Digital BW, The Print

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "Brian Ellis"
<bellis60@v...> wrote:
> >The story of how he coated the paper >and recoated the prints and
> >with perfect registration re-exposed in >order to increase density
> >amazed me.
> 
> The NY Times reporter gushed over that too but there's nothing
unusual or 
> particularly difficult about  rexposing in registration with one or
more 
> previous exposures. The techniques are well known and relatively
easy. Not 
> to take anything away from the quality of Penn's prints which I'm
sure are 
> outstanding but gum printers commonly expose, process, and re-expose
many 
> more times than Penn did.

Yes, we do.  I've gone past six on some projects.

But I would never call it "relatively easy" or say "there's nothing
unusual or particularly difficult" about it.

It's a bleeding pain. You can spend an enormous amount of time playing
with different papers to find out which are stable through the
multiple long wet steps. I often make a couple of cycles, running the
paper (uncoated, no exposure) through all the baths, for the full time
in each bath, to relax it, before starting the coating and multiple
exposure process. It only takes one bad lift to stretch the paper
enough to mutilate the alignment of the next layer.

And platinum literature, unlike gum literature, is full of paper
recommendations to get a good looking print in a single pass, with no
thoughts to how the paper will handle in multiple passes. So the
beginning multiple pass platimum printer is out there on his own, with
no guideposts...