The Online Photographer

A Chacun Son Gout*

What I find fascinating about the foregoing discussion of printing and print quality is how often the comments bump up against what I would call "The Limits of Certainty." As much as we would like to speak with authority on how things should or shouldn't be done, or how prints should or shouldn't look, we are voicing opinions and preferences, not objective facts. It's all so virtual. We're forced to discuss prints while looking at JPEGs. We each have our own unique set of eyes and visual biases. We may be inspired to print one way on one day and perhaps another way the next. Ctein would print one of my images differently than I would, as would Mike. Which one of us is "right?"

We can discuss individual preferences, years of printing experience and artistic judgment for weeks, but what you ultimately end up with is a print and a viewer. A print that the photographer is satisfied with and that the viewer enjoys enough to buy, frame and mount on a wall seems the best we can hope for. The great challenge is how to do it. Although we (i.e. those who wish to produce excellent prints) all have the same goal, the most that other printers can do is give us maps to how they reached it. We then have to find our own way as best we can.

—Gordon Lewis

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Photo by George LeChat

Mike adds: Hence the classic didactic instrument of art instruction, the "critique." In a critique, a group of artists (usually a class of students) brings examples of their own recent work (usually an assignment) and pins them to the wall. Each person's work is then discussed in turn by the teachers (if it's a class, and there are teachers) and the members of the group. Generally, all aspects of how the pictures work can be discussed, but there is no reason why the discussion can't center on print quality, as one of my classes—taught by Frank DiPerna—did. Also, although sometimes the effect of regular critiques is to lead to the formation of a group taste, it's just as usual for individuals to put themselves into some other relationship to the group—to try to provoke the group, out-do the others in some way, or hold back one's "real work" and put up dummies, so to speak, to protect oneself from criticism. The relationship can always be learned from by the individual, if he or she so chooses. At the Corcoran, where I got my degree, there were always two teachers, who often voiced conflicting opinions—to undermine the idea that any teacher held the "correct" answer just because he or she was the teacher.

I thought critiques were fun, interesting, and helpful enough that I tried to extend them past the end of art school. My graduating class met a number of times for group critiques in peoples' homes after we graduated. The problem was that many of us were by then preoccupied with making a living, and didn't have time or energy to make new work, so, increasingly, people would show up without any new work. Our momentum eventually dissipated.

In Washington, D.C., where I taught, I also used to get people coming to me saying things like "My friend -------- took your class at -------- and she loved it. If you ever teach another class, will you please let me know?" I'd encourage those people to organize a group of a few friends, and we'd meet in somebody's home, use slides, and hold critiques. I became an itinerant teacher.

I've never quite taken to the idea of the "camera club," where, typically, larger groups of people get together to compete and award prizes, sometimes in separate categories, sometimes with an "expert guest" who is responsible for bestowing the brass rings. I was asked to do this once, and I found it vaguely unsatisfying—plus, I awarded top prize in three of five categories—the judging was blind as to the identity of the participants—to the same guy, which was very unsatisfying to the group, which would have liked to have seen the coveted prizes distributed more equably. What can I say? I thought he had the best eye. If I were going to start a trend, like the Lyceum movement encouraged by Emerson or Vincent and Miller's Chautauquas, I'd suggest photographers start small critique groups. Realistically speaking, though, it's too heavy a commitment to be practical in modern life; this isn't the nineteenth century any more.

Mike

* "À chacun son goût" is French for "To each his own taste." Title suggested by Mr. O. Grad. I can't reproduce diacritical marks such as the accent grave and circumflex in headers on TOP. Flyer from jebabb.us, advertising a Chautauqua in Corbin, Kentucky in 1926. Although Chautauquas were allegedly for self-improvement and adult education, entertainment played a part too. I particularly like Ellsworth Plumstead, the Dean of Impersonators, and the lady saxophonist.

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

A Few More Thoughts on Printing

I've been truly enjoying the comments to Ctein's post yesterday, and just wanted to add a few thoughts and reactions of my own. Actually these are all things that have been mentioned by me, Ctein, or commenters either this week or in weeks past, so maybe call it "underlining" instead of "adding."

• It's important to keep in mind that for most mainstream techniques (i.e., any double-negative process) for most of photography's history, printing wasn't optional. It was the necessary last stage of the process. Without it, you didn't have anything you could conveniently look at. The major exception, color slides, necessitated notoriously burdensome viewing requirements—you had to set up a projector and a screen in a darkened room. Nowadays, it's quite feasible to be a very serious and active photographer without ever making a print. But, for the most part, that's a novel development. The major reason for the radical decline in printing is simply that printing is no longer necessary. Not only that, but, for most of us, the situation has flip-flopped—it's now much harder to look at prints than online JPEGs. Witness....

• Ctein's "before and after" example yesterday gave me a bit of an existential smile because, of course, we're not seeing his print. Printing is the act and art of fixing the image on paper. All of the things we are seeing in those two JPEGs that he "did to the print"—while they could easily take place during the printing process and were, as Ctein tells us, part of his preparation for printing—really fall under the category of "image optimization" and don't absolutely require that printing be done in conjunction with it. Image optimization can of course be performed on digital files. We're still just taking his word for what the print looked like.

• To know what prints look like, you've got to look at prints.

• This leads to my next point, which receives very little discussion but which I think is a crucially important part of the act of printing: it fixes the image into final form, or the best approximation of final form. That is, the print that the artist makes or approves is often the best, most stable and most durable embodiment of the way the artist wants her image to look. This is true whether the artist prints the picture herself or hires a custom printer to do the work under her direction. In printmaking—by which I mean stone lithography, copper-plate etching, etc.—the custom is for the artist to sign only those prints which fully meet her satisfaction; one doesn't sign seconds or proofs. Fine printing a photograph is a way of "signing off" on the image so others can see it the way you intend them to. I used to go to the Library of Congress and call up various master portfolios to look at. With stable techniques—assuming the originals had not deteriorated with age—what I was able to hold in my hands was the picture the way the artist wanted me to see it. Holding an original Frederick Evans print in my hands, I was able to see the picture as Frederick Evans wanted me to. As long as an image exists only as a digital file (or a negative, or a book reproduction, or an online JPEG, etc.) that final state hasn't really been "set," except perhaps under very controlled conditions like seeing it on the photographer's own monitor (and that will change in time, because nobody keeps their monitors forever and monitors don't stay perfectly calibrated indefinitely). The print is not an absolute way of fixing an image according to its maker's intention—you can probably think of some of the ways in which prints are still approximate and malleable—but, given good methods, materials, and techniques, it's still the best way we have.

• I got into photography in a serious way in 1980, and by maybe 1985 I'd heard "the negative is the score, the print is the performance" so many times I was tired of it. I've heard it half a million times since. Yes, the great truisms remain profound for those who haven't encountered them before. But let's go a little further: great printers are like great conductors. Their printing style consistently shows their aesthetic concerns and tastes. Their interpretation is individual. Klemperer is deliberate, Beecham warm, von Karajan precise and perfectionist. Fürtwangler's lines are flexible, Erich Kleiber is fierce, Barenboim exaggerates the chiaroscuro of fast and slow tempos. You'd never mistake Bruno Walter for John Gardiner in Mozart. Great printers are like that too. When I was editing the darkroom magazine, I saw an endless procession of "Zoner" wannabee work that attempted to mimic the style of Adams, but the surprisingly thing was that very little of it was truly successful. It wasn't because they couldn't copy his technique—he left detailed "instruction manuals" in the form of his technical books, and some people were slavish in their imitation, to the point of using the same developer and the same light meter. It's that they didn't have his judgment—they didn't see like he did. So they couldn't quite print like he did. When Walter Rosenblum was caught making counterfeit "vintage" Lewis Hine prints from the original Hine negatives (which, as a leading Hine expert, he would then certify as genuine), one of the ways the deception was discovered was that the prints he made looked like Walter Rosenblum prints—they showed telltales of his characteristic interpretations as a printer. In any event, it might be as important—some would say more important—to develop your own style of interpretation as it is to learn to make generic "good prints."

• I've always said that the most important thing about printing is judgment. Sometimes, when other photographers "optimize" an image to their satisfaction, I'll disagree—to me, they made it worse. Experts disagree. I commissioned a feature in my magazine called "Master Printing Class" that was written by Bruce Barnbaum. Every issue, Bruce would show a straight print from a particular negative and then show his final interpretation, describing how he got from one to the other. Another Contributing Editor, David Vestal, said he often preferred the "before" print. My friend Ailsa McWhinnie, founding Editor of the English Black & White Photography magazines, went a bit further. In her magazine (maybe it's still an ongoing feature—I don't see the magazine any more), there was a wonderful regular feature that I enjoyed where two printers would be given the same negative to print. Sometimes their "final" prints were pretty close, but often they were wildly different. The point is that there's no one right way to make a great print. You're not going to please everybody, so you'd at least better make sure to please yourself.

Mike

CRANKY ADDENDUM: If I ever stop blogging, it will be because there is nothing I can say that someone, somewhere, will not take issue with it. I've just finished treating with two individuals who wrote to me in favor of the oil spill. One of them is angry with me. If I said killing babies is wrong, I'd get an email from the Infant Euthanasia Society.

