I'm still working on the Baker's Dozen, I haven't forgotten. Very wrapped up in this piece I'm trying to put together for that other outlet. I might submit it tomorrow, so that'll be that one done.
Ctein wrote to say that all the infrared prints from the sale have shipped. If you haven't gotten either your print(s) or a notification from USPS that it's on the way, please contact Ctein at ctein@pobox.com.
I invited him to write a column giving us his thoughts about the new Mac Studio, and below is what he replied—written as a casual email, mind you. I have his permission to share.
Ctein: "I wouldn't mind writing something about the Mac Studio, but at this point I have nothing coherent nor useful to say. My thoughts are too muddled. I need to straighten them out before I'll have anything worth adding to the chatter.
"The two things that are most messing with my head (there are others) is that, first, I have little interest in the M[x] chips. The switchover, in fact, will cause me problems when I'm forced into it. Which is, hopefully, not going to happen any time soon.
"The second is that I am unreasonably fond of the 27" 5K iMac. And I do think it's unreasonable. My last-year's 16" MacBook Pro runs rings around my now-ancient (2014) iMac, along with providing me with a dual monitor setup (I have the LG 5K 27" monitor), which has better color and a larger gamut. Plus having twice as much RAM as my maxed-out iMac. There is no sensible reason why I should prefer working on the iMac. Well, I'm allowed to have my idiosyncrasies, but I don't understand this one and it makes it hard to write usefully about the New Apple Order.
"The likely reality is that if my iMac were to give up the ghost tomorrow, I'd go out and buy the final-generation 27" iMac, either refurbished from Apple or used from one of the reputable dealers, in the minimum RAM configuration, populate it with RAM from Other World Computing, and I'd be spending half as much as a Mac Studio would cost me. And that would likely carry me for another 6–8 years... or until Apple decides to stop supporting the Intel chips entirely."
Note that Ctein does professional printing and restoration, so he falls into the pro user category. I believe he paid top dollar for his 5K 27" iMac when it was the very latest thing, so it's nice to hear that he got his money's worth out of it, both in terms of years of use and his positive feelings for it.
By the way, I'm far from an expert on computers—actually more the opposite—but I read enough of Daring Fireball yesterday to find out that it's pretty well accepted that the 27" iMac is now dead. I had two of them, the second being a 2011 that's still sitting here looking for a home. The only reason I went to a separate CPU and monitor was that I work on a porch, surrounded on three sides by windows, and I needed a monitor that could cope with glare better. I still can't do critical work on photos in the daytime. But my NEC MultiSync PA272W solved the glare problem—it has a non-glare surface and a hood.
And in local news...
It's like mid-Winter here today—five or six inches of fresh snow and 17°F (–8°C). The difference is that we're due for a warm-up tomorrow. The anti-icing wires on the pool table shed are working nicely, so no ice dams! Personally, I count today as the first day of Spring, despite the weather. With Daylight Savings Time newly returned, it should be light till 7:00 or even a little later, and don't think I'm not grateful. Those dark Winter evenings can feel awfully lonely. The seven Temperate Months (capitalized out of reverence), roughly April through October, are the reason to live in the Finger Lakes. Bring it on!
27-inch 5K iMac new at B&H Photo: i5, 8 GB RAM, 256GB SSD, $1,799; i9, 32 GB RAM, 2TB SSD, $3,699 (that's the low end and high end; there are other configurations in the middle).
Mike
(Thanks to Ctein)
Book of Interest this Week
Gregory Crewdson: Alone Street. "Filmic" seems the best single adjective to describe Gregory Crewdson's work; his directed and carefully managed tableau are the still photography version of scenes in movies. As such they are hyper-real; more beautiful than life and more poetic, and more concerted. They're also very easy to enjoy and a pleasure to look at.
This book link is a portal to Amazon.
Original contents copyright 2020 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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Thom Hogan: "I'm with Ctein for the most part. A recent 27" iMac 5K Retina configured properly is an excellent tool that should be long-lived (though Apple's yearly macOS updates have many of us living behind the times intentionally).
"Thing is, the 24" M1 iMac fills the need for those who want a lithe all-in-one, and as Mike has noted with his need for a separate monitor to get glare/positioning benefits, a Mac mini or lower Mac Studio model with the proper 4K/5K monitor is probably a perfect replacement for the 27" iMac.
"Those of us with iMac 5K's almost certainly have a small farm of peripherals hanging out on the desk (mine are about 3x the area of a Mac Studio), so the notion of a separate box really isn't an issue. Macsales.com has some very nice boxes that would stack under a Mac Studio and actually take up less space than my current drive boxes when all is said and done.
"As far as I'm concerned, Apple has done a good job of rationalizing the M1 Macs. Portables in 13, 14, 16" sizes, mini, Studio, iMac 24", and later this year a Pro. This is the best set of choices we've had in a long time. I'm not sure that a 27" iMac M1 adds much to the lineup. Indeed, if Apple were to provide one, I'm pretty sure that it would have to be Max/Ultra and the 24" would have to remain plain M1, which is what the mini/Studio distinction is right now."
John Krumm: "My Sierra Juniper just arrived and it looks fantastic. Off to the frame shop."
Bill Beebe: "I certainly understand a strong attachment to any technology or tool, especially if that tool has served you well and allowed you to make a living in your chosen profession. I have experienced the same, but from a pure engineering viewpoint. (I use a camera, and my output can be charitably described as hobbyist).
"What Ctein might be reacting to is the cost of the new M1 variant Mac minis. Let me speak to cost from my perspective.
"I'm fortunate enough that I have a 2019 16" MBP fully equipped with an i9, max memory, and 4TB SSD. That cost $6K. It's a workhorse given to me in 2020 to help complete a contract, and believe me I put it to very good use. Later, I was able to pick up a 2020 13" MPB with the basic M1 (i.e. just 8 cores), on sale for $1.5K. That became my field computer because the idea of carrying $6K of computer out of the house became untenable.
"I can say, without exaggeration, that the 13" will keep up with the 16" with 1/4 the memory, even if the 13" has to hit swap. There are use cases for which the 16" has to be used due to its 64GB memory. But for a lot of other basic use cases, I can't tell the difference in performance.
"But I can certainly tell the difference in battery life. What makes the 13" such a keeper is the speed combined with its very long battery life while out testing in the field. I can run at least eight hours of solid work before I even have to think of hitting the charger. The 16" by comparison sucks down a battery like it's going out of style.
"I understand and appreciate why Ctein uses what he uses, but I hope in the future he'll see that the Apple Silicon based Macs will benefit him even more than Intel based Macs, especially when mobile."
