Re: Could someone summarize that gum up or down discussion?

It reminds me of a time when someone wrote to the list that they
didn't understand why everyone says that gum has a short tonal scale,
because to their eye, it made a fully tonal print with one printing,
easy. But when the person posted some examples, the prints didn't
appear to have more than three or four discernable tones. Just
another example that suggests we may not share a common meaning for
the term "fully tonal."
kt

On Apr 16, 2006, at 9:22 AM, Katharine Thayer wrote:

>
> On Apr 15, 2006, at 2:15 AM, Peter Marshall wrote:
>
>
>>
>> The reason why transfer jumped straight into my mind was in part
>> because of the different nature of the substrate and a hope that
>> the bond between gum and plastic sheet might be rather less than
>> that between gum and paper so as to make this possible.
>>
>
> As I described before, I've found that gum, once dried, is so
> attached even to glass that it takes three changes of razor blade
> to scrape off an 8x10 print, and that trying to take it off while
> it's still wet just turns it into slurry. But one thing I haven't
> tried is soaking the hardened and dried gum layer, and that's what
> I would suggest to Marek: soak the dried image on the substrate in
> warmish water and try to loosen it gently with a mixing knife or
> something flat that you could gently ease under the layer, and see
> if you can float the layer off, like a Polaroid emulsion transfer.
> I have serious doubts that you could keep the layer intact, but I
> haven't tried it and don't know for sure. To me, a carbon-type
> transfer simply doesn't make sense, because as Dave pointed out
> earlier, gum and gelatin have different natures that make the
> success of such an approach improbable.
>
>
>> Although it is always dangerous to judge from reproduction,
>> Marek's image seemed to have a more delicate tonality than I've
>> previously seen in one-coat gums.
>>
>
> Yes, that was what blew me away about Marek's print. I certainly
> don't know of a way to get that kind of subtlety in the mid and
> high tones and in the darker tones at the same time, in one
> printing. Understand, I'm not saying that you can't get darkish
> and middish and lightish tones in one print; that's not what I'm
> arguing. What I'm saying is that you can't get subtlety in both
> deep tones and light tones in the same print, IME. This is a
> problem of the gum emulsion itself, as Sandy rightly said earlier,
> not of the negative, and IMO can't be fixed by being more
> sophisticated about the curve of the negative. If you want a lot of
> subtle gradation in the highlights, they have to be laid down with
> a lighter pigment load that can't possibly give you a deep DMax; if
> you want a really deep DMax you have to use a very heavy pigment
> load that can't possibly give you subtlety in the highlights, just
> as Sandy said. Marek's print showed a way to get both in one
> print, that's why I consider it a breakthrough.
>
> I'm always ready to be pleasantly surprised, as I was with Marek's
> print, but I've never yet seen a one-coat gum print that was made
> by adjusting the curve of the negative to fit gum's short tonal
> scale, that didn't look, well... compressed. Sure, you get some
> relatively dark tones, some mid tones and some relatively light
> tones, but you can't change gum's short scale nature by the type of
> negative you use. The only way, IME, to make a gum print with a
> long tonal scale with delicate gradation throughout the scale
> (until I saw Marek's print that points to another way) is by
> multiple printings. But like I said, I'm always ready to be
> pleasantly surprised.
>
> I'm inclined to agree with Sandy that the problem here may be a
> problem of semantics: maybe those who say one can make a fully
> tonal print in one coat by adjusting the negative mean something
> different by "fully tonal" than those who say it's unlikely.
> There's "fully tonal" as in the seagull print on paper at the
> bottom of the tests I posted earlier in the discussion, which is
> fully tonal in the sense of having tones from dark to light, and
> then there's fully tonal as in marek's print, which expresses a
> living, breathing quality in the tonality that IME you just can't
> get in an ordinary one-coat gum, no matter how you make the
> negative. But like I say, I'm always ready to be pleasantly
> surprised.
>
> Katharine
>
Received on Sun Apr 16 10:59:29 2006