Bromoil printing and bromoil transfer

by Emil Mayer

If the high lights of the picture completely repel any grade of ink, while this adheres thickly in the shadows, then the formation of the relief has been forced too far.

If the print takes the ink neither in the high lights nor the shadows, there is either a fault in the preliminary preparation, as, for instance, bleaching in too warm a solution, or one too strongly acidified, or the print has been acted on too energetically by the ammonia bath. In the last case the print may be dried and again swollen in water.

If large or small irregular spots which take the ink more strongly than the surrounding parts, are formed during the inking, the reason is either that the prints have lain one on top of the other in the preliminary baths, or the film has been prevented from swelling by air bubbles, or by having risen out of the water. Thus certain places are less well prepared or are not swollen, and therefore behave as though they had been more strongly tanned, that is to say, they take even the first ink strongly and stand out from their surroundings as spots and streaks. Sometimes such spots are improved by putting more ink on the print; if they are not of large area and are in the less important parts of the picture, they may be ignored, as they can be removed from the finished print without special trouble, as will be explained later. If, however, the spots have a large area, or occur in an important part of the picture, for instance, in the eyes of a portrait, it is preferable to stop further work. As a matter of fact, all such blemishes may be removed by after treatment of the print, but the trouble entailed by the correction of large faults is greater than the work of preparing a new print.

Sometimes darker spots or streaks of irregular outline show themselves during the work, which from their shape cannot be ascribed either to air bubbles or to partial sinking of the relief. Then there are probably irregularities in the gelatine coating, for which the preliminary treatment of the bromide print is not responsible.

If the print shows a satisfactory relief, but still takes the ink badly or not at all, the reason is in the incorrect composition of the bleaching solution, or the omission of the intermediate drying after bleaching.

Finally it may happen that the image appears almost as a negative during inking-up, since the high lights take the ink quicker than the shadows. This phenomenon appears when the intermediate drying after bleaching has been omitted, or if the work has been begun with too soft an ink. In such cases, if too much ink has not been applied, the fault can be corrected by further working-up with a hard ink. If this is of no use, all the ink must be removed from the faulty places in the manner already described.

If during the inking-up small irregular white spots in groups show themselves and shift their places, then there are drops of water in the brush or on the print. The print should be dried, the brush also, and the spots hopped dry and worked over.

Yellow or brown spots and patches, which often appear during the work, increasing in number and continually enlarging, or even penetrating through the film into the fiber of the paper, are to be ascribed to the fact that particles of amidol were deposited on the film before the soaking of the print. When these particles dissolve in water they cause the trouble just described. If there are merely scattered spots of this kind which have not penetrated the paper, they may be scraped out of the finished print and then retouched. The real remedy, however, is in keeping the amidol carefully closed and as far as possible not in the same room as the prepared prints.

Ink streaks, which a print treated with a soft ink shows when it is taken out of the warm water, only appear when the print is placed in a slanting or vertical position; they can be avoided by taking the print from the water and immediately bringing it into a horizontal position on the support and rapidly drying, so that the water cannot run off.