Words and illustrations by Ctein
[Since we're in the middle of a print offer featuring five of Ctein's expertly crafted digital IR prints, I asked him to explain his IR equipment, methods, and workflow. The resulting article was so long we decided to break it into two parts; the second half will appear tomorrow. —Mike the Ed.]
Let's start with first principles—my artistic philosophy. As I've written often, it's (deceptively) naïve: I want to make prints that show you what I saw. When I think, "Oh, look at that!" I want you to have the same reaction for the same reasons when you see one of my prints.
The naïveté is deceptive because any of you who have tried doing this know that it's bloody difficult to transform what the cameras sees into what you see. For a wide range of values of "bloody difficult"—sometimes it's terribly easy and on occasion it's impossible. It's my goal, regardless.
This creates a bit of a problem. I don't see in the infrared! Consequently, my goal gets a bit meta-. I want to make prints that show you what I imagine I'd be seeing if I did see infrared. It's no longer purely about understanding human visual perception; there's an element of imagination and a fair dose of physics knowledge in the mix.
It really helps that I can see what the camera sees in the infrared! I can't imagine doing infrared photography without an electronic viewfinder or screen preview (a.k.a. live view). No, I can imagine it, and it would be an exercise in frustration. I'd look at a scene, make a wild (albeit educated) guess as to what it looked like in the infrared, make a photograph, and look at the results on the screen on the back of the camera.
A lot better than in the film days, but still....
I started playing with black-and-white infrared digital photography back in 2008–2009, and you can see that work if you scroll to the bottom of this section on my website.
Back then I was using a Fujifilm Finepix all-in-one camera (I hadn't abandoned film yet) which had a weak-enough IR-blocking filter on the sensor that I could add a visible light blocking filter to the front of the lens and photograph solely in the infrared. At a very low ISO—single digits! But it worked, and the results were quite nice. I'm especially fond of this one:
Ctein, Buena Vista Park Path
Once I moved to more "dedicated" digital cameras, in the Olympus line (where I have stayed to this day), this trick stopped working—their IR blocking filters were too good. But I was hooked, so when I got my second Olympus camera, I had my Olympus Pen digital converted to pure infrared by LifePixel.
That was a real step up in quality, plus now I could photograph at decent ISO's! "Thunderhead over the Sierras" is another of my early favorites, made with that converted Olympus Pen.
Ctein, Thunderhead Over the Sierras
I've had three cameras converted by LifePixel and I've been delighted in every case. The company is responsive, helpful, and affordable, with conversions running between $200 and $300 (and sometimes they have sales). If you don't see your camera on the list, inquire. I cannot recommend these folks too highly.
They will even sell you an already-converted camera if you don't have a spare one to convert. That can run a lot more, because you're buying the cameras as well as the conversion, but an older used model may not cost any more than converting one of your own cameras. New cameras with lenses start at about $450 but most will clock in in the high hundreds for just the body.
About the conversions. LifePixel offers several different options. Go with a straight infrared conversion, unless you are positive you want to play with full spectrum photography. I thought about going that route and then realized that if I also wanted to do pure infrared photography (what I cared about most), I'd have to invest in appropriate filters for all my lenses—a.) inconvenient and b.) expensive!
Once you've made that choice, you'll discover that there are more options. I strongly recommend the Deep B&W Infrared conversion with the 830 nm cut off. It provides a much purer result than the Standard Infrared (720 nm) conversion. It costs you a stop of sensitivity, but with modern cameras (especially with image stabilization) this really isn't a problem.
LifePixel will also program in a custom color calibration (at least they did on my Olympuses) that produces a neutral preview and JPEG. Makes visualizing what you're doing a whole lot easier. I really do like these folks!
In case you're wondering, my current infrared camera is an Olympus OM-D E-M5 Mark II. If I ever replace my E-M1 Mark II with a newer model (no, the Mark III and M1X didn't do it for me), I’ll likely get that converted to IR and sell the E-M5.
Lenses
Okay, you've got a camera body, now what about the lens? This is hit or miss: conventional lenses are not corrected for aberrations in the infrared, nor do the anti-reflection coatings work very well there. The latter is the bigger problem. Poor reflection suppression results in large amounts of flare, a pronounced hotspot in the center of the field, and ofttimes images of the diaphragm blades. You will find that many lenses are simply unusable.
In addition, optical corrections may be a factor. This does not correlate with how well a lens works in the visible light. A lens that is good under normal circumstances may crap out in the infrared.
In any case, there will be differences to take into account. For example, my 12mm ƒ/1.4 Leica DG Summilux is unbelievably good for normal photography, even wide open. The aberration suppression is unbelievable. This is the lens I used for the aurora photography on my website; just take a look at those pinpoint stars! It's still very sharp and well corrected in the infrared—happy, happy me—but it has pronounced curvature of field. Fortunately, I always use this lens at ƒ/3.5–4.5 because outside of that range flare and/or internal reflections become intolerable, and this produces ample depth of field with a 12mm lens. I further cut the error in half by setting the focus window two-thirds of the way to one side of the frame. Works well enough!
In case you're wondering, the three lenses I use for infrared photography are that 12mm, the Panasonic 42.5mm ƒ/1.7, and the Olympus M. Zuiko 75mm ƒ/1.8. They all have their quirks in the infrared but they're all acceptable.
My favorite by far, oddly enough, is the 12mm. Why is that odd? Because I've never been particularly in love with wide-angle lenses. I've always gravitated to the long side. My standard always-on-camera lens for normal photography is the 42.5mm Panasonic. That would be the equivalent of 85mm in 35mm format. I rarely use anything shorter than that. But in infrared? The 12mm is my go-to lens. Don't know how to explain it, it just looks right. That was a big surprise, and it was one of the things that drove me to buy the Leica lens, because Olympus's 12mm lens is pretty punk.
Fine, I've got my equipment. Now I'm off to make photographs!
The viewfinder view is great. Decent contrast, a little bit flat because of lens flare, but good enough for me to evaluate a scene. The image is nice and neutral. When I look at the resulting photograph (well, actually the preview JPEG, as I photograph in raw) on the camera screen, it looks flatter than it did through the viewfinder, but still tolerable. Mostly I depend on what I see in live view; I only go to post-exposure chimping in IR to check focus and sharpness.
I import my raw files into Adobe Bridge and that's where the fun begins. Tune in tomorrow for the thrilling conclusion of my saga!
Ctein
Book o' the Week:
Ernst Haas: New York in Color 1952–1962. "When Haas moved from Vienna to New York City in 1951, he left behind a war-torn continent and a career producing black-and-white images. For Haas, the new medium of color photography was the only way to capture a city pulsing with energy and humanity. These images demonstrate Haas's tremendous virtuosity and confidence with Kodachrome film and the technical challenges of color printing."
This book link is a portal to Amazon.