People seem to be having trouble with my contention that the print fixes the photographer's intent. Relatively, okay? Relatively. To quote a relevant passage from Nelson Pass, the amplifier designer, responding to customers' anxieties about the durability of their purchases: "In fifteen years, the electrolytic power-supply capacitors will get old. Depending on usage, you will begin to have semiconductor and other failures between 10 and 50 years after date of manufacture. Later, the sun will cool to a white dwarf, and after that, the universe will experience heat death." In other words, nothing lasts forever. I'm also reminded of a friend of my parents who was known as Black John. Convinced anarchy and apocalypse were nigh and fanatical about the protection of his person, Black John built himself a elaborate survivalist redoubt in the woods of northern Wisconsin. And then died of old age. Ticking seconds breached his defenses.

I certainly never intended to imply that every print fixes its photographer's intent. Forgive me—I didn't feel that was even necessary to say. Most photographers don't even have an intent. And I didn't mean to say that the fixing has to last forever. The vast majority of photographic prints are made for some immediate or ephemeral mundane or quotidian purpose, with no thought for their career in the universe thereafter. I don't dispute that.

Sometimes, blogging is like being pecked to death by ducks. —MJ

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Benjamin R. George: "Even in a meticulously inspected signed print, one can't control for the visual anatomy of the audience.

"To take an obvious example, my retinas are calibrated for a different color space than a typical set of retinas are. ('Color blind' is a crude and misleading term, since I see in color, with three primaries like everybody else. It's just that at least one of my primaries isn't quite standard.) There's no way for me to make a color print that will look to me the way I envisioned it and also look to other people the way I envisioned it. I suppose with a lot of very careful measurement, it might theoretically be possible to come up with a way to make a print that produced for other people an experience that could be considered in some sense equivalent to mine, but this isn't a practical possibility. When I distribute a color photo (as a print, a JPEG, or in any other form), I must simply resign myself to the fact that almost everybody else's experience of it will be unlike mine in this way.

"For the rest of you, it may be easier to overlook this, but of course there are all kinds of variation in the population—some viewer will inevitably be getting your image with the wrong color space, or will be able to focus on it optimally at the wrong viewing distance, or will in any of countless other ways just experience it in a way other than what you'd envisioned.

"Once we accept that, it becomes easier to accept differences between monitors as more of the same. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do our best to assert control, but it's important to remember that, even if we could perfect our printing process or our monitor calibration, our control would still have its limits."

The Importance (or Not) of the Print(ing)

By Ctein

A couple of comments on my last two columns provide the starting point for this column. John Camp commented that he expects that "printer setup and color management will be much more standardized" within a few years and software will allow one to print well with little experience. Cameron makes a closely related comment on my last column, where he describes the business of going from camera file to a printer-ready file as "photo post-processing" rather than printing.

Both of these comments view printing as the merely physical act of driving a file from bits on a hard drive to ink on paper. But, as Cameron intuits at the end of his comment, "Or am I somehow missing the point of what it is that a master printer does?"

Well, yes, he is. What Cameron calls postprocessing is properly part of the whole custom printing process. There've been several occasions when the client has provided me with a "finished" file to print and I've looked at it and really wished they had sent me the RAW file instead and let me do the conversion and adjustments, because honestly they didn't do a very good job. Please understand that I'm not talking about reinterpreting their vision. I'm saying that anything they could do I could do better. My output file would have had less highlight and shadow clipping (when that's aesthetically appropriate), better sharpness, less grain/noise, and more clarity than theirs. For a start.

Before

After

A photograph by Roger Pellegrini before and after custom printing. A lot of what I did isn't going to be very visible in this small, low quality reproduction, but there are eight substantial and important-to-the-final-print alterations. Only three of them were requested by Roger, and only one of them is blatantly obvious. As for the other five, Roger just told me to print as best as I could.

There's a lot I can do with a photograph even if what I'm receiving is the "finished" file. In fact, it's extremely rare for me to print someone's file exactly as they send it to me. Even if they think they're done with it, I can convince them they're not. They may have done 75% of the work  needed to make a really great print, but there's another 25% that I know how to do and they don't.

People like to talk about the RAW conversion process as being a lot like developing film, but there are some very important differences. For one thing, film developing is a pretty straightforward and non-aesthetic operation. Unless you're heavily into Zone System antics. Even if you are into such games, film development is about giving you the starting point for a really good print, not about getting you a negative that yields the perfect and ideal print with no further attention. That's what custom printing is about.

RAW conversion lets you make a whole bunch of artistic and aesthetic decisions that film development never does. If you're not superb at that, your final print will suffer for it. If it really helps you to think of RAW conversion as being like development, then you'll be better served thinking of a RAW converter as though it were 10 film developers rolled into one, with all possible combinations of development times, agitations, and temperatures being available. Looked at in that fashion, I can tell you that most people doing RAW conversions are "misdeveloping their film" to a greater or lesser extent.

Another important change is that unlike true film developing, RAW conversion can be done over and over again. The camera file is "fixed;" the conversion isn't. It may be subject to reconsideration and reevaluation as one's aesthetic demands become clearer. That more properly places it in the artistic domain of "printing" than "developing."

Some people think that all they need to get a great print is a well-done RAW conversion. That's true only a small percentage of the time. For example, easily 3/4ths of the photographs I see, film or digital, would benefit from some dodging and/or burning in before they're printed. How many folks do that when they're RAW-converting? Yeah, damned few.

As for John's push-button printing, I think we are already there for 90+ percent of the serious printers (I mean people, in this case). Just pull the printer (now I mean the machine) out of the box, follow the roadmap to set it up, use the canned profiles that your operating system will automatically invoke, and you'll get very good-looking prints. The hassles are the exceptions rather than the rule. I don't think we have to wait for the future for printing to become easy. At least, not so long as it's not extreme, high-end, custom printing.

On the other hand...

I'm genuinely not sure how much printing will be done in the future. Some folks, two weeks back, expressed the interesting notion that it didn't matter if one did one's own printing or not, so long as the photographer did get good prints. I think that's only true if prints truly matter. Many will argue that, especially today, viewing a photograph on a screen simply cannot do it justice, so people are aesthetically shortchanging themselves. I can't support that. After all, traditional slide photographers rarely felt that way, and their best work speaks for itself. Yes, this is relevant.

Some of you old-time slide photographers are going to hate to hear this, but most of your viewing environments were crap. The average slide presentation, even in camera clubs and other "serious" settings, suffered from objectively poor brightness range, sharpness, and shadow detail, as well as distortion and artifacts of many sorts. If you threw quite a bit of money at the problem and were very careful in designing your viewing environment, you'd get something that was, by objective measure, about as good as carefully-made-but-not-exceptional print. You had to burn lots of C-notes to achieve superior viewing. Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, but that was true, so help me Kodak.

Meanwhile, the Loyal Opposition is thinking, "Hey, Ctein acknowledged that on-screen viewing can't stand up to a well-made print; hasn't he just refuted his point?" No, to the contrary. Note my repeated use of the word "objective." Subjectively, those projected slides look great! Why? That's very complicated to explain; oversimplified, if you present the brain with a visual experience while isolating it from the surrounding world, your perception expands or contracts to match the experience. The slide, even if shoddily projected, becomes a universe unto itself, not answerable to external objective measurement.

Screen images in any technology benefit from this perceptual illusion. TV, by which I mean the 525-interlaced line, analog-broadcast-bandwidth limited stuff, should look lousy by all objective measure. Instead it looks great all out of proportion to the specs. Ditto with small, limited-gamut JPEGs viewed on mediocre monitors. They look a lot better than they really are. If you throw the kind of money at digital display that you'd throw at a decent slide projection setup, you get a great viewing experience, no matter that some of the technical specs may be mediocre compared to a print.

Personal experience trumps specs every time, and all that really matters in photography is the viewing experience you have when you see a photograph, not one little bit the measurements you can make on a lab bench. We make photographs for people, not photometers.

(Hmm, I like that. You may quote me. Attribution always appreciated.)

Some people gravitate to sheets of paper (I'm one), some to screens. A few are equally happy with either. If what the photographer truly loves and desires (not the same thing) is the image on the screen, whether projected, pixelated, or both, then a print is irrelevant. It can express nothing that matters to them about the worth of their photograph. It's the wrong medium sending the wrong message, just as much as a 50KB JPEG doesn't convey nor inform the viewer very much about one of my dye transfer prints.

There are going to be exceptions. Even a studio-quality 30" display will not do justice to a 4x5 chrome (or digital equivalent). But, neither did traditional slide projection. I'd be surprised to learn that there were ever more than ten people in the entire United States at any given time who had projection setups that could do full justice to 4x5 photographs. What matters is not the specs, what matters is how good it looks and how strongly it can speak to you. Don't underestimate the strength of the projected photograph. A strong print draws your attention away from the rest of the room. A strong screen image owns that room.

That's it for my much-extended musings on printing. Next time, we get back to tech-speak, and a très-cool trick I came up with for using my Olympus Pen at ISO 6400 and liking it!

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column appears every Thursday morning.

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Custom Printing and Artistic Ownership

By Ctein

Well, my column on digital printing two weeks back, which seemed like a straightforward technical column, has developed into a complex and erudite conversion that is anything but straightforward or shallow. Way to go, commenters!

