From a photograph by Paul L. Anderson
A PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPH
Printing the Photograph
The finished negative, when dry, must of course be printed, and there are many printing mediums available. The carbon process gives an image in lamp-black or some earth pigment, bound up in a film of gelatine; the gum-pigment process gives an image similar to that of carbon, the binder in this case being gum arabic; the platinum process gives an image of black metallic platinum direct on the paper support. Other processes give different effects, one of the most valuable to the pictorial worker being gum-platinum, in which a completed platinum print is coated with a gum-pigment film and printed under the negative a second time, the final result being a gum-pigment image superposed on the platinum image. Of all printing mediums the one that has most intrinsic beauty, and is at the same time most capable of rendering satisfactorily the gradations of the negative, is probably platinum, so this is most used by pictorial workers. But, since it is expensive and requires daylight or strong artificial light for printing, nearly all commercial workers prefer the somewhat less beautiful and less permanent, but more convenient, gas-light paper, so-called because it can be manipulated entirely by gas-light, neither daylight nor a dark-room being required. This medium consists of paper that has been coated with an emulsion somewhat similar to that used for plates, but requiring much longer exposure. The negative is placed in an appliance that holds it in close contact with the paper, then a sheet of paper is put in, and an exposure of a few seconds is given. Obviously, the paper receives most light under the thin parts of the negative and less under the denser portions, so that when the print is developed, fixed, washed and dried the resulting picture is light where the original subject was light, dark where that was dark, and show intermediate gradations where these existed in the original.
Photograph by Karl Struss
CAPRI, ITALY
From a bromoil transfer by Charles Kendall