Original contents copyright 2020 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. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Peter Komar: "I'm fairly positive that LifePixel will now have a surge of orders for camera conversions. The IR images from Ctein’s website are gorgeous and just ooze silver like traditional darkroom prints but we all know are now inkjet printed, oh he has mastered that as well. Thanks for the print sale and posting the detailed and informative essays on the IR process, can’t wait for part II."
New and deep blue! Photo by Sandy Stone.
Written by Ctein
I am really loving my new Tesla Model X. I guess I better when I spend close to $100K on a car, but it's nice when there's not any buyer's remorse.
The only thing Paula and I don't like about it is that it's larger than we're used to—it's a standard sedan chassis and we are used to compact cars, so it's taking a little bit to get adjusted to a car that's a foot wider and two feet longer.
A small disappointment—with all the high-speed freeway driving, the range is significantly less than EPA figures. I get about 80% of official. That turns out to be surprisingly significant with the kind of driving I do, but it is what it is. Can't really fault the electric for that; if I were driving an ICE [internal combustion engine vehicle —Ed.] at an average 70–75 mph, I wouldn't get EPA mileage either.
On the other hand, Tesla keeps rolling out software tweaks that improve the efficiency, which is not something that would happen with an ICE.
Quality control is everything you've heard about Tesla. That is, crappy. Fortunately, the D minus they get in manufacturing QC is offset by the A plus they get in servicing. Going in, we were prepared for that, and, yes, we've had two warranty fixes so far. The first was a wire harness obstructing the front camera. Not a common thing—the service manager had never seen that failure before—but one that should never have gotten out of the factory. If any kind of check were done on the cameras it would have been very obvious.
The second was that the actuator arm on the passenger side door popped off the ball joint. That is also uncommon but wouldn't show up in normal QC. I'm guessing the socket or the ball sleeve was slightly out of tolerance. That was something Tesla could fix in the field. Within 48 hours they had a technician out to the house who pulled the door apart and replaced the entire actuator motor assembly. Very probably the problem was only in the socket/sleeve, which would've taken five minutes to swap, but he agreed with me that it wasn't worth the risk of having to make another trip out, so he spent most of an hour replacing the entire assembly.
My unexpected-favorite things are the navigation system display and the heated steering wheel. I didn't imagine that I would care about the latter in California's mild climate, but I chill easily and my hands are what gets cold first. Heating up the steering wheel for a few minutes makes me a lot more comfortable. I know, wimpy Californians.
The navigation display might be the best safety feature in the whole car. It makes use of the in-dash display where the speedometer lives—the navigation map appears right next to the speed. It takes about one second to glance at it for driving instructions, as opposed about three seconds for an off-axis nav display.
The adaptive cruise control works extremely well and does the right thing 99+ percent of the time. It takes a whole lot of the stress out of driving in traffic and works perfectly in stop-and-go traffic. The autosteering/autopilot is not so good. Definitely reduces the stress of driving, and it's entirely reliable in stop-and-go, but normally I have to keep close tabs on it. Because it makes mistakes. Paula's description was to think of it like a horse: Most of the time it will do the right thing, but it lacks common sense and every so often it gets spooked or makes an entirely wrong decision. Me, I think student driver. Still, the two features make my driving a whole lot less difficult.
Also, the sound system, which seems to be the best way I have to listen to music in or out of the house. Sandy, my expert sound-engineer sweetie, says that it's Bose and it's top-notch. I was pretty happy with my Audioengine 5+'s until I heard the Tesla sound.
Ctein and his Tesla Model X in Daly City. Photo by Laura Majerus.
Getting used to everything being automated was disturbingly easy. When I walk up to the car, it unlocks the driver side door. When I get within about two feet of it, it swings it wide open, retracts the steering wheel, and moves the driver's seat all the way back to make it easy to get in. Once in the car, pressing the brake pedal moves the seat and the steering wheel back to the position I saved for them (I can save preferences for any number of drivers) and closes the door.
I didn't realize how used I was becoming to these features until I had to drive the Chevy HHR (which we still have) a couple of weeks ago. I walked up to the car and it took me several seconds to remember how to make it work.
Overall, it's difficult to describe the driving experience. My general comment is that "Friends don't let friends drive Teslas." It's like crack on wheels. The Tesla engineers borrowed a big page from Apple design philosophy when they came up with their luxury models. They thought long and hard about how many things people find annoying about driving and how many of those they could fix with existing hardware and software. It's far from perfect but it must be way ahead of whatever is in second place.
If Tesla ever really does get fully autonomous driving, Paula and I will be in heaven—I paid for the full (nonexistent!) package when I bought the car in hopes for the future. We aren't counting on it, no matter what Elon Musk smokes. Based on the performance of the current software, it isn't remotely close, not even for freeway driving. But Tesla is closer than anybody else, so that's where I've put my money.
I'm still getting used to the performance—this is a luxury car that handles and accelerates like a sports car. It'll pull two thirds of a G and doesn't bank a smidge on tight turns. I've been doing a lot of runs down Highway 1 to Santa Cruz (where Sandy lives) which is two-lane highway for much of the way. South of Half Moon Bay, it's normal to be passing tourists and beach visitors who are driving the 55-MPH speed limit, which nobody trying to get from Point A to Point B observes.
The first time I passed a 55 MPH-er, I did what I would usually do—push the pedal to the metal to get past as quickly as possible. I passed them at 98 MPH! I suppose that's really nice for my safety, but I'm not trying to scare the crap out of other drivers on the road. I'm having to learn to moderate my reactions.
I'm still getting used to the car, climbing the learning curve and discovering customizable settings I didn't know about. Today I figured out that it was possible to set the passenger and driver temperatures differently. God knows what else is buried in the feature set. It's like buying a new computer system with an unfamiliar operating system and user interface...
...That can kill you.
I proceed with caution.
And that's about it from Daly City, where all the photographs are beautiful and all the cars are above average.
Pax,
Ctein
Ed. Note: Readers notoriously ignore bylines, so please note that this review is of Ctein's new car, not Mike's! Mike will continue to drive his paid-fer, 30-MPG, manual-transmission 2014 Acura ILX, made by Honda in Greensburg, Indiana, until it dies, or 250k miles, or his ship comes in, or the cows come home, whichever comes first. (It's got 79k miles currently, at age six.) His next car, far off in the hazy future, is likely to be a hybrid. Ctein's next vehicle will be a spaceship, bound for other precincts of the solar system, or possibly beyond.
(This review replaces "Open Mike" for this week.)
ADDENDUM by Ctein: The Tesla is an absolutely frivolous purchase for me—the one monstrous, frivolous purchase in my entire life. But that does not mean I entered into it frivolously. Paula and I have been looking at eVs since 2010, and we started looking seriously about four years ago. Not seriously in the sense that our Chevy HHR needed replacing, but in that when it did the odds were very high that our next car would be an eV, and there were workable options out there for us. Depending, of course, on money and needs and timing.
