There are many stunts used by good printers to pull themselves out of tight places at various times. I will describe two that are more commonly used than any others in printing undertimed and uneven negatives, for no matter how careful the operator may have been and how much has been done on a negative in staining and blocking, negatives will find their way to the printing-room which are far from good and are shy in quality. Negatives, such as of interiors where there is furniture, dark wall paper, etc., will have detail, but in the print will show a little too dark. One way to correct that is to take a printing frame and build it up, say, three inches with cardboard, similar to shown in Figure No. 73. Cover it with vignetting tissue, cepia or onion skin paper, place your negative in the frame and hold it tip to the light and daub opaque on in splotches here and there over the thin places. It does not require much practice and you will be surprised what an improvement it makes, but, of course, the frame must be kept moving before the light during the exposure (this being one of the advantages over a printing machine) as one gets more diffusion.
Occasionally an operator will go out on a job and bring back a negative horribly undertimed through lack of sufficient artificial light. Illustration No. 74 is a print from such a negative. At first sight it looks as though there is absolutely no hope, but there is. One way is to make a very thin trans parency from that negative and bind it in contact on the glass side, which means that your thin place in your negative is being covered by a thin deposit in the shadows of your transparency and your high-lights are not being obstructed by the transparency. Of course, it does not make as nice a print as the negative would if fully timed, but it will "save the bacon" many times, and is an old stunt which has been used for years. Illustration No. 75 is a print from the combined negative and transparency.
The washing of prints is quite a proposition in the large studio, where prints are turned out by the thousands, as there has never been a real satis factory washing machine put on the market that would wash large size prints, that is, prints from 8 x 10 on up. About as good an arrangement as I know of is illustrated in No. 76, which is a pen sketch of a washing tank used by one of the largest studios. These boxes work practically automatically in that, as soon as one side is filled, the weight of the water turns it over and the water runs out that side, while the other is being filled from the faucet. The studio mentioned has fifteen to twenty in a battery, with one boy to change the prints from tank to tank, and is as practical a way to handle a large amount of good size prints as I know of, although the washing of prints by hand and changing from one tray to another, as used by the majority of the studios, after all has been said and done, is about the only satisfactory manner of thoroughly washing any kind of a print.
The drying of prints is another proposition that worries many of us. Studios doing a lot of advertising work, where speed is essential, have to turn out prints in a hurry. One way to do this quickly from ferrotype tins is by a drying cabinet such as illustrated in pen sketch No. 77. This cabinet is gener ally made of wood with slots to hold the tins with the prints on them in an upright position, with an air space between, so that the air can pass right through from the bottom. There is a gas flame underneath the cabinet with an electric fan at the top, pulling the heated air from the gas flame right straight up through the cabinet past the prints. Prints will dry in a cabinet of this kind in five or six minutes under normal conditions. I would not recommend this system for prints with muslin backing though, for to prevent them from sticking and to get the proper gloss, the prints should dry more slowly.
The kind of ferrotype tins and the care of them is a matter for much consideration. Almost every day someone asks me—"what do you put on your feiTotype tins." Tins when they are new do not need anything on them and I firmly believe that if they always had good care and the prints were prop erly hardened before going on to them, the tins would not have to have anything on them. It is only when tins get scratched and dirty and prints have stuck on them that you need a remedy. What to put on tins is governed by circum stances.
If you are delivering prints to commercial artists or to people fc;r coloring. or you are coloring the prints yourself, you certainly do not want to put paraffins and gasoline on them. But, if you are delivering prints to customers for salesmen's sample books, paraffine and gasoline is all right, although it should be used sparingly at all times and the tins should be polished to the limit—the more they are polished, the better.
The real theory of it is that no more paraffine should be put on the tin than just enough to fill the scratches.
If delivering prints for commercial artists, wash the tins with warm soapy water, but do not rinse them very much and apply the print directly. Then, when the artist applies saliva to the print to make his color stick, he will have dissolved off what little soap there was on the print.