Half tones, paper  negatives and the losses digitisation has imposed upon us.

In a message dated 9/4/06 9:37:02 pm, petermarshall@cix.co.uk writes:

> As well as giving Terry some
> dichromate (mea culpa), I also suggested it would work much better as a
> half-tone process, and showed him that it did. (Of course inkjet printed
> negatives are a kind of half-tone, but they weren't around then). But he
> chose to do things the hard way,
>
>

That was really very kind of you Peter to show me how pictures in newspapers
were made of all those
little dots. The trouble was that to me, pictures made like that were not
quite as pretty as those made using continuous tone negatives which gave one
greater control over the subtleties of the process. This is certainly true of gum
and, for my own prints, I believe is still true for platinum and palladium
especially if you use in camera negatives..

I did make a large gum print from a digital negative at least twenty years
ago but I preferred the results I was getting from the Sep Neg 2 I was using at
the time. I suppose that the scan and the print out cost forty pounds a time
may have had something to do with it.

For gum printing,  my experience with RC silver gelatine paper negatives 
suggested that a 90 lb paper would give an excellent ink jet negative, from
images taken with my digital cameras,  easily and cheaply. It does.

Incidentally, I was looking through my OPs box the other day. It had a couple
of the prints that you had published in Creative Camera Year Book, when was
it, in 1982 ?. They have a richness and subtlety that is missing from the
digital prints you have shown me. To me, one of the main points of alternative
processes is to preserve the beauty that advances in industrial efficency have
taken from us. Fine printers I know are still not satisfied with digital results
when they are compared with 'traditional' methods. Customers are now beginning
to appreciate what we have been in danger of losing.

It would be interesting to hear people's views as to the similarity between
the random dot of an ink jet printer and an aquatint grain as used in
photogravure.

Terry
Received on Mon Apr 10 11:17:27 2006