But, oh yeah, we've been studying this. And by now you should all know that when I study something, I really study something. Most especially when looking at having to spend $40,000 or more, which is four times more than we spent on the Chevy. A great deal of consideration went into this purchase, not to mention no small amount of planning. Yes, it is a frivolous and an exorbitant luxury. Do not imagine, though, that it was entered into ignorantly. There are many pros and cons to buying an eV these days. They are not panaceas. I'm not asking you to think so. But please give me a little credit—I knew exactly what I was doing.
Original contents copyright 2020 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.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Kirk: "Made me chuckle a bit. In Austin they are as common as pickup trucks and Honda Accords...."
emptyspaces: "I have had a Nissan Leaf Plus for about five months now. Couldn’t afford (or drive!) a Tesla during the buying process (Leaf Plus will be $10k less than the off-menu Model 3...before insuring it). Anyway, I love it. It’s quick in that key 25–55 MPH range and can easily merge onto the freeway from any ramp.
"I am happy for anyone who gets to experience an EV for basic driving...none of them are great for long trips but in five months my biggest day has been 85 miles. It’s our second car, and my DD. Congrats on the Model X—I have a hard time believing the sound system is better than Audioengine, but glad to hear the sound doesn’t suck like in my Leaf. Just got done replacing the speakers in it."
Malcolm Leader: "I want one!"
Daniel: "Meanwhile, the old '81 VW Rabbit diesel keeps on going with 50 MPG at highway speeds all day long. In-town driving is 46 MPG. Was made in Pennsylvania, USA. Roomy enough that Wilt Chamberlain (former NBA player) drove one. Parts easy to get and the vehicle still works well. Paid for decades ago and insurance cost is low. Why mess with what works?"
Thomas Mc Cann: "Worth watching:"
Tim Auger: "What’s the depreciation like on a high-end Tesla?"
Michael Reichmann of The Luminous Landscape interviewing Ctein in 2004
Well this is a nice surprise. Josh Reichmann, son of our late friend Michael of The Luminous Landscape, has given us permission to make available the two videos of MR's visit to Ctein's San Francisco area darkroom fifteen years ago. This is especially generous of him as L-L is now behind a paywall.
Here's the interview. The part about dye transfer begins about 23:50 of the 32-minute video if you want to skip right to it.
The second one is really the priceless one—it's the only video we know of that shows a dye transfer print actually being made. The first fifteen minutes are somewhat simulated (you can't film in total darkness), but the later part is real-time documentary, showing Ctein making an actual matrix and a print, from start to finish. You really should watch this—it's quite fascinating even if you never set foot in a darkroom or never will again. And it's now a valuable historical record, at least in photo-tech history. Finally, it certainly shows you how involved a process it was to make the rare print or prints you've bought in our sale!
Speaking of which, there are now less than two days left. The basic information is here and you can browse the available images here.
Many and most sincere thanks to Josh. I found it emotional to see and hear his father again—I knew MR for many years. It's the first time I've rewatched one of his videos since his passing. He was a pioneer of photography online and is greatly missed in our little corner of the universe.
Enjoy!
Mike
(Thanks to JR)
Original contents copyright 2019 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.
Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Sid: "Fascinating, even spellbinding, videos!"
Rob de Loe: "Best quotation from the second video: 'now we know why not that many people do this anymore.' Yeesh. What an incredible amount of work to make one print. I had no idea. Thanks for posting this Mike."
Mike replies: Incredible, isn't it? Now you can see why I think dye transfer is one of the most amazing processes in photography's history. But unlike some things that are purely difficult, there was a reason for going through all that work: the results were inimitable, especially as regards maximum black and color purity.
However, my second most favorite color process is pigment inkjet. A well-made pigment inkjet print can be really beautiful. It is a wonderful medium too.
...And not quite as difficult, either. :-) But one of the salient comments Ctein made in the video is when he talked about the prejudice people have that inkjet printing is just "pressing a button and letting the computer do it." He's right that that's the same prejudice that people leveled against photography itself in the beginning. Inkjet printing is a skill too, and takes knowledge as well as judgement.
As an aside, note also in the videos that Ctein doesn't use junk words and fillers when he speaks. You won't hear him say "um" and "ahh" very often, if at all. And he doesn't use filler phrases like "you know" (unless he really means it) or "know what I'm saying" or "like" or "stuff like that"...or stuff like that. Sometimes he will pause and actually sigh, but he's silent—he doesn't fill his silences with junk. Very unusual manner of speaking these days. No wonder he dictates instead of typing.
Kenneth G James: "Wow! Watched the videos, they are great! Thanks Mike, Thanks Josh."
Kenneth Tanaka: "I actually have a DVD of that second video (from a former LuLa subscription purchase) that I keep near my desk as a greatest-hits reference. I’ve not only watched several times myself but I’ve played it for others. Several years ago I even played it for a lunchtime group of photo curators and conservation interns at a major museum. It’s a wonderfully educational video, a genuine classic."
Mike replies: Genuine classic...I thought the very same thing, Ken, rewatching it last night.
[A different] Mike: "As amazing as the process is to watch—and it really is—it's even wilder to think about how the idea came to be in the first place. Wow."
MHMG: "Some fifteen years later, I listen with interest to Ctein's comments and concerns about print permanence in the first video. Ctein is entirely spot on with some of his concerns about accelerated aging test methods as it was practiced at the time. We have now learned something about modern inkjet prints that weren't predicted by those accelerated aging methods practiced at that time. A new understanding of inkjet print longevity has indeed been determined both by refinements in accelerated test methods and actual observations in real world anecdotal reports at this point in time now that inkjet printing is a much more mature print process. I take comfort that both 'real world' anecdotal evidence of aging issues with modern media and more recent accelerated testing protocols with improved methodologies for these media are now leading to a better understanding of print permanence. The role of optical brighteners and titanium dioxide whitening pigments in modern media, for example, play a more significant role than we knew at the time Michael Reichmann interviewed Ctein in the these videos. Progress is progress!"
David Lee: "Thanks for the videos Mike. I watched the printing process three times already and shared it twice."
Eamon Hickey: "An incredible treat to watch these videos, especially the printing demo. Thanks to all who thought to make it and now made it available for us to see. In addition to being a master printer, Ctein is a master explainer, a skill that is probably as rare and valuable (in the benefit-to-the-rest-of-us sense) as his darkroom skills. A real pleasure to hear and see him describe his work."
We're having a most extraordinary Print Offer this week.