And, once again, a comment from Geoff Wittig provides me with a theme. If Geoff keeps this up, I'm never going to have to come up with an original topic again.

So, taking a deep breath and diving into the deep end of the pool...

Last week, Geoff relayed a remark by David Plowden—"David Plowden has described a conversation with a custom printer who boasted that he could make a better print from Plowden's negatives than Plowden could. 'No doubt you're right; but it would no longer be my photograph.'"

This is a remarkably nontrivial thought. Unlike Benson's remark to the effect that "...photographers who hand their images to someone else for printing are abdicating part of their artistic responsibility," which provoked in me a (completely justified) "this isn't even wrong" reaction, Plowden's observation is simultaneously and in various ways and circumstances right, wrong, sideways and off-axis in the complex plane. It's most assuredly not amenable to simple analysis. (Of course, I was not there for the conversation and I don't know just what that printer said to Plowden.)

In an "average" sense, I'd disagree with the notion. When I do custom printing for people, no matter their level of printing skills, I'm going to be making suggestions about ways I think the print could be improved. Sometimes they're trivial—a slightly different crop, a modest dodge or a burn. They're tweaks on what the photographer's providing me as a starting or reference point. Usually the photographer agrees with me; on occasion they don't. It's their call; it's their vision I'm trying to fulfill (I'll get back to that).

I think it would be wrong to say that the resulting photograph is in any way less theirs because I happened to come up with a good idea they didn't think of. People make suggestions to me all the time about my own photographs. On occasion I accept them. I don't think of the result as being less my own photo; after all, I'm learning new stuff all the time! That is part of being an artist.

(And, to keep the discourse as clear as I can, I've already established that I consider it entirely irrelevant who controls the instrumentality of printing. You personally feel differently? Fine. That was last week's column; you can go argue your side in the comments there. If you already have, please don't reiterate the same point here. We're moving on, not going in circles.)

I truly don't believe the minor fact that I may suggest to the photographer a better way to print in any way affects their artistic ownership. But, that's only a small part of a larger landscape. Back to that "fulfilling the vision" thing, which gets into just what "collaboration" can mean.

I collaborate with photographers on printing their work. I don't know any custom printer who works any other way (although I have no trouble imagining they might exist). The reason we succeed in this business, if we do, is that we know lots more about how to make a good print than our typical client. We're not a mechanical device they simply issue instructions to. We try to find out what they want of their photograph and then we propose ways they can get that, often ones they never thought of. It's a collaborative process, no question of that.

But the resulting work is not inherently nor usually a collaboration, although it could be. The photographer had some idea in mind when they made the photograph. It didn't include the input of the printer. We came into the picture (ahem) much later, at a stage where the photographer is trying to physically implement that vision. But that creative vision doesn't originate with the printer. Again, usually—the interesting exceptions are part of the reason why Plowden's situation is anything but trivial.

Examples make this point clearer. My best friend Laurie Toby Edison and I have created joint works such as the one above. Our Collaborations derive from a complex process of interactions, but even at the points in the process where we're not actively engaged with each other, we're both aware that collaborative work is happening. There's a mutual vision from before the first frame is exposed.

I also print for Laurie. Laurie's a masterful printer, so almost all the time I am supposed to exactly duplicate a print she's already made, like the one below. Which, it turns out, I can't do, and I'll get back to that later because I have a hunch it's germane. Whatever; I get very, very, very close. On occasion, though, she's been really pressed for time and she's just handed me the negative and the proof sheet, and we have a conversation about what the print should do. Then I print the negative 'blind,' and almost always I get something she likes. It's still her photograph, 'cause it's still her vision. I simply realize it for her via remote control, as it were.

Photo © 2010 by Laurie Toby Edison

That's not the normal photographer/printer relationship; Laurie and I have had 30 years to get in each others' heads. But it's not telepathic and I'm not always right. As with any photographer, I'll usually make suggestions, and Laurie will usually vet them, but sometimes, not often, we simply aren't close to being in agreement. Laurie's given me prints to match that I quite disagree with. I tell her so in no uncertain terms; what else are friends for?

The conversation typically runs something like this:

C: This ceiling doesn't work. We need to paint it beige.

L: Nope, I painted it taupe, and I wanted it taupe.

C: But taupe simply doesn't work. It catches the sun wrong and it clashes with the drapes. It really needs to be beige.

L: No, if it were your ceiling it would need to be beige. It's my ceiling.

That's the trump card. So I paint it taupe, just knowing in my heart of hearts that I'm right and Laurie's wrong. But it's her photograph and it doesn't matter that she's utterly wrong (and she is, you know) and I know better (and I do, you know). She owns the work.

I'm still right, though (he grumps with entirely characteristic maturity).

But, I think there was one time—out of hundreds of photographs—when she did agree beige would be better, and the resulting print was very different from what she originally envisioned. It was still her photograph, though; I'd never have made it. Merely giving her a great idea for making it even closer her vision didn't make it mine.

Okay, now what about that remark I made about not being able to make prints that look exactly like Laurie's? It's been my general experience when printing for other master printers. Almost every time, I can't do it. I strongly expect it would be true in the other direction, if I needed to have someone else print my work. I can't explain it. I can say it's not a matter of one or the other of us being better printers. It also doesn't seem to matter whether it's digital or wet printing.

My best not-a-real-answer guess (insert a whole lot of arm-waving here) is that there are two things going on. One is that master printers are working at such a refined level that our work's affected in significant ways by variables that aren't even in the recognized sets of parameters we try to control when printing. The other is that we can see subtleties that most people would never notice, so we find significance in print differences that most folks would justifiably consider ignorable.

If (and this is a really large if) this situation applies to most master printers, then Plowden's and even Benson's remarks become more understandable. Within their frames of experience and reference, they would be undeniably true, although they still wouldn't be universals. The concerns and sensitivities of master printers are not those of 99% of the folks doing printing. We may be entirely justified in those sensitivities, but there's still something of a princess and the pea thing going on.

One last wrinkle I'd like to toss out. I suspect I would be okay with other folks printing my work. I've noticed that while I am extremely particular and fussy about having a print come out exactly right, what constitutes "exactly right" for me can change considerably with time. I can hit the bull's-eye every time, but the target moves around. I have to force myself to be a little less fussy than my inclinations run. I've been known to fine-tune a print, in wet darkroom terms, to within a 20th of a paper grade, a quarter CC color balance and/or 1% exposure. Should I go back and reprint that photograph the next day, what I'll decide looks exactly right will not agree with the previous day to such incredibly tight specifications. If I look at it a month or year later, my idea of the best print may be considerably different. There may even be two or three different versions that I consider best prints, "local maxima" in the print space, if you will.

You can see why, given that, I think someone else of comparable skill to mine could make prints that would satisfy me. But, I have no idea if my experience is common or not. It would be interesting to hear from other "extreme printers" in the readership on this subject.

In any case, I've taken the topic about as far as I want to in this particular direction. But I'm not done with it; next week I'll ruminate on yet a different angle on this complex business of printing and what it means to us.

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column appears on TOP on Thursday mornings.

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Do 'Real' Photographers Print?

By Ctein

I don't hold a lot of agreement with assertions about what photographers are obligated to do, as I've written in columns like "Channeling David Vestal" and "The Photo-Fetishist League." I think one of the more destructive mindsets in the arts accompanies a pronouncement to the effect that you are not a Proper Artist (or Practitioner, if you eschew the term "artist") unless you do such-and-such. We've all been fed them. Real Serious Photographers don't work in color. Or if they do, they only work in slide film. Or if they do that as well, they only work in large format. Or, absent that, at least they work in film, because we all know that it's not real and personal photography when you drag that durn, soulless computer stuff into it. Or, if they are so far gone and lost from The True Path (TTP [tm]) that they're committing digital photography, at least they work solely in RAW and never JPEG. Yup, we gotta maintain standards.

The reason why this is all nonsense is very simple: Every approach you take to photography will have its strengths and weaknesses, both artistically and technically. What's bad is when there's a mismatch between what you want to do and the advantages and disadvantages of how you're going about it. I rail against absolutism because it encourages that sort of mismatch by demanding TTP.

These pronouncements have been appearing my entire life. I don't expect them to stop. It's a game of whack a mole; when it pops up, you whack it. Sometimes the moles pop up where you don't expect them. I was stunned to read in a comment to my last column that, "...photographers who hand their images to someone else for printing are abdicating part of their artistic responsibility." Oh man, I can't let something that wrong pass*.

(Yes, there are certain arenas where prints don't matter one bit. That's obviously not the scope nor intent of the claim. Even absolutism has to be judged with a grain of relativism, so no fair shooting at the fish in the barrel.)

Failing the absolutism test is sufficient reason to damn it, as I've already argued in 2.5 columns. But worse, I think it's specifically bad advice. Printing takes a lot of time, money, and energy. No photographer is given an unlimited supply of any of those. Resources you devote to printing are ones you cannot devote to making more photographs, making more timely photographs (which may matter), learning and practicing how to make better photographs (which definitely matters), even traveling to more interesting locales to make photographs (travel being another one of those things that consumes time, money, and energy).

