Re: Dots of gum?

Ender100@aol.com wrote:
>

> The other issue is that when printing with larger dots doing full
> color with gum, a number of people have reported that a coarser screen
> seems to give more vibrant color since the dots don't get as "muddled"
> as they do with smaller dots. 

Hi Mark,
This argument only works for me if you're talking about opaque pigments,
as transparent pigments create color blends by overlying and showing
through each other; for them, the more overlap the better, and no danger
of muddled colors. In printing with halftone dots in commercial
four-color printing, the color dots are laid down next to each other in
a rosette pattern, as I'm sure you know, and the eye creates the blends
by sorting of blurring the colors together, but there's no particular
reason to need to rely on this trick in gum printing; you can just
create the intermediate colors by printing transparent pigments over
each other.

But in thinking about this, it occurs to me that the halftone case and
the stochastic dot case, although they have both been evoked recently to
serve the same purpose, to lay down dots of gum, may well be different
in what actually prints. So I'm going to backtrack a bit and say that I
know very little about halftones, having never used them in my life, but
I have used stochastic dot negatives extensively, and it is of them that
I say from experience that it isn't the dot that prints, it's the
surround that prints. But for all I know, halftone screens may actually
print dots. Even if this is the case, I still can't agree with the
argument that dots print subtle tonal transitions better than continuous
tone, because this has certainly not been the case in my own experience.
Katharine
Received on Mon Feb 21 12:10:34 2005