Our friend Ctein was for many decades a master custom printer in dye transfer, crafting prints to order for the rock 'n' roll photographer Jim Marshall among many others. He is also a photographer in his own right whose portfolio, prior to the closing of his darkroom in 2013, consisted of several hundred approximately 16x20-inch photographs superbly printed as dyes. After carefully archiving extra copies of his own full-sized dye transfer prints for years or decades, Ctein has decided that it's time to pass along his archive of his own prints.
For the next seven days, he's offering his entire archive for potential sale.
VERY IMPORTANT: We're offering 270 different images but there are only 1–5 copies of most of the prints (the number available is noted next to each thumbnail on the Selection Page). There will never be any more. It's not strictly "first come, first served," but it's heavily weighted that way. It's a good idea to provide Ctein with alternative choices, so he can make as many people happy as possible, but it's very important to get your order in early to stand the best chance of getting the prints you want.
Selection: You can easily appreciate that this is going to be a tough sale to administrate as an un-automated, one-time, one-Ctein-with-no-minions offer. The ordering instructions are a bit complexicated. Sorry about that! Please persevere. :-) We are standing by to answer questions should you happen to get confused.
Initially it's easy, though—just go to the
Selection Page
[SALE ENDED and link removed 12 noon Pacific Time 12/6/19]
and follow the two very simple steps—but please read the following before you do!
Cost: The prints cost $650 each, which is high only in the context of our usual sales and quite low in the context of dye transfer. Between the 1930s and 1994, it most often would have cost you more than that—sometimes far more—to have a custom lab make a dye transfer print for you from your own original. (Just the other day one of our readers reported that his company used to have dyes made to order for $5,000 each. That would have been at the very high end, but not crazy.) It is also far below Ctein's normal everyday prices for these exact prints, which are now in the thousands of dollars.
Shipping: Shipping is $39 per order to anywhere in the world, no matter how many prints you order.
Payment: We prefer payment by check (US bank) but you can pay by PayPal if it's more convenient or if you're in another country.
Layaway: Being about 11 times more organized than I am, Ctein is, incredibly, offering a layaway option: you can pay for your print in 13 easy monthly installments. I would never stand a chance at this, but I know the guy. He will pull it off.
Bonuses: There are bonuses for those ordering multiple prints. If you buy three dye transfer prints, you can pick any of Ctein's digital prints as a free bonus; if you buy six dye transfer prints, you can pick a seventh dye transfer print for free.
Ctein
Guarantee: I know you can't see the prints before you buy, so we offer an unconditional 100% guarantee: live with your purchase for a month and if you're not happy, send it back in the original packing for a full refund. You're protected. However, this time we have no way of replacing pictures damaged in shipment. They will be packaged extremely well to minimize possible damage, but in case of shipping damage you'll have to decide either to keep it for full price or send it back for a full refund. In the latter case we'll cover shipping costs.
That's it! Ctein's "Dye Transfer and Me" series will resume tomorrow. In the meantime, have a look for yourself at the beautiful prints! It costs you nothing to browse. We very much hope you will like.
Mike
Original contents copyright 2019 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.
Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon
Word to the wise—in the Ctein Archive sale that starts in two hours, we're offering 270 different images (count 'em—I did!), but most images only exist in a 1–4 copies or so. Popular images will sell out—single images will sell out if just one person wants it. So if you want to actually be able to buy the image you want, it would be wise to stake your claim early. You can always change your mind later.
Most importantly, you'll need to know what your choice is, so go to the selection page and look through the pictures to see if there's something you particularly would like to have.
In my personal opinion, Ctein's portfolio is strong in...
Sunset under Columbia
...The Space Program...
Lava under Forest Fire Smoke
...atmospheric effects...
Total Eclipse Coronal Streamers
...and astronomy, and I think those prints will go fast. You might recall our sale in 2013 when Ctein stopped taking print orders. He had enough materials left to make 160 new full-sized dye transfer prints to order, and those 160 prints sold out in 6 hours and 2 minutes!
Whatever you want, don't wait till Day 7 of the sale to make your decision. In fact, don't wait till Day 2. We are going to be publicizing this sale at other websites and through other channels, so (jealously?) I want to make sure that as a loyal regular TOP reader you get first crack at what you want.
Mike
Original contents copyright 2019 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.
Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon
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Featured Comments from:
Bruce Bodine: "Order link please?"
Mike replies: The sale hasn't started yet and the order link isn't live. It starts at noon San Francisco time today, Friday, which is 3 p.m. Eastern US Time, 8 p.m. in London, and 7:00 a.m. in Sydney.
Master printmaker Ctein with his life's work,
much of which will go on sale here on Friday
It's only four days until our fantabulous Black Friday Ctein Dye Transfer Master Print Sale. It'll start at noon Pacific Standard Time on Friday, November 29, and run for exactly one week. This is the only print sale we've ever had for multiple pictures—many of 'em—and there is a severely limited supply of prints of each picture, so it's going to be complicated to try to get you happily matched up with a picture you want.
ALL THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION IS FOR FRIDAY, when the sale starts. It doesn't start until then. This is just so you can familiarize yourself with what going to happen then.
Bonuses
First, all the prints—you can view them here—are $650 regardless of rarity and size, plus a $39 shipping and handling charge for each order regardless of the number of prints you buy (that's higher than usual, but Ctein will be packing these extremely well). There is no limit on the number of prints you can order. There are bonus incentives for multiple-print purchases: digital prints (here's the most complete list) or even an extra dye transfer print of your choice (subject to availability). We'll give you the details later.
Layaways are available!
You'll be able to pay for prints by personal check (which we'd prefer) or PayPal (necessary for buyers who don't have a US bank account or wish to use credit cards). You will also be able to purchase prints on layaway, paying $50/month for 13 months for each print you want to buy (plus a bump for shipping and handling in the last payment). Here are the layaway terms.
What you'll do
Here's how it's going to work (the final and official instructions will be in the live Sales posting here on the 29th):
1.) There will be a request link on TOP and on the print listings page on Ctein's website. Use either of those to send Ctein an email. If neither link works for you (they fail for about 1% of viewers for unknown reasons) email ctein@pobox.com and put "My print requests"—exactly those words—in the subject line.
2.) The email should contain ONLY the following information:
That's it. Don't include your mailing address, payment information, any special shipping requests, bonus prints you'd like, anything else at this point. All that will be taken care of when Ctein confirms your selection and directs you to place your order.
3.) Ctein will send you an acknowledgment of your email within an hour of receipt (unless he's asleep—remember he's on Pacific Standard Time and won't be on the computer from roughly 1:00 a.m. until 10:00 a.m.). If you don't get an acknowledgment, send your request again.