That's not to say that you shouldn't know what a good print looks like. That's very different from having to do it yourself, or ever having done it yourself. In fact, DIY can sometimes interfere with knowing what a good print looks like. Anyone in the biz has seen vast numbers of poorly printed portfolios, "wet" and "dry," where the photographer clearly had no idea that their printing sucked.

We can likely agree that understanding what a good print looks like is important. It's the main reason Mike started the low-cost print program at Photo Techniques magazine. We both think that's really important; it's hard for photographers to know what to aspire to without reference.

But, once you know that, is there an unavoidable need to be doing your own printing? No. Custom printers have existed since Day One and it's their business to understand what the photographer needs and to elicit the information from the photographer that will get them the print they need...even if the photographer doesn't know how to articulate that. It's part of the job. It's not even an especially rare skill; there used to be a zillion decent custom labs out there.

Many justly-famous photographers haven't done the majority of their own printing. In some subgenres like portraiture that is even the norm; the majority of great portrait photographers did not do their own printing; some never even learned to print. Among four photojournalists I have a fondness for, Pearce, Kennerly, Jarecke and Turnley, we have substantial talents with quite varying amounts of personal printing in their careers. Even in landscape photography, that bastion of fine printing, it's a mixed bunch. Eliot Porter was famous for doing dye transfers of his landscapes. Galen Rowell wasn't exactly well-known for his darkroom time.

Personal choice
Obviously I  made the "print your own" choice, even taking it to possibly unreasonable extremes. But it's never been clear that it was the only right choice for me. Some arguments to the contrary: I am a vastly better printer than I am photographer. Is that imbalance really good for one's art?  I don't think it is for mine.

It may not have even been the smartest career move. Frank McLaughlin, the patron saint of dye transfer, once asked me in all seriousness if I was really better off having  immersed myself in doing dye transfer printing. A good case could be made that I've spent as much money in the darkroom as it would've cost me to buy others' dye transfer printing services, and I would not have been out many thousands of hours of my time.  And I'm not sure I could even claim a net profit on printing my own work until the dye transfer print sales here on TOP. That's 30 years to financial break-even, again not counting the number of hours spent.

Understand that I am not expressing one bit of regret. I like my life. But I cannot logically defend it as the best choice, either artistically or professionally, for me. As for declaring what must work for others, oh, that is to laugh.

Ctein

*An afterthought to insure that we don't veer into the ad hominem...I didn't write this to defend my printing business; I did it because I have a deep knowledge of the subject. 99.9% of you could decide that having anyone else print your work would be abhorrent and it wouldn't affect me one bit nor in any way jeopardize my income; you're not my clientele.

Ctein's regular weekly column appears every Thursday morning on TOP.

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Featured Comment by Geoff Wittig: "Ouch! Smacked down by Ctein!

"I probably deserve it for implying such an absolutist position. But I'd like to clarify a bit; I was paraphrasing a comment made by Richard Benson in an interview in Lenswork. [Issue 84 with audio on 84 Extended —Ed.] Benson is the author of The Printed Picture, former head of Yale's art department and an expert printer. (Okay, the academic credentials may be considered a negative here, but still.) Regarding the print as a physical artifact, as the final work of art resulting from the photographic process, I think the assertion still has merit. Delegating the actual process of crafting a print from your photograph does indeed relinquish some of your control over the image, and introduces at least a modicum of someone else's interpretation into the final print. David Plowden has described a conversation with a custom printer who boasted that he could make a better print from Plowden's negatives than Plowden could. 'No doubt you're right; but it would no longer be my photograph.' That's obviously a bit of hyperbole, but Plowden is emphasizing the importance of controlling every aspect of the photograph's interpretation. Certainly there have been countless fruitful collaborations between photographers and printers; not for one moment to I mean to denigrate the remarkable skills of fine printers like Ctein. Robert Glenn Ketchum's work for example is known largely through the spectacular Ilfochrome prints made by Michael Wilder. Obviously working closely with a skilled printer who follows your instructions (or who can educate you regarding where the image 'wants to go') can yield a superb result.

"There are also obviously large areas of photographic expression where finicky darkroom (wet or digital) interpretation and a physical print are irrelevant. The vast majority of snapshots and family photographs come to mind. Plenty of photojournalism finds its home as 2x3" halftone reproduction on newsprint, where careful attention to print quality seems beside the point. Then again, it's hard to imagine W. Eugene Smith's work having precisely the same feel or impact without his obsessive stylized darkroom interpretation.

"As always, YMMV. Like the old Ben & Jerry's bumper sticker says, 'If it's not fun, why do it?' For me, printing is easily half the fun. But if anyone finds it torturous and gets great results from Mpix or Costco, well, have fun!"

Ctein replies: Oh, absolutely not meant as a smack-down of you. (I'm sure you know that, but I want to make sure everyone else does, too.)

I think there are some interesting ideas worth exploring in more depth in the Plowden anecdote; there's a deep and fascinating question along the lines of "What does 'artistic ownership' mean and what compromises or enhances it?" It might even be the seed for a whole new column. But, I'm too blitzed after 13 hours of traveling to think deeply right now.

Featured Comment by Greg Smith: "Best thing you've posted I've seen. Good job. I do my own printing, because I haven't tried a pro shop yet. Economically, its cheaper for me to self-print. My work sells, so there is some validation for my efforts and I take a measure of satisfaction in being able to tell those curious that I do the entire process from camera to frame myself. Someday, when the funds present themselves I will try a custom house, see what's what. Talk of absolutism brings to mind a bumper sticker: 'Death to extremists!' Best wishes."

Returning to Hell: Color Management and Snow Leopard

By Ctein

About 11 weeks ago I wrote about the insanity-inducing problems I was having getting proper prints under MacOS X 10.6.2: "The Printer/Photoshop/Snow Leopard Hell." The OS update to 10.6.3 didn't change anything nor have I heard that the soon-to-be-released 10.6.4 will. It's still hell out there.

I learned how to live in hell. At this point I have all my printers working properly, with good profiles that behave correctly under Snow Leopard, and I've convinced myself that the prints I'm getting are nearly identical to what my MacBook Pro running OS 10.4.11 produced. It took several steps:

1) Making sure I had the absolutely most current drivers for all my printers.

2) Culling my existing profiles. ColorSync Utility identified which of my ICC profiles were v4.x, and those were banished, as Snow Leopard still will not play nicely with them. That wiped out most of my custom profiles. Happily, Bill Atkinson's profiles for my Epson 9800 were ICC v.2.x. That allowed me to compare prints made with Photoshop CS4 from both my laptop, under MacOS X 10.4.11, and our iMac running 10.6.3. They were very close to indistinguishable. Really, I expected bigger differences from changes in the print engine between the OS versions.

3) Generating new profiles for my Epson R2400 and R800. This is where things started to get "amusing." I set ColorMunki to produce version 2 printer profiles. The prints came out way too dark; my profile was clearly no good. I had something set wrong in the twisty little maze of printer controls that all looked the same. Huzzah, the X-Rite website had several helpful pages:

"Prints not matching either display or compared to canned profiles"

"Prints look too dark using printer driver with Leopard or Snow Leopard"

I needed to give control of color matching to "Epson Color Controls" rather than "ColorSync." I should have caught this; the first test chart just looked wrong. My profiling test chart should have had dark and saturated color patches (figure 1). When the software is massaging the data behind your back, you'll get a result that looks more like figure 2. Many patches are lighter and pastel. You need to find printer driver settings that get you a print that looks more like figure 1...usually. I'll get back to that.

Figure 1. A properly made profiling test chart is going to look something like this. Note that most of the color patches, especially the ones corresponding to primaries, are dark, saturated, and rich. It's the kind of output your printer will produce when it's just dumping ink on the paper, with no adjustments to get the most accurate color.

Figure 2. If a printer profile is sticking its nose into your profiling process, you get a print that looks more like this. Most of the colors have gotten lighter and many are pastel. If you see something like this you need to backtrack and figure out how to turn off color management, because a target like this is not going to produce a good profile...usually.

Well, once I got the driver settings right, everything went swimmingly. ColorMunki gave me a great looking profile. I don't think it's quite as good as the V.4 profile I generated under 10.4.11; the transitions between primaries are little harsher in my new V.2 profile (figure 3). But it is so very close that I doubt it will make a perceivable difference in any of my prints.

Figure 3. On the left is a print made using my ICC version 4 custom profile printed under MacOS X 10.4.11. On the right, the same test image printed using an ICC version 2 custom profile under Snow Leopard v 10.6.3. They are very close to identical, although I think the latter isn't quite as smooth in color gradations.

So much for the R2400 printer; on to the R800. Here's where things got weird. The very latest Epson driver software didn't present me with the same interface as the driver I had running under 10.4.11. When I tried the X-Rite recommendations, I didn't get a clean, un-massaged test chart; it looked a lot like figure 2. No combination of settings did any better. After wasting far too much paper, I decided what the hell, let's see what happens if I just go with this and generate a profile. I mean, if there's really, truly no way to turn off the driver's color massaging, it's a constant that the profile should be able to take into account, right?

A naïvely hopeful assumption, but in this case it worked! I wound up with a profile that looked just about as good as the ones I'd been running under 10.4.11. Equally significantly, the test prints I made with both the R2400 and R800 looked remarkably similar, which is no small achievement given the very large differences in the ink sets of the two printers.

