black vs. color inks and gum

Good morning,
Over the weekend despite my many mistakes I finished testing side by side
black ink only and colorized negs for gum.

Thanks to Rodolpho Pajuaba for the suggestions to remove the venetian blind
effect; the black ink reprint of the negative did not contain those waves of
density when i switched to 16 bit and selected 1440 instead of 2880 in my
print driver.

Well, I'm hard pressed to make any conclusions except one: with correct and
separate curves for magenta, yellow, and cyanotype, my gums look great.
BUT, since with the PDN system I had developed 6 curves, 3 for black ink
only and 3 for color ink only negs, both sets of images were fine. Both
were a great improvement over my former methods of gum printing and my
former curve. But side by side, black ink and color ink only negs both "do
the gum job".

Next I am going to bitmap the image with black ink only curved, and see if
Howard Efner's bitmapping is even sufficient enough. If the lowly bitmap
does a great gum, then I would suppose gum is the most flexible
negative-using process there is. After all, we're talking about hardening
gum in a layer, essentially not a photographic process almost per se.

Certainly with palladium, salt, straight cyanotype, argyrotype, van dyke,
and traditional silver paper, I would use Pictorico and colorized negs for
the grainless, tonally smooth negatives. Howard, I've lost your post: what
resolution did you bitmap at?

One thing I will say is that with correct curves the gums are soo easy to
develop. No dinking around removing color from areas it shouldn't be.

Will I stay with black ink only on PWOHP vs. Pictorico? This is where I am
undecided. Pictorico is so nice and stable and not flimsy even though it is
expensive. I think I need to do a few more side by sides and see if there
is any slight edge.
Chris
Received on Tue Nov 15 08:43:16 2005