8/29/14 The Morning Coffee: The Paris Meetup (Thanks Franck!)

Ctein at a Parisian café. Photo by Franck D.

Your late Morning Coffee this morning (Ed. apologizes for falling down on the job*): Franck D., who organized a TOP gathering in Paris with Ctein, sent us the following short report.

The Monday evening of the TOP meeting was supposed to be a lovely evening in Paris, and the few Parisians that had not left the city were supposed to enjoy terraces with a drink in hand. A number of TOP readers had planned to meet up with Ctein inside Café Crème…at the exact time when a heavy summer rain hit Paris. As as result, the cafe filled up quickly and we found ourselves cramped on a couple of sofas and chairs in a recessed (and rather noisy) corner.

It was a fun evening though! Ctein, his friend Bayla, and seven of us from Mendocino, Zurich, Paris and a few other places spent the evening talking about how special TOP was, about Mike, about matte, glossy and baryta paper, and about lenses and printers. Ctein told us that printer profiles were overrated and that we should have the courage to ignore them and trust the printer to manage colors. Trying to recover from this shocking news, we looked at a beautiful set of (digital) prints that Ctein had brought with himHe had worked on these over the last year or so. We talked about science fiction, about Steve Jobs, about moderating posts, about how Mike will be able to get some help in the new TOP headquarters. We talked about tea and pu erhs, about Ctein’s soon-to-be released novel with Jon Camp and about the color of the sport car he will buy when the book becomes a best-seller.

An enjoyable night in the (temporary) TOP Parisian office!

Many thanks to Franck for hosting the meetup, to Ctein for making himself available (although I'm sure he did it just to have fun too) and to those who showed up.

Mike

*I haven't yet gotten into a rhythm with the schedule with these Morning Coffees. Of course, my whole life is torn up at the moment as I work toward the moving truck on Wednesday, coordinating things like UVerse hookup and phone service and the preparation of my current house for sale. The transfer of the workstation is coming up too, and that's going to be a big day. I'll get there, I think, but in the meantime, as I've said, your patience is much appreciated.

"Morning Coffee" is usually auto-published weekdays at 3:30 a.m. Central Time to be in time for morning coffee breaks in the UK and Europe. The feature is a month-long experiment that I'm going to try to continue when TOP revs up again for the Fall in mid-September.

I'll write about anything. Want to suggest a topic or ask a question? Leave it as a comment.

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

David Paterson: "Re 'Ctein told us that printer profiles were overrated and that we should have the courage to ignore them and trust the printer to manage colors.' OMG—surely they used to burn witches and others at the stake for less heresy than this?"

Mike replies: They did, but they would have long since tried to burn Ctein as a Wizard, and he would have waved his wand and turned them into salamanders.

Ernie Van Veen responds: "He turned me into a newt. No...really...."

Comments

[jim]

Good Luck with the actual move! Mentally how is the change of "leaving" your home for many years going? And do you have any "apprehension?" about how your old home will fare with its new owners? These questions coming from someone who has spent nearly 29 years in the same home.

[David Paterson]

"Ctein told us that printer profiles were overrated and that we should have the courage to ignore them and trust the printer to manage colors."

OMG - surely they used to burn witches and others at the stake for less heresy than this?

[Matt Penning]

Don't forget to triple backup that workstation before you shut it down. One off site, at least. Fare thee well in the move.

[Steve G]

Yes, it was a fun evening, and thanks again to Franck. Sorry that I had to leave a bit early to catch the RER 'C' train, which was disrupted by August work.

Wonderful meeting Ctein, whose stuff I've been reading since the printed page era. And his comments on printer profiles, while contradicting current conventional wisdom, match my experience. Lately I've been using printer profiling as a test. When I've got my monitor right, two prints of the same image, one printed with Photoshop-controlled color and the manufacturer paper profile and the other printed with the printer profile should be very close. When that happens I feel confident that I can concentrate on the images, which is the point after all.

As I said before, I'm looking forward to Mike having the space and time to do some printing, and of course writing about same.

Bearing in mind the old adage about building and moving projects. "The first 90 percent of the job takes the first 90 percent of the time, and the last 10 percent of the job takes the other 90 percent of the time."