I still don't understand why I couldn't entirely turn off color management, but the pragmatist in me doesn't really care. It worked.

So I'm good. Well, until Apple decides to finally fix the ICC bug and I decide I need to redo my profiles...or Epson updates their drivers and printer interfaces...or I get a new printer. But at least now I feel that whatever happens I'll be able to cope with it.

So, taking a deep breath and setting aside a good chunk of spare time, I just finished upgrading my MacBook Pro from MacOS X 10.4.11 to 10.6.3. An entirely straightforward 45 minute process, that ended up taking me 14 hours. Sigh, it's still business as usual when upgrading core software, and that business is most assuredly a sadistic one.

Ctein

Ctein's regular column appears weekly on Thursday mornings.

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More On Print(er) Sharpness

By Ctein

In my column on January 5th, "How Sharp Is Your Printer? How Sharp Are Your Eyes?", I described a relatively easy and robust way to test how sharp your printer was and how sharp you needed your prints to be. I recommend that readers reread that column and the comments before reading the rest of this one.

One of the questions I got from a couple of readers was whether or not printing at a printer's "magic" resolutions (360 / 720 ppi for Epson printers) would make a difference in the results I got. While I suspected it wouldn't, suspicion is not the same as experimental data. So, this week it was back to generating resolution test pages and pixel peeping.

I generated four more pages to accompany the ones I made for the last article. That provided me with comparison pages at 300, 360, 450, 600, 720, 900, and 1200 ppi. I printed everything out on my Epson R800 printer on Ultra Premium Luster paper at the highest quality settings. Time to start squinting. In the set of four running from 300 through 600 ppi, the results were unequivocal and monotonic; even with the naked eye I could see that each jump in file resolution resulted in a sharper print. Comparing the 360 ppi print to the 300 and 450 ppi prints, I could see single-pixel-scale artifacts in the latter two that didn't appear in the 360 ppi print.

These two illustrations, above and below, show highly magnified sections of the test prints produced as described in the article. From left to right, they're from the 300 ppi, 360 ppi, and 450 ppi files. Observe that there's nothing "magic" about 360 ppi; it's in between the other two in sharpness. the 600, 720 and 900 ppi files show similar results.

As I mentioned last time, I have pathological test targets that can demonstrate that difference. As I also mentioned, it's not relevant to printing real-world images. The 450 ppi print definitely looked sharper than 360 ppi, which looked sharper than 300 ppi, and the improvement in sharpness with each jump in resolution seemed just about right. In the real world, gross resolution trumps single pixel artifacts any day.

(Sidenote: There's no point in looking at intermediate resolutions to these—you'd be unable to see any differences in sharpness with such small resolution changes.)

As for the test prints between 600 and 1200 ppi, the same monotonic relationship held, but now you're down to the pixel-peeping area. prints get minutely sharper with increasing resolution, but I'll never be able to notice it in real life. I'm not convinced there is any improvement, even microscopic, going from 900 to 1200 ppi.

On a purely practical level, it's clear to me that there are folks out there who've missed the (real) forest for the (ideal) trees. They argue that everything should be printed at a magic resolution, ignoring the reality that your photographs don't magically come at those magic numbers. Resampling a photograph that's going to print out it 300 ppi at the size you want up to 360 dpi is not going to make it look visibly better. Resampling a 450 ppi photograph down to 360 ppi will cost you sharpness and fine detail.

Now, all my test photographs were printed out natively through Photoshop. Start bringing third-party RIPs into the picture, and all bets are off; the difference in appearance between a "straight" print and a RIPped print has a lot more to do with the rendering engine than the ppi it is rendered at. If the RIP wants to render at some magic resolution, more power to it. Just understand that the improved quality you see is much more a consequence of how was the data is being massaged for the printer than the resolution it's being output at.

By the way, no, I am not going to compare the various third-party RIPs versus Photoshop. Doesn't interest me. Photoshop works well enough for me. Just so you know. Your mileage may differ.

I think that's it for this subject (barring more intriguing questions that I haven't thought of, of course).

Next week, I hope to be able to revisit the Snow Leopard color management issue and the week (or two) after, an interesting take on the question, "How big can I print this?"

Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column appears every Thursday morning.

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

They're Selling Us Crap Paper

By Ctein

I've just finished printing up a bunch of "art quality" 11 x 14 prints for my Contributors, and I'm so frustrated I feel like tearing my hair out. (Yes, I have plenty to spare. What's your point?) The amount of time and money I waste because of shoddy inkjet paper manufacturing practices is appalling.

This is not about aesthetic qualities like tone and color rendition or D-max. I'm talking about genuine manufacturing defects: fibers embedded in the emulsion (figure 1), bubbles and pinholes, inclusions that penetrate the surface (figure 2), and highly visible scuff and scratch marks straight from the factory.

Figure 1. This kind of manufacturing defect is very easy to find (ruler markings in mm). Unfortunately, it's the least common. The flaw would stand out in a light or dark area, because there is damage to the surface relief, as you can see in the grazing-light photograph on the right.

Figure 2. This is by far the most common kind of manufacturing defect. It is almost invisible (it's between the arrowhead and the ruler) but if printed upon will produce an obvious flaw. It takes a lot of time going over blank paper to catch these defects and I'm only partly successful.

This isn't a big problem with "RC" papers. It's when you move into the world of fiber papers that you start to endure a world of pain. I've yet to try a fiber-based paper where I don't get a couple of bad sheets per box. The standards of some of the paper manufacturers are astoundingly low. The Harman FB Al glossy paper, which I love for its appearance, is atrocious; I typically reject a quarter of the sheets in a box of 11 x 17" sheets. The larger the size of the paper, the more rejects. For 17 x 25 sheets, far fewer than half are good.

Traditional light-sensitive photographic paper manufacturers dealt with exactly the same issues. It takes more attention to quality control and cleanliness, and more critical standards for your raw materials to make a good fiber-based paper than an RC paper. Coating the base with plastic eliminates a multitude of manufacturing problems. Wonder of wonders, they figured out how to do that; it is not, in fact, rocket science. We expected high quality paper, and we were entitled to do so. It's no fun going to the trouble of making a darkroom print, getting the finished print on the viewing table, and discovering some gross physical flaw that makes it unusable. When we did, we screamed bloody murder, and most of the time paper manufacturers responded appropriately.

It's not about "getting what you pay for" (or any other supplier-centric apology). Fiber inkjet papers are not cheap; in constant dollars, they are frequently more expensive than silver gelatin B&W darkroom papers were. We're paying premium prices; we're getting substandard goods.

Although I wouldn't be any happier if the stuff were dirt cheap. Lousy paper costs me, even if the paper were free. If I make a print on a defective piece of paper, I've wasted a couple of dollars of ink as well as the time it took the computer and printer to create the work. The printing costs and time are avoidable...if I successfully weed out the defective sheets before I print. That time and trouble is considerable. A minority of paper defects are so horrendous that they'll just jump out at you at a casual glance (figure 1). Most of them, though, are small white-on-white defects that are nearly invisible in an unprinted sheet of paper (figure 2) although, once you lay a bunch of dark ink on them, they will catch the light and they will stand out like blemishes on an adolescent's forehead. I have to check unprinted sheets closely at just the right angle, under the right mix of diffuse and specular light, to catch those flaws.

Some photographs are fairly forgiving of paper flaws; they are light enough and busy enough that I can get away with using slightly defective sheets. A photo like the Weathered Sulfur Vents (figure 3) will survive slightly-less-than-perfect sheets; I know the viewer is never going to see a very slight flaw. Unfortunately, that's not many of my photographs. A photograph like Floodlit Colombia (figure 4) is utter hell. Even after weeding out 30% of the sheets, there's still a 25%–30% chance that I've missed some defect that will be glaringly obvious after I've printed out the photograph.

Figure 3. A photograph like this can tolerate one or two very small surface defects, because it's mostly light in color and very busy.

Figure 4. A photograph like this needs a pristine surface to be printed on, because any emulsion defects catch the light and are glaringly obvious.

There is no excuse for this. Simply none. The paper manufacturers are getting away with using incompetent manufacturing techniques and expertise and selling us garbage. And, unfortunately, the vast majority of nouveau digital printers have not a clue that the paper manufacturers can do much, much better if their feet were held to the fire, and they do not understand that they should expect better.

Unlike so many of the technical problems I face in fine printing, shoddy paper is one I have no fix for. Damn and double-damn.

Ctein

All photographs copyright 2010 by Ctein

Ctein's regular weekly column appears every Thursday morning.

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Featured Comment by Miserere: "Your struggle felt familiar, and I just realised why: This problem is reminiscent of when my sister used to play the clarinet. For those that don't know, you need to place a wooden reed on the mouthpiece which, when vibrated as you blow, produces the instrument's sound. All woodwind instruments have them as far as I know (and saxophones too).

"Well, they sell these reeds in packs, and they're not cheap. My sister would buy packs of ten, open them, then spend an hour testing the reeds individually. I don't remember exact numbers, but it went something like this: 3–4 reeds would be unusable and get thrown out, 5–6 would be fine to practice with, 1 would be superlative and she would mark it and save it for performances and exams. If you bought the more expensive reeds, you simply increased your odds of getting more usable ones, but we did the math and it was more cost-effective to buy the cheap packs and throw 3–4 away than buy the more expensive ones and throw 2–3 away. I remember saying to her once 'but surely there must be some brand that sells boxes with 10 good reeds, or maybe a box of 3 guaranteed excellent reeds!' She insisted there wasn't."