4.) Within 24 hours of your request, Ctein will confirm which print(s) you can buy. In all likelihood it will be a lot less than 24 hours, and if none of your choices are available, Ctein will let you know that very quickly (unless he gets totally slammed with orders in the first hours, in which case there will be a notice posted on TOP letting you all know there will be delays). With your confirmation, Ctein will send a link to the order page. You will place your actual order there, following the instructions posted.
Ctein will make an effort to match up people's choices and alternatives with print availability to maximize happiness (and sales), but there will be—of necessity!—a very strong "first come, first served" component.
The earlier you get your request in, the more likely you are to get what you want.
(Did Mike emphasize that enough? :-)
Ctein will be updating the webpage showing which prints are still available as orders are confirmed, but as you can appreciate, there's going to be a substantial lag, because there will always be print requests that haven't been processed yet. That's why it's a good idea to provide alternates to your first choices, if you have any. By the time you place your order, the inventory will have changed. Especially overnight (his night, not yours).
We'll tell you all this again on Friday. This is just a heads up.
Meanwhile, between now and Friday, you can check out the prints and make up your wish list in advance. Please do not send it to Ctein before the start of the sale.
Questions
Any questions? Please post them in the comments and we will endeavor to answer them promptly.
—Mike and Ctein
Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and Ctein. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
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Fig. 1
Words and photos by Ctein
Dye Transfer and Me: A Meandering Half-Century Journey: As a prelude to the big Black Friday Dye Transfer Sale I'm writing a series of columns talking about dye transfer—how it worked, what it meant to me and other photographers and printers, and our perpetual jousting with Eastman Kodak. (Important note: You cannot put in print orders or requests before the sale. Please don't email me your preferences in advance.)
Part 4 of an Uncertain Number...
In Which There is More Hacking of Process
My first meeting with Frank McLaughlin in 1978 was a high point in my life. Frank was warm and welcoming and knew everybody in the dye transfer world. Frank introduced me to Phil Condax, Louis's son and a curator at the Eastman House—we also became lifelong friends—and Tom Rankin and the other folks at Frog Prince, a commercial dye transfer lab in San Francisco. Frank knew there was strength in networking and he made certain we networked.
Frank brought in Bob Speck, who developed the dye transfer process for Kodak under the direction of its inventor, Louis Condax. Pretty exciting! Bob and Frank pored over my prints and gushed fulsome praise, to a degree that anyone with a smaller artistic ego than mine would have found embarrassing (I coped). They declared they had never seen better dye transfer prints. I expect my feet didn't leave any footprints as I was departing Kodak.
Frank's favors didn't stop with introductions. He put in a word about my work with Kodak's public relations department which, a few years later, produced its own substantial rewards, and he introduced me to my biggest and best clients. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Fig. 2.
Dye transfer changed what I photographed. This print medium could handle anything I could record on film, and that was a lot. Color negative films had an exceptionally long exposure range, well over 10 stops of straight-line curve. I could photograph in the middle of the desert, at noon, and make prints that held detail in the highlights and the shadows (figure 2).
Night photography was—and still is—one of my passions, though not the way it was usually done back in the era of available darkness, pushing films to their max. In college, I'd begun to wonder what kind of photographs I'd get if I went all the way to the other extreme—slow films, processed for minimum grain and maximum tonal quality. The first time I saw what urban landscapes at midnight looked like on Panatomic X, I was hooked.
Fig. 3.
When I moved to color and medium format, it was the same. It demanded patience, a flashlight, and a good book. Occasionally the exposures were only a few minutes; figure 3 ran 45 minutes. I discussed reciprocity failure last column—contrast went up, and the scenes were contrasty to begin with. Well, that's what contrast-control masking and dye transfer were for. I dealt with previously impossible-to-print-well negatives like figure 1. That vein of work continued throughout my film and darkroom career, culminating in the Christmas in California series.
Dye transfer was a "hi-fi" printing process that exposed problems the same way a really good sound system reveals a poor recording. I loved telephoto lenses (still do), and long lenses are prone to lateral chromatic aberration—the color fringing that occurs towards the edges of the frame because the lens produces red, green, and blue images of slightly different magnifications. Before digital image processing, which made the fix simple, it was something you lived with. I could ignore it in smaller prints, but I was printing large in dye transfer. Worse, the high color purity of the dye transfer process made those fringes more obvious. Worst, color fringes in a dye transfer print look like bad technique! It takes a technical eye to distinguish lens aberrations from mis-registered color separations. This would not do.
I measured the exact amount of the color fringing and calculated how much I'd have to raise or lower the enlarger head to compensate. It was a millimeter or so over a throw distance of about a meter. When I printed a negative made with my 300mm lens I carefully adjusted the enlarger head between the matrices to compensate for the aberration. Mostly, it worked. I rarely got perfect results—enlargers really aren't designed to be manipulated that way with any degree of precision alignment—but there was much less color fringing than there would have been if I done nothing.
Other complications—I've mentioned that one of my misconceptions was that dye transfer prints would be technically the equal or superior to chromogenic prints in all respects. Among other delusions, I expected dye transfer prints to be as clean and flawless as a well-executed Ektacolor print.
Oh my, but that is to laugh! We're talking about a process that involves multiple generations, large trays of liquid dyes, rinses and washes and multiple hand transfers. Why in the world I ever imagined that would produce spotless and flaw-free results, I have no idea.
Any bits of dust on my negative or contrast masks produced a white spot in the matrices that would have to be retouched out of every print I made. You can bet I went to great lengths to be as clean as possible, and sometimes I achieve perfection...but more often, not. Further, any bits of dust or air bubbles that got trapped between the matrix and the receiving paper would keep the dye from transferring to the paper, leaving a little bright red (minus cyan), green (minus magenta) or blue (minus yellow) spot that also needed to be retouched.
If a bit of grit got embedded in a matrix or it got scratched, then there'd be a little bright spot or streak to spot out of every print thereafter. Manipulating large sheets of soft, wet emulsion for print after print, stuff would happen. Even careful craftspeople aren't perfect, as much as we'd like to be.
Little particles of dye precipitated out of the liquid baths. If they settled on a matrix and weren't entirely removed in the rinse step, those dye specks would transfer themselves to the receiving paper to create a minuscule pinpoint spot of pure cyan, magenta, or yellow. Fortunately, the yellow specks were invisible to the human eye, but the cyan and the magenta? Not so much. They had to be bleached out, and the cleared spot retouched in with dye.
Sometimes there were only a few. Sometimes there were hundreds. Very rarely were there none. Dye specks like that are so common in dye transfer prints that it's one of the more reliable diagnostics for telling if what you're looking at is a dye transfer print. Peer really closely and the odds are good you'll see a primary-color speck somewhere in the light areas.
