Not the weather for printing

Tree of the field, Swaledale, June 2009

Now that all the book making is over, I've been turning my attention to running some prints and tweaking some of my favourites for paper output. This is an activity nicely timed to coincide with a spell of hot, humid weather. This is not conducive to print making. The humidity seems to cause the printed surface to absorb moisture, causing wrinkling of the paper and that is also leading to some long drying times, despite the heat. How do people in warm climes cope with this stuff?

On the positive side, I'm really happy with the output from my recent work. There are a few tricky images with subtle tones and colours that are taking some effort but most are coming straight out very nicely. My whole process is now driven from Lightroom using the custom profiles I built for my printer/paper combos.

Artistic choice: paper and profile

As much a part of the photographic process is the choice of paper and the profile to go with it. Many photographers talk about the papers they use, the surface, the gloss etc. It is important, however, to make these choices based on artistic goals rather than technical ones.

What brought on the thinking about papers? I tried a new type today. I'd been having trouble getting hold of my regular paper so tried something that is fairly similar. the new paper is Ilford Gallerie Classic Pearl, but that is not important. What is important is what effect it has on my prints. It is slightly (very slightly) warmer than my previous paper and has a finer surface finish. Ilford also supply a vast number of profiles and happen to support my printer, too. Nice.

Result of the first prints are very good. It yields a more subtle translation of fine detail, which is something I am constantly striving for. The colours are balance - not too saturated and even across the spectrum. More detail is carried in the dark shades with a finer tonal transition, which is something I'm looking for at the moment in black and white. Plus black and white is actually more neutral, balanced nicely by the slighter warmer paper tone. Overall it is very much meeting my needs at present with this printer which is great.

The point is, this paper much better suits the aims I have for my prints. even with only 2 or 3 off the press, I find the results much more in line with my aspirations. That is what counts.

Of course, I'm hankering after a decent, larger, pigment printer but that will have to come later.

Digicam prints

This morning I decided to try some prints from my digicam. I printed off the photo from the last post ("Preparing for the off") trying a couple of processing options. These are actually the first prints I've produced from this camera.

This was shot at ISo400 which appears pretty grainy on screen but is sharp as I had balanced the camera on a solid object. (An aside, the Samsung A503 that I use has a flat base and flat ends which makes it ideal for fixed position shots. All the hotel room shots were done this way. It's a feature I'd look for in a pocket camera in future.)

In all cases I cropped the dark portion along the bottom and a funny dark stripe that appears along the top edge. I also rotated slightly to overcome the small tilt.

First up I went my normal route: shadow noise reduction, tonal separation and as much contrast and output sharpening as it would stand. Loss of detail from noise reduction (even restricted to the shadows) and aiming for a smooth look really limited the amount of brightness I could get.

The second try was to ignore noise reduction, take the grain as it comes and try brightening the key areas. A final tweak kept the tones even in the sky and dark parts of the water.

The final outputs are surprising. Both prints are 8" wide on 12" (A4) paper - that's native resolution at 300ppi. The "smooth finish" from the first effort has great tonal separation in the shadows and has quite a lot of fine highlight detail but the main parts of the image are way too dark. It has nice details and stands up well to normal viewing distances but lacks a little something overall. The second print is much better than I had expected. the noise produces a very fine texture in the shadows that is not at all unpleasant. Lack of NR means there are a few details that haven't been lost and the ability to brighten the mid-tones more (by being less worried about noise) gives a real lift to the print. I'm very pleased with the outcome.

I had started this little exercise wondering if I could really produce good prints from the A503, with it's grainy output and limited resolution (5MP). It turns out that the printed image is even better than the on-screen with plenty enough detail for a goo, medium size print. Wven with the fairly well compressed JPEGs, there is plenty of scope for enhancement to produce quite a fine print.

I'll have to experiment with colour now, to see if there is a similar story.

Lightzone 3.2: a look at printing

Now that I've got my printer back in action, I decided to take a run at printing from Lightzone 3.2. I'd previously tried from 2.4 but there were so many issues (not least a weird corruption of the right edge of images) that I gave up long ago.

So I started out to run off a couple of the recent set I've been doing for my up-coming print review. I loaded up one of the pre-prepared jpegs: correct size, white border. di a couple of contrast adjustments and set it to print. And then waited (and waited and waited) then went off to do something else. It took over 5 minutes to process the image to the printer - all in the foreground. I have no idea what was going on but it wasn't a processor or memory limit. Once that one printed i tried another to see if it would be quicker. Nope.

Another one of those annoying quirks that's getting in the way of this being a great piece of software.

Needless to say, I will into be printing any more from Lightzone 3.2 - I hope the new version (3.4) is in better shape.

Getting to grips with black point

Lake hut, Mongolia, September 2006

Over the past couple of days I've been putting a lot of effort into printing. Now I've got my printer working again, there is quite a back-log. I'm also putting together a series of prints for a print review session at an up-coming workshop. It's been quite a trying experience at times.

i realised that I had to put together a more robust workflow for printing than I had, plus most of my print optimization had been in preparation for the local print shop. Different printers, different final edit.

I always work my output (web, print, distribution CDs) from a 16-bit TIFF exported from Lightzone. I had to make a few changes to the settings there. Black point needs to be set high enough in the TIFF to cover all outputs (e.g. my printer has a black point of around 35). Then the image needs some levels & contrast adjustment to get the blacks (and sometimes whites) in the right place. As I pay more attention I'm finding more and more I need to do to get it just right.

Then there are the printer settings. I ran through about 10 sheets of awful prints before realising I'd set colour management in both Photoshop and the printer. The iP6700D (and I'd presume other Canon printers) has an annoying pre-sets function where output settings are stored. It's fine if you stick to the setting saved but make a change and everything else seems to revert to default. I had to go carefully through each of the pre-sets I use to make sure they were all just right Plus you can't modify & re-save the settings, need to create a new set but at least the old filename can be overwritten.

The outcome of all this is a dramatic improvement in the quality of prints I'm putting out, more consistency and a much easier process to boot. Next I'll need to start trying Fine Art papers, now that I think I can cut down the wastage.