Mike adds: And try buying vinyl records. Ironically I have 50-year-old records that have numerous flaws and defects that I find perfectly satisfying to listen to, but it's really annoying to spend $50 on a current two-disk, 45 RPM deluxe superdisk and find it comes out of the shrinkwrap with multiple flaws baked in. Vinyl is only about 10% of my listening, and I just do it for fun—I don't really need to mess with it at all—but it's still amazing how elusive good QC can be. I recently bought three copies of Dexter Gordon's "One Flight Up" on Cisco and just had to give up. 

In general, Ctein's point is just further evidence of one of my pet theories: that digital inkjet printing is actually the opposite of "all you have to do is push a button." Q&D lowbrow digital printing is easy as pie, but really top-level digital printing might actually be harder than darkroom printing of a similar level, unless you do a lot of it and do all the work to keep everything tuned and humming.

Featured Comment by John Custodio: "That's why I never print on roll paper. I examine each sheet before I print on it, which I can't do if it's in a roll. I've had lots of problems with Museo Silver Rag with specks and junk in the coating, also similar problems with Hahnemuehle Photo Rag Baryta. Recent batches of these two papers are fine, however. Seems like they've solved the problems, at least for now.

"In my opinion, the weakest step and what causes me the most lost time in the entire digital process (shooting, Photoshop, printing) is printing. And the weakest link in the printing process (color management, ink, paper) is the paper!"

Featured Comment by Michael W: "Funny story about fibers in photographic paper. Back when I was going to college in the late '80s my father worked for a paper mill, and they had a summer work program for college students if their parents worked at the mill. The last summer I was there I was assigned to one of the slow but high-quality machines. We had a run of dense bleached coated stock that was as I was told for a large American photo company. The QC on this run was much much higher, so  much so that the QC department set up a station at the end of the line. One day at the start of the shift I was asked by one of the lowest hands on that machine to help him drop some powdered additives for the coating into a hot mixing vat about halfway down the line. I was helping him pour the powder out of 50 lbs. brown bags. One of them got a away, and a piece of the bag about 8 x 12 inches wound up in the vat. Talk about some upset people. the mill manager came down, the QC guys came down, everyone came down and waited. Finally about ten minutes later, small brown fibers started showing up in the 12x12 samples pulled off by QC...well, the run as it came off the rollers went right back into the process at the start of the line to be rebleached and remilled...long story short, when I came back the next day, 24 hours later, QC was still rejecting the run. It wound up taking nearly four shifts to get all of the brown fibers from that 8x12 piece of bag out of the system. Needless to say I was not asked to help with pouring again...."

Featured Comment by Matthew C.: "I'm ready for the end of paper myself....

"I have 100+ fine art nature prints from some of the top landscape photographers sitting at home piled in a closet. And they are beautiful, and I love them and bring them out every month or two just to savor the beautiful images. But I'd enjoy them even more if I could just bring them up on a 20x30 luminescent 300 DPI screen hanging on the wall, maybe switching between them every 20–30 minutes or so.

"Thirty seconds after picking up an iPad, I knew the paperless future has finally arrived. We'll see the end of routine printing in the next 10 years. It's a technology whose time has passed. Honestly I get more visceral joy from looking at and handling 4x5 trannies than prints...."

Featured Comment by George Kraniotis: "I feel the pain...every day...this image is an insect trapped underneath the coating of a sheet of Hahmemuhle Bright White. I kept it in order to send it to my supplier. And what about scuffing after printing? Big issue as well. Some papers scuff just by looking at them. Pretty sure the manufacturers can do something about this as well."

Featured Comment by ed nazarko: "I sell a lot of very large panoramas—12x144 inches, 18x180 inches—and my biggest cost and time waste comes from flaws in the paper. I usually print on smooth fine art, which hides flaws very well, better than fiber or semi-gloss papers, and I'd guess that I have to print an image at least twice to get one yielded. If I'm lucky, the flaw shows up early in the print and I can kill the job and only lose that little bit of paper. (Yes, I sit there monitoring...a hateful process, but the savings in paper costs are huge.) There have been a few papers where I couldn't get a single clean print done (I don't print them smaller than 12x144). I tried fiber or semi-gloss coated papers last year, and the yield was so bad I'm sticking with smooth fine art. I love the extra color and punch of the fiber papers, but couldn't get my head around how many failed prints I'd have to accept."

The Making of a Platinum Print (+ Slideshow)

By Carl Weese

To begin with, take a look at the slideshow. The paragraphs below describe what you see me doing in the pictures. Note that this is not a "darkroom" printing process—it's all done in the light, just as you see me doing in the slideshow.

To make a platinum print, you need to mix a sensitizer solution and coat it on a sheet of paper, dry the paper, expose it with your negative to intense ultraviolet light, then develop, clear, and wash the print.

At every step of the way there are choices and options for chemicals, tools, and working procedures. Probably no two people use exactly the same start-to-finish procedure to make platinum prints. I’m going to describe the specific way I made the pilot or master prints for our print offer. (In the slideshow, the little black gadget you see in my hand in some of the pictures has nothing to do with platinum printing. It’s an IR trigger I’m using to set off the camera to make the slideshow pictures.)

The most important first step in making a platinum print (I’m following convention and using that term even though the prints are actually made mainly of palladium, with a small percentage of platinum) is to begin with a negative suited to the process. Platinum paper is very low in contrast, so it requires a long scale, high contrast negative. There's a misconception that negatives for platinum should be "bulletproof"—overexposed and overdeveloped. Not so. Overexposure is to be avoided because it reduces the potential overall density range of the negative, and results in excessive exposure times for printing. The ideal negative is exposed just enough to register all the shadow detail you are interested in, and developed to a much higher contrast level than would be used for silver printing. A 50% increase in development time is a good starting point. Another approach, which I prefer, is to use a proportionally staining developer like PMK pyro. The stain is an excellent UV blocker so the negative "looks" long scale enough to the platinum paper, but can usually still be printed well in silver and is also scanner-friendly.

Platinum and palladium, "noble metals," are non-reactive, so they are not made directly light sensitive like the compounds used in silver-gelatin emulsions. The Pt/Pd solutions are mixed with an equal amount of ferric oxalate, which is UV light sensitve. To simplify, the process actually makes an iron print, and the fancy metals are carried along for the ride. Then the iron is chemically removed from the paper. For these prints, I use a sensitizer consisting of 20 drops of ferric oxalate, 18 drops of lithium palladium chloride, and two drops of potassium chloroplatinite. (I get my supplies, except paper, from Artcraft Chemicals.) I love the color and tone of a pure palladium print, but the deepest tones can be a little weak. The substitution of those two drops of platinum solution cleans up the blacks and makes a slight but agreeable change in print color.

The number of drops needed depends on the size of the negative and the absorbency of the paper. The next step is to brush the sensitizer onto a sheet of Stonehenge, an excellent all-cotton paper that I use for most of my prints. There are quite a few papers that can be used, though sometimes manufacturers make changes, like adding a lot of buffering, that make a paper no longer workable. It’s important to test before ordering a large quantity. Coating simply requires moving the solution around the paper surface with the brush (glass tubes and other gadgets can also be used) until it is fully and evenly distributed. It takes a couple of minutes for an 8x10 on Stonehenge, but some hard-surfaced papers can take quite a bit longer. Since this is done in ordinary room light, and the paper changes color as the sensitizer is absorbed, you just work to make sure the color is consistent, no dark or light areas, to get a perfect coating.

The coated sheet now needs to be dried. While some workers prefer to expose the coated sheet "bone dry," I find this can result in a weak print with anemic dark values. A significant amount of moisture in the paper fosters a richer end result. However, too much moisture can result in muddy light values, or even damage the negative. Striking a proper balance is the key, and it takes experimenting with the specific paper you use. There are probably as many drying techniques as there are platinum printmakers, and most of the techniques probably work fine. I prefer to print with a fairly high level of moisture in the sheet, and to dry "just enough" rather than get the sheet bone dry and then re-humidify it. The simplest way to do this (for this particular paper) is to set the printing room to a relative humidity level of 60–65%  and then just let the coated sheet dry to room conditions, either hanging from a clothesline or, more quickly, in a film drying cabinet with fan but no heat. If I can’t get the room conditions I want, which is frequently the case when teaching a workshop at another facility, I just use a fan or hair dryer (no heat) to dry the sheet "just enough" by feel (you feel the paper, not the coating). That might sound tricky but in fact I find workshop students easily learn to do this consistently after just a couple of tries.

The prepared sheet is then placed in a printing frame in contact with the negative, and exposed to intense UV light. You can go out and expose for several minutes in direct sunlight, and many great prints have been made that way, but it's a lot easier to be consistent with an artificial UV light. "Pike" and "Motel" are both pyro negatives, and print at the same 11-minute exposure time on the smaller of my two UV boxes. That time is typical for a well made pyro neg. "Rock" was developed in Kodak HC-110, with no stain factor, and prints in four minutes—that's typical for non-pyro negs. From a workflow standpoint, I actually prefer the longer exposure time because it gives me time to coat the next sheet of paper.