So, spotting had to be done. A lot of spotting, and I wanted it to be perfect, because I didn't know any better. Nobody knowledgeable was trying to turn out perfect dye transfer prints. (Okay, almost nobody—Frank Tartaro's lab in New York was as obsessive about this as I was.)
It helps that the dyes used to make a dye transfer print are the same ones you use for spotting and retouching. Any finishing work you do can be flawless and invisible, if you're good enough. And your brushes are good enough. I'd buy six or eight 000 brushes to find one that produced the perfect pinpoint spot of dye. I coddled those perfect spotting brushes, but over the course of my career I wore out several generations. Lots of print spotting!
Potassium permanganate selectively removes cyan dye. Happily, that was the most common dye speck. I tried the finest spotting brushes I had, but they made far too big a blotch. I can't recall what inspired me, but I discovered that toothpicks, whittled down to a needle point, proved ideal. I could take out a spot a tenth of a millimeter across and leave the surrounding area almost untouched.
It also helped that I'm phenomenally nearsighted. In my youth, without my glasses my "infinity" working distance was only four inches from my nose!
Permanganate left a brown stain that I removed with sodium bisulfite applied, again, with a sharpened toothpick. Then I had to quickly wipe off the bisulfite with 1% acetic acid, because bisulfite itself would start to bleach dye if left on the print.
Unfortunately there wasn't a strong selective bleach for magenta. There was a general-purpose bleach that would attack all three dyes—it was Kodak's R-18 B&W film reducer formula. R-18 is a mixture of potassium permanganate and sulfuric acid. It bleached great, but it turned out to have problems that I discovered only when I went after the other "dirty" part of dye transfer—stained borders.
In theory, the totally clear parts of the matrix film, where there is no gelatin emulsion to carry the dye (see process description) should print as pure white. Well, they don't. Usually they'd carry a few CC of dye density over to the print paper. Even though I'd figured out how to get sharp borders on my prints' image areas, the surrounding borders would usually have a faint dye stain. Some people considered it a mark of the process. I considered it unattractive.
After I made a print, I'd bleach the area around the image with R-18 bleach, removing most or all of the dye from an inch or three around the image to provide clean white border suitable for framing. Then I'd wipe that whole area down with sodium bisulfite, rinse it off with 1% acetic acid, and dry the print. Nice.
What I didn't realize was that the sulfuric acid in the reducer was creating residual sulfur compounds in the paper. I was turning archival paper into non-archival paper! The paper started to turn brown and get brittle where I'd applied the bleach. Fortunately for me, the the consequences of that became apparent in less than a year and I hadn't sold any prints yet. I needed a better solution—pun intended.
I dug into the chemistry and decided that it wasn't sulfuric acid in particular that was important, it was that it acidified the potassium permanganate. Perhaps glacial acetic acid would do—it wasn't anywhere as strong an acid as sulfuric but if it drove the pH low enough....
It did. R-18C (for Ctein flavor) worked just as well as the Kodak formula and it meant I didn't have to contaminate my prints with sulfuric acid. Not so incidentally, it also worked just as well as R-18 as a film reducer. I passed that information on to Kodak, although I don't think it ever made it into the literature. Now you know.
Why have I spent so much time talking about print spotting and finishing? Because that's where most of the work is! After the first print, I spend far more time on that than on transferring prints. That's the reason I've had to put something like a thousand hours into preparing prints for the upcoming sale.
Ctein
Original contents copyright 2019 by Ctein. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon
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Words and photo by Ctein
Dye Transfer and Me: A Meandering Half-Century Journey: As a prelude to the big Black Friday Dye Transfer Sale I'm writing a series of columns talking about dye transfer—how it worked, what it meant to me and other photographers and printers, and our perpetual jousting with Eastman Kodak. (Important note: You cannot put in print orders or requests before the sale. Please don't email me your preferences in advance.)
Part 3 of an Uncertain Number...
In Which Our Hero Doth First Engage the Great Yellow Beast with Stealth and Guile
When we left off in Part 2 (and mid-1976) I had written to Frank McLaughlin at Eastman Kodak about my ongoing and unsolvable-by-me problems getting good prints out of the dye transfer process. It was an act of desperation. It paid off.
Frank's reply answered all my questions, included a "DT care package" of every related publication Kodak had, and concluded with "The dye transfer process is complicated and sometimes frustrating, but...keep at it. If I can be of any assistance, please let me know."
Fortified, I plunged back into the learning pool. By the end of the year I had the process under control (no, not "mastered," never mastered). They were small prints and artistically insignificant, to teach me how to manage the process and it. The art would come later, after I learnt craft.
Finally, the big moment—my first full-size (20x24-inch) print for my portfolio. I chose this photograph (figure 1) because I knew it would benefit from dye transfer's unique qualities. I needed a long density range to render everything from the disk of the sun to the near-silhouette Saturn/Apollo 17 vehicle with appropriate brilliance. In addition, the Ektacolor print was monochrome orange. I knew there was more of a range of hues than that, and dye transfer, with its excellent yellow (see Part 2) was the ideal medium for this photograph.
Fig. 1
I ordered a box of 16.5x21.25-inch Pan Matrix Film, the largest sheet size it came in. Not quite large enough for a 16x20 image area, not if I wanted big enough borders to handle the film, but close enough. It would've been nice to have 20x24 film, but it was already fabulously expensive—800 current bucks for 25 sheets.
Into the darkroom! I spent a day making test strips, nailing down the correct exposure and color balance. My first process innovation had been controlling the color balance using the dial-in filtration in my enlarger's color head. The usual way to control color balance was to vary the relative exposures for the red-, green-, and blue-light-exposed matrices. I knew how to color balance this way, but it had disadvantages. I had to do annoying calculations to make fine color shifts as appropriate RGB exposure adjustments. More significantly, exposure times much beyond 90 seconds would induce reciprocity failure.
Photographers think of reciprocity failure in film as being about time. Really, it's about intensity. The lower the light level hitting the film, the less effective the film is at recording it. Reducing the light intensity by a stop reduces the recorded image by more than a stop, because the weaker light isn't recorded as efficiently as the stronger.
Reciprocity failure causes contrast to increase. A one-stop luminance difference in exposure might become a 1.1- or 1.2-stop effective difference in what the film records, or worse. The lower the intensity (the longer the required exposure) the stronger the effect. This would be very bad news for color separations. They all have to have the same contrast or you'll get color-crossover in the highlights and shadows, even if the midtones are correct.
Many of my exposures were going to be a lot more than a 90 seconds. Well, I couldn't get rid of reciprocity failure, but I could equalize the exposure times by dialing color filtration into my enlarger's color head. For example, if the red exposure was half that of the green and blue, dialing 30CC (one stop) of cyan filtration into the color head would make the red exposure time match the other two. Yes, with very long exposures there'd be an overall contrast increase, but I had tools to correct that.