In the spirit of this topic, Bon Chance, Mike!

[cfw]

I would like to know what kind of stuff you were able to throw out in preparation for your move, or what parameters you employed for deciding what stayed and what got tossed. I can't seem to let anything go, and as a result my house is becoming uncomfortable (I was just able today to throw out all the cardboard boxes and packing material I'd been saving, having thought over the years that I'd use them at Christmas time, to store things, etc., but never did).

cfw

[Rene Theberge]

Mike, Careful about your remarks about salamanders! We take them seriously here in Amherst, MA:)

http://www.masslive.com/living/index.ssf/2011/04/video_amherst_salamanders_make_annual_trek_through_henry_street_tunnels.html

Good luck with your upcoming move.

Rene

[MikeR]

I think I want to ask Ctein to provide more information about his "trust the printer" statement.

Mike, physically moving is a sucky experience, regardless the benefits at the other end. It's a roller coaster, and the best you can do is hold on for the ride. The patience you asked for? You got it.

[Warren Jones]

Brooks Jensen says the same thing about printer profiles & has an interesting video "creative lab" discussing this very thing on his pay site, Lenswork On-line. We also discussed it some at a workshop of his I attended. I have started to print from Adobe Acrobat (PDF) on some projects that combine text & images, letting the printer (epson 3880) manage color & ABW...It works!

Listen To Ctein & Brooks, they are on to something.

[Spencer H.]

Can we have some elaboration on this no printing using profiles business Ctein? Very curious of your thoughts....

[Mark Bridgers]

Ctein's comment about printer profiles jives with a Brooks Jensen Creative Lab on the Lenswork Online subscription site. Is it too much to ask that Ctein write an article about that in the near-ish future?

[D. Hufford.]

Printer profiles are overrated and we should have the courage to ignore them? This is too much for a Saturday morning, for it means I have wasted part of my life not ignoring them.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

I suspect part of it is that printer profiles are imperfect at Ctein's level of work, so he has to do some printer-specific adjustment anyway -- so a little more or a little less makes no difference. That's probably true for some of the other people here who print seriously.

And Steve G., that project estimating rule is an exact match for one current in software work (not surprisingly, I suppose).

[Sven W]

I like the photo taken by Franck D. Is the lady on the left of the frame joining the group or pinching a chair? ;-)

[Franck D.]

During our conversation, Ctein had mentioned that this idea of delegating color management to the printer came from a discussion he had with a digital imaging specialist at Adobe whose tests were supporting this idea for most images. Independently from the sample variations between printers, between different batches of the same paper and from all paper/printer combinations I guess that a case can be made that printers manufacturers know the printers better than anyone else. I would be also interested in getting more details on this point as I have also spent too much time not ignoring printer/paper profiles!
Out of completeness we also discussed that using a RIP (such as ImagePrint) was almost certainly the way to get the best absolute results but it comes at a price.

[Aashish Sharma]

This is off-topic, but I really want to ask.
Could you get affiliation from amazon India too? If yes, then my purchases from there could benefit you a tiny bit.
I'm sure you have many, many more Indian readers who could do the same. Just a thought.

And yes, sincere congratulations on your move. It's such a lovely house! :-)

Regards,
Aashish

[Franck D.]

Thanks Sven! This picture was shot on them day after the get together ; Bayla, Ctein and myself spent a few hours walking around in Paris and taking pictures. The lady on the left was not in our small group, ; I just looked at the pictures I shot after this one and she was sitting down at another table close to ours.

[Henry Heerschap]

I first heard Brooks talk about this last year during his road show tour. As I was struggling at the time with consistent results in spite of using Epson paper with a 3880, I decided to take the challenge. He was absolutely correct. My colors are dead on and consistent from print to print.
I do, however, still use profiles when using Red River and Hahnemuhle paper.

[ctein]

Dear Folks,

Dave Polaschek (the man behind the curtain when it comes to Photoshop's print engine) and I will be doing up an article about the printer profile stuff... but not until the novel's done.

Plus the remodel goes on and on and on. Very distracting.

Might be towards the end of September.

Or not.

We'll see.

pax / Ctein