The darkest parts of the picture form a partial or ghost image during exposure. When printing a negative for the first time, you can inspect the progress of this partial print-out image to help judge when the exposure is complete. There are also a couple of alternate methods of making platinum/palladium prints that print out completely during exposure, requiring no separate chemical development step.

With the method used here, when the exposure is finished, the print needs to be developed. Several different chemicals can be used. The one I prefer is potassium oxalate. The platinum image appears instantly, nearly fully developed, as the developer is poured over the sheet. I then let it stay there for 90 seconds to be sure the development goes to completion. The developer is poured back and the print then gets a five minute water wash. The developer is "immortal." You just keep adding fresh solution to replace the volume absorbed by the paper, and filter it now and then. It can keep going for years, or until somebody knocks the bottle over.

A platinum print has no emulsion, no layers of baryta or gelatin. Once developed, the print consists of finely divided (microscopic) particles of metal embedded directly in the paper fiber. One problem with this is that the print surface, which will eventually be quite robust, is very fragile during wet processing steps. This means you can’t process stacks of prints the way you can with silver-gelatin paper. The prints have to go through the trays one at a time. In practice, during a printing session, as one print is being exposed in the UV box, I'm coating a sheet of paper for the next print, and the previous print is working its way through the wet processing steps.

After the print has been washed for five minutes, it's ready for clearing: we need to get rid of the iron left by the light-sensitive ferric oxalate. There are several ways to do this, the traditional one being weak baths of hydrochloric acid—not my cup of tea. What I use is a first bath of a freshly mixed solution of citric acid in warm water. The print stays there for ten minutes, with occasional agitation. Agitation and timing are not critical the way they are in fixing silver materials. If I'm tied up doing something else when the ten minutes are up, it doesn’t hurt to go longer. I use just enough solution to fully cover the print, and mix fresh solution for each print. The sheet is next rinsed and transferred to a second clearing bath, this time a combination of EDTA disodium (a chelating agent) and that old photographic standby, sodium sulfite. The print finishes clearing in just a couple of minutes in the second bath, but I give it ten as a safety factor.

Now all that remains is to rinse the clearing solution out of the paper, which is done by washing for ten minutes with frequent water changes. Then I hang the print from a line to drain and finally transfer it to clean fiberglass drying screens. A fairly heavy paper like Stonehenge naturally air dries in a few hours and comes out perfectly flat because there is no emulsion to cause curling.

Carl

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Featured Comment by Nikhil Ramkarran: "You know, it occurred to me this morning that this offer covers a number of firsts for me which may be as important as being my first Pt/Pd print. It is also my first contact print, first print produced from a non-electronic camera, and first print from a large format camera/negative. As important as it being my first Pt/Pd print is, I think it is just as important for any of the others firsts. So my original 'thank you' should be multiplied at least by three."

A Platinum Printing Capsule History

Steve Szabo, Wyoming, 1973. Original in platinum / palladium
(George Eastman House)

By Carl Weese and Mike Johnston

1830
Experiments indicate the light sensitivity of platinum. Ferdinand Gehlen finds that under the influence of light, a solution of platinum chloride turns yellow and eventually precipitates out metallic platinum.

1831
Johann Wolfgang Dobereiner, in Germany, looking for greater light sensitivity, tries a variety of platinum compounds. He discovers the combination of potassium chloroplatinite and ferric oxalate that will become the standard combination of chemicals for light sensitive platinum solutions.

1832
English polymath Sir John Herschel, who also discovered fixer and first applied the term "snapshot" to photography, finds several light sensitive platinum solutions. He detects that photosensitivity is confined to the violet end of the spectrum.

Sir John Herschel by Julia Margaret Cameron (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

1844
Robert Hunt succeeds in making platinum photographic prints, but can't make them permanent.

1844–1856
Frustrated in their attempts to find a permanent printing process using platinum, several researchers concentrate on finding a way to use platinum for toning to increase the permanence of silver images. M. de Carranza, in France, first publishes a formula for platinum toning of photographs. Toning formulas are developed for salted paper, albumen, and gelatin.

1873
William Willis obtains the first patent for a platinotype process. Willis finds that the use of potassium oxalate results in predictable image formation in platinum.

1880–1914: The High Period
In 1880, the enduring platinotype process is born. In his third patent related to making photographs from platinum, William Willis introduces the "hot bath" method where a mixture of ferric oxalate and potassium chloroplatinite are coated onto paper which is then exposed through a negative and developed in a warm solution of potassium oxalate. This method has been used ever since.

1887
Captain Giuseppe Pizzighelli patents a platinum Printing Out Paper (POP) process which uses a double salt—sodium ferric oxalate—in the sensitizing solution along with the potassium chloroplatinite, resulting in an image that forms completely on exposure to light without need for liquid development. It is marketed as the Pizzitype. Consistency problems in manufacture spell its demise despite a flurry of enthusiasm from photographers.

1892
Willis forms the Platinotype Company to market his inventions and begins to produce and sell "cold development” paper to the public. ("Cold" in this case meant room temperature.)

1894
Of 382 prints exhibited at the annual show of the Photographic Society in London, 175 are platinotypes.

1895–1905
The Platinotype Company’s products are marketed in the United States and Europe. Competitors begin to offer platinum papers. Platinum becomes one of the primary printing media in the fine art photography and Pictorialist movements, favored by members of The Linked Ring in Britain, the Secession in Vienna, and Alfred Stieglitz's Photo-Secession in the United States. Emerson in Britain and Stieglitz in America both declare gravure and platinum to be the only two processes suitable for artistic photography. The Platinotype is favored by proponents of "straight" or unmanipulated photography; advocates of extensive hand manipulation of photographic images begin to favor the gum bichromate process. The silver papers that will later become standard for black-and-white photography are perceived as appropriate mainly for commercial and professional purposes.

1906
Eastman Kodak Co. brings platinum papers to market for the first time.

1911
The Platinotype Company is offering 15 different styles of platinum paper while Kodak offers an even greater array of emulsion colors and surface textures and weights. Platinum printing is still the perceived high point of photographic procedures, but is rapidly losing ground to high-speed "gaslight" silver chlorobromide enlarging papers. Platinum is becoming increasingly expensive.

1914
The First World War cuts off supplies of platinum, most of which is mined in Russia.

1916
The Platinotype Company introduces a palladium based paper to compensate for the increasingly prohibitive cost of platinum.

Kodak ceases production of platinum papers.

1917
The Platinotype Company ceases importing paper to the United States. Several important photographers including Paul Strand, Laura Gilpin, and Edward Weston continue to use privately imported materials. Platinum is nearly unobtainable in wartime Europe.

Frederick H. Evans, The Loft at Kelmscott Manor. Original in platinum.

In England, Frederick Evans—whom George Bernard Shaw called "the ideal bookseller"—quits photography altogether when commercial Platinotype papers become unavailable. He is still known today as one of the greatest platinum printers in the history of photography.

1920s—1960s: The Interregnum
Platinum printing falls into neglect. Scattered devotees continue to work with platinum by hand mixing and coating; but the platinotype and its derivatives have become anachronistic, a part of history.

In the 1930s, Paul Anderson develops the current two-solution, drop-counting, ferric oxalate method of hand coating papers for platinum printing. He publishes instructional articles in various photography journals. A few magazine articles give evidence that a small but dedicated coterie of workers were making platinum prints with Anderson’s method through the 1960s, but largely in obscurity.

1970s: The Revival
During a general period of explosive growth and advancement known now as The Photo Boom, platinum printing is rediscovered as an innovative fine-art method by a number of adventurous photographers.

• George Tice begins working in platinum; publishes The Lost Art of Platinum Printing, in 1970; and demonstrates platinum printing in the widely disseminated Life Library of Photography volume Caring for Photographs, 1972.

Original print in platinum / palladium; picture by Irving Penn.

• Irving Penn exhibits handmade platinum prints. The great degree of attention he gets from a mainstream media newly infatuated with photography seems equally divided between interest in his images and in the platinum printing process he employs.

• In Wilmington, Delaware, Alan Goodman founds Elegant Images, a company devoted to supplying Pt/Pd printing materials to photographers.

• Arnold Gassan publishes Handbook of Contemporary Photography, which dedicates a chapter to the handmade platinum print.

• Steve Szabo publishes The Eastern Shore, printed from 8x10" platinum prints.

• Nancy Rexroth publishes an instruction booklet on palladium and platinum printing called The Platinotype 1977 that becomes an underground best seller.

• In 1979, RIT publishes The Platinum Print by John Hafey and Tom Shillea, with duotone reproductions by 21 photographers working in the revived platinum process.

• William Crawford, also in 1979, publishes The Keepers of Light, soon to become a bible of alternative processes for artists and hobbyists, which contains a major treatment of platinum printing.

By the end of the decade, platinum had regained a place as the "Rolls-Royce" of fine printing techniques. It makes exquisite original fine-art objects with great presence; its main drawback is that its qualities are difficult to reproduce well on the printed page (except in photogravure, which is also rare).

1984
Louis Nadeau publishes The History and Practice of Platinum Printing (revised 1986, 1994), which combines historical information, including original patents, with working instructions for modern practitioners.