This worked beautifully. My most extreme case was a dense negative of a very high contrast subject which needed a very strong contrast-reduction mask. I wound up with 12-minute exposures, but the print looked gorgeous.
Okay, enough about my cleverness. It's a new day; it's time to make my first big set of matrices.
They are horribly dense, badly overexposed. What happened?!
In my enthusiasm, I'd forgotten to stop the lens down after focusing. There went $100 worth of film.
Matrix Set 2. The exposures are just fine, but two of the sheets of film stick together in the developing tray and I can't get them apart fast enough (developing this stuff was hard). There's a big blotch in one of the matrices.
Another $100 worth of film. Grrr.
Set 3: The exposures are good, the development feels good. As I rinse the magenta matrix in hot water to remove the excess emulsion (see the process description), the entire image slides off the film! I'd accidentally exposed one of the matrices wrong-side up, and that's what happens if you do.
At this point my memory fails me. I can't recall what went wrong after that...traumatic amnesia, I'd guess. All I know is that I went through four —that's right, four—more sets of matrices, and there was something wrong with each and every one and it was different each time.
What I do remember is being in tears. I'd expected that very expensive box of film would get me (optimistically) a half dozen finished prints, but I had zero. I gave up for the day.
The next day, calm and less tearful, I went back into the darkroom, took a deep breath, centered myself as much as I could, and made Matrix Set 8. It was good. My first successful portfolio print, achieved through sweat, blood, and tears.
Okay, no blood—there were enough of the other two, thank you.
Fortunately, I never had another experience remotely like that first one. Occasionally I would screw up a set of matrices—galling, and expensive—but the majority of the time everything went fine. In fact, I can't remember much about my dye transfer printing for the next year, it was so uneventful. It's what they say, no news is good news.
Not that I didn't come up with all sorts of little questions; and in early 1978 I sent a long list of them off to Frank McLaughlin. He courteously answered most of them and encouraged me to continue writing him. I did, and we quickly struck up a friendship that lasted for the rest of his life.
Correction: something noteworthy did happen in June of 1977—my first professional publication, an article on contrast masking color negatives, appeared in Petersen's Photographic, the big photography-craft magazine in the US (circulation: 300,000+). It was an article Bob Nadler at Camera 35 had wanted, but it had taken me a couple of years to get around to writing it and by that time Bob had moved on. That taught me an important lesson—never, ever put off writing an article that an editor has asked for! I sent the orphaned article to Karen Sue Geller at Petersen's, who bought it and launched my writing career.
As I wrote back in Part 1, one of the reasons I had a five-part series for Petersen's Photographic, "Dye Transfer for Beginners," in 1980, was so that no one else would ever have to go through the hell I went through climbing learning curves I didn't even know were there when I started. There was a second reason. I was scheming.
I met up with Bob Nadler in early 1978 when he was in San Francisco on a book tour. On hearing of my success in learning how to make dye transfer prints, he told me that Kodak was thinking seriously about killing off the process or, at the very least, eliminating shipments of anything less than professional-lab quantities of supplies. Think thousands to tens of thousands of current-dollars minimum orders. That would eliminate the likelihood of anyone new taking up the process—a slower path to demise, but no less certain.
That would not do. With Frank's off-the-record and sometimes tacit support, I approached Petersen's later that year with the idea of a five-part series on making dye transfer prints. Karen had also heard the rumors and said she'd be on board with me doing that...but only if I could guarantee supplies would be available in reader-affordable quantities. I said I could. Technically, that wasn't true at that moment.
Okay, nothing technical about it.
My then-partner Terry and I made annual driving trips cross-country each fall, so a few months later I was in Rochester meeting Frank for the very first time. I told him that he could tell Kodak that Petersen's had "committed" (nudge nudge, wink wink) to running a series on dye transfer. Frank was a loyal Kodak employee, but he was more loyal to dye transfer. Our co-conspiracy worked. Kodak management bought it and canceled their plans for discontinuing or drastically restricting product availability.
"Dye Transfer for Beginners," Part 1 of 5, appeared in January of 1980. Through a scheduling SNAFU (Paul Farber's, not Karen's), Part 2 did not appear in the February issue but was delayed until March. The magazine got no fewer than five letters from readers asking what had happened to the second installment, which was incredible!
I know how funny that sounds in these days of instant Internet communication. It was different back then. When all correspondence with magazines was by mail and there was no such thing as a "Web presence," letters from readers were few and far between. It was significant when an article got even two letters from readers. Five? That was unheard of. We had a hit on our hands and dye transfer was safe for another few years.
It was my first joust with Kodak. It wasn't going to be my last by any means, and I won them all, save at the very last. Okay, a few beyond the very last. Yes, friends, more dirt will be dished. Stay tuned to this channel.
Ctein
Original contents copyright 2019 by Ctein. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
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Dave: "Ctein, Thank you for writing this series! Such interesting tidbits about the dye transfer process, along with a fortuitous series of events that allowed you to learn the process and practice it for years. The columns read as though they were part of fictional story, but you persevered by learning the process, asking questions to your contact at Kodak, figuring out a way to prolong the manufacture of dye transfer materials, and more to come! Even though I know nothing about dye transfer, this series fascinates me with all the twists and turns of the story. I commend you for continuing after the first results were disastrous and expensive! I can almost imagine how you felt when that expensive box of film was depleted without a decent print—'traumatic amnesia' indeed! I'm eager to read the next part in your series."
(Part 2 of an Uncertain Number)
Figure 1 (see text)
Words and photos by Ctein
As a prelude to the big Black Friday Dye Transfer Sale, I'm writing several columns talking about dye transfer—how it worked, what it meant to me and other photographers and printers, and our perpetual jousting with Eastman Kodak. (Important note: You cannot put in print orders or requests before the sale. Please don't email me your preferences in advance.)
Back to our story...
When we last left our intrepid hero it was 1975 and he was about to attempt to scale mountains that he imagined were molehills (okay, maybe not so intrepid, not so heroic). As I said, I had misconceptions.
Why bother? Dye transfer had two major advantages over other processes: control and inherent quality. It was like having Photoshop in the darkroom. You had multiple tools for controlling curve shape, both the overall grayscale curve shape and the individual RGB color curves.
You could change the contrast, saturation, and overall print density range independently. You could make these adjustments to the overall print or to the individual primary colors. There were always several paths to each aesthetic end; for instance there were three different ways to increase contrast that had different effects on saturation and print density range. There are, in fact, so many different ways to control the print appearance that I don't believe anyone has ever entirely mastered the process. I certainly reject the term "master" for myself. There is just no end to the learning curve.
I photographed Figure 1 at a considerable distance, so normal light scattering in the air