Digital BW, The Print

I just made my first attempt at coating a print using the following
procedure:

- 2 layers of Golden Soft Gel (Gloss) brushed on with one hour drying
time between the two coats.

- 2 layers of Golden Polymer Varnish with UVLS (Gloss) also brushed on
with one hour drying time between coats.

My first impression is that this looks really beautiful. Sure I got
visible brush streaks from the first coat, and lots of dust on the
print, but the blacks are much, much better, and I feel the picture got
some extra 'punch' that wasn't there before. It's got the deep blacks of
glossy papers with the texture and archivability of fine art matte
papers - Seems like a great combination to me. 

I measured the uncoated black to 2.54 and coated to 2.85 on EAM. This
should only be about 2% difference, but in reality it looks much
greater. Holding an uncoated black patch against the coated print makes
the patch look very gray, not black.

Next time I'm going to try a roll instead of a brush for the first coat,
and do the coating in my bathroom instead of my dusty carpeted room.

This was very encouraging, I'm really looking forward to doing more
experiments now! 

--
Daniel Staver
http://daniel.staver.no