1988
Photographer Rob Steinberg and his wife Sura form the Palladio Company to manufacture and market machine-coated platinum paper—the first commercially marketed platinum-palladium paper after a 50-year absence from the market. Surprisingly, hand-coaters are resistant to the new product—they don't want to share their "guild secrets" with anyone who can buy product off a shelf! Palladio suffers recurring problems with paper procurement*; the official reason for Palladio's eventual demise was that it was absorbing too much of Rob and Sura's time.

Today, platinum printing is firmly established among a small but dedicated group of craft practitioners, and is highly prized among galleries and collectors. It's difficult to say with certainty, but interest in the process seems to have been hardly affected at all by the rise of digital—it's possible that the prestige of the process, which was already very high, has even been enhanced.

Carl and Mike

*Sura explained to me (MJ) that some of the properties important to platinum/palladium coating were not even qualities that paper mills controlled for, or allowed clients to specify.

Note: Carl's platinum / digital print sale—TOP's first-ever offering of prints made with this technique—starts at noon this coming Sunday. Please check back then for details. —MJ

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Featured Comment by Bill Mitchell: "For 50 years, until George Tice took up the baton, platinum printing was virtually kept alive in the U.S. by Laura Gilpin."

Featured Comment by Rod S.: "In recent years I've seen several beautiful platinum-palladium prints by Gordon Undy at Sydney's Point Light gallery, so this introduction was interesting and helps me appreciate them further. Thank you.

"My professional goal as an exploration geologist is the discovery of metal ores, so I find it fascinating to read that the limited supply of [native] platinum dug from [alluvial deposits] in Russia at first enabled and, later, nearly wiped out this art form. Now, most platinum and palladium comes from platinum arsenide and platinum sulfide, present at almost trace amounts (0.5 ppm, according to Wikipedia) in large tonnage nickel-copper sulfide deposits at the Merensky Reef, South Africa, at Norilsk in Russia and at Sudbury, Ontario, ensuring a consistent supply."

The Trouble with Recommendations

Ezra Dyer recently wrote a funny piece for Automobile magazine (which unfortunately I haven't been able to find online) about the perils of recommending things. He notes that when he unloads on some piece-of-crap car, it's inevitable that whoever he's talking to will own one and love it. And when he recommends something specific, his in-laws will buy one and proceed to have endless problems with it. He concludes that the only safe thing to do is to recommend the Ferrari 599 in all circumstances. As in, "What would you recommend, Mr. Dyer, an Accord, or a Camry?" "I'd definitely go with the Ferrari 599."

Which brings me to the late, not-so-great HP B9180.

Which I recommended a few years ago.

I got not one of them, but two, from my contact at HP. The first one they sent me, packaged as new, turned out to be a repack, which left HP with a touch of egg on its face. I had a lot of trouble getting HP to take it back; they basically didn't want it to be returned, but no one at HP was willing to say straight out that I could keep it, either. Somewhat amusingly, the various people I spoke to about it at HP kept referring to "what HP wants" and "what HP usually does" and so forth, as if there were some sort of all-powerful Wizard-of-Oz corporate Will running things. They kept suggesting I could "talk to HP" without seeming to realize that I was talking to HP, because they worked for HP and I was talking to them. I don't keep review items in any case (although sometimes I'm shamefully lax about getting them back), so I donated the first printer to a local college, and managed to pay HP some paltry sum for the second one.

"Should I buy an Epson or a Canon?"

Some time back, I decided it would be better for my blood pressure if I just disconnected the second B9180, and let it go sit on the floor in the corner of the living room. It had already paid for itself many times over, which is the only reason I'm in no danger of blowing a gasket over it. It was, shall we say, frustrating. Not always. Just most of the time.

It made very nice prints when it was working right.

It appears the experience was somewhat frustrating for HP, too, as the company has recently recently discontinued its mid-line pigment-ink pro-am printers—the B9150 and its stripped-down brother the B8850—and doesn't appear to be gearing up to put any replacements in play. Retiring from the field, in that segment of the printer market?

My contact at HP, too, has "left the company."

And may I just say, I really have no idea why people keep repeating the old platitude that to print digital, "all you have to do is press a button." What? Have those people never printed digital? That's nothing close to my experience. Printing digital badly might be easy. Printing digital really well is hard. It requires attentiveness, knowledge, investment, preparation, and a certain thoroughness of mind.

So what printer would I recommend to the serious photographer nowadays? That's easy. I suggest you go with the Ferrari 599.

Mike

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How Sharp Is Your Printer? How Sharp Are Your Eyes?

By Ctein

How much fine detail do you need in a photograph for it to look sharp? How much fine detail can your printer deliver? Both of these questions have been the subject of gigabytes of verbiage, most of it hearsay, untested and unfounded. It seems like everyone has an opinion; pathetically few of them are informed opinions.

A few weeks ago I stumbled upon an easy and robust test that you can run to find the answer for yourself. In this column I'll tell you how to determine how much detail your printer can make use of and how much of that fine detail you actually care about.

Understand, here, that I'm not talking about what constitutes "perfect" sharpness: the point at which adding more fine detail to a photograph makes no difference whatsoever in your perception of its sharpness. I've run those experiments, and the number is phenomenally high. You need hundreds of megapixels. Forget it. You're not making photographs (or scans) that good, and even if you were, your printer can't render detail that small. (Traditional printers should not be feeling smug; you can't do it in the darkroom, either, unless you're making contact prints from very high quality negatives.)

The question we're concerned with is what you can achieve in practice and what looks "good enough." Now, understand that "good enough" is going to depend upon subject matter, viewing distance, choice of printer and paper, and printer settings. Everyone's going to get a different answer. The nice thing about this test is that it takes all of that into account. It comes up with answers that will work for you.

Along with a printer, you'll need the following items to perform this test:

• Three to five sheets of paper.

• A copy of Photoshop or Photoshop Elements or any other program that can generate a "contact sheet" from an assortment of files.

• A folder on your computer with several dozen different image files in it, spanning the range of things that you're likely to be printing.

(Note: Do not use synthetic test target files like bar charts or checkerboards or other such things. They can produce weird and anomalous results that are not at all germane to how your photographs will print out.)

• A good magnifying loupe, good enough to be able to clearly see the dots in your inkjet prints.

Now you're ready to roll.

I'm still using the "Contact Sheet II" operation from older versions of Photoshop (figure 1). It's what I know and like, so that's the process I'm describing here. Bring up the contact sheet control panel, point it at your file folder, set the rows and columns to something like 7x7" or 8x8", set the page size to 8x10", and set the resolution to 300 ppi. Let'er rip!

Figure 1

After the contact sheet has been generated, print it out on an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper, using whatever printer settings you wish to evaluate. In the illustrations in this article, I was using an Epson Stylus Photo R800 printer, printing on Epson Premium Semigloss paper at the highest quality setting.

Repeat this two more times with everything the same except for changing the contact sheet resolution to 600 ppi and 1200 ppi in the Contact Sheet II control panel (figure 2). You'll now have three superficially-identical prints. You may want to mark them on the back so you can tell them apart.

Figure 2. From top to bottom, small sections of the contact sheet files generated at  300, 600, and 1200 PPI.

(If you want to refine this further, generate two intermediate-resolution prints, at 450 ppi and 900 ppi, but don't try to split it finer than that. You really won't care, and it's hard to see smaller differences even if they're real.)

Look at the fine detail in the prints with your loupe. If it's a recent-model printer being used at a high quality setting, you will likely see a difference in the amount of fine detail being rendered between the 300 ppi and the 600 ppi prints. You may or may not see a difference between the 600 and 1200 ppi prints. I did, in my tests (figure 3).

Figure 3. Enlarged sections of the prints produced by the Epson R800 printer, from top to bottom, of the 300, 600, and 1200 ppi files.

Look for the point at which the fine detail stops improving. In other words, if the 450 ppi print shows more fine detail than the 300 ppi print, but the 600 ppi print doesn't show more fine detail than the 450 ppi print, it means that your printer can't make use of more than 450 ppi of data.

Now you know what your printer's limits are. Of course, this will vary with the paper you use and the printer settings to use, so don't try to generalize. Generally, glossy papers support higher resolutions than matte papers, but you never know until you run a test.

So much for the pixel-peeping. Now you're going to find out how much of that fine detail actually matters to you. Just look at the prints. You get to decide what distance you're viewing them from, what the lighting conditions are, and how persnickety you want to be. Can you tell sharper prints from fuzzier ones? Which of those little contact sheet images look different? Higher resolution matters more for some kinds of subject matter and photographs than for others.

How many ppi do you need before it stops mattering to you? Remember there's no right answer to this exercise. I suspect you will be surprised if the answers you get. Some people will find that they're happier with much lower resolutions than they thought they would be. Other people find that they can see a lot more fine detail than they thought.

In case you're wondering, my "sweet spot" for most of my printers and the kind of prints I make, is in the 450-500 ppi range. As a rule, prints look visibly fuzzier to me if I drop to 300 ppi, but they don't look obviously sharper if I go to 600–900 ppi. But that's me. I guarantee your mileage will differ.

Of course, once everyone runs these tests, all the interminable online arguments about print and printer resolution will cease.

Right?

Ctein

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