, and that
was what they had, tho I had the option of omitting the K, which I did
because they were plenty dark enough) and print the negatives at 300 dpi
on my old laser printer -- and paraffin wax.

In fact there may have been no other options, because, if memory serves,
you had to have an inkjet printer to print the negatives in RGB, which I
didn't. Either that, or go through some rigmarole in Photoshop which was
beyond my knowledge, if not my program.

I go into this detail because my experience with these gum prints was that
the color was *realistic* to a fault, in fact they looked exactly like gum
print versions of the slides. Uncannily so. Which was one of the reasons
I gave it up -- my idea of color printing, ESPECIALLY in gum, is to have a
transformation, or at the very least a free interpretation. Otherwise the
print would feel like, perhaps a tour de force, or even virtuoso
performance, but.... um... lacking imagination? -- ie., what was the
point? Just to show I could do it?

There was also the fact that the photographs I needed to print in gum were
all monochrome, so printing them in gum for the next several years WAS
ipso facto an act of imagination. The prints I'm preoccupied with now, on
the other hand, have to be printed digitally first, although in due course
I intend to take them to gum. Since these originals are in color I expect
to benefit from the current list info and discussion, not to mention that
I now have Photoshop 7 and the Epson 1160 for color seps. (In the span of
relatively few years, it's a whole other world.)

Judy
Received on Sun Oct 31 21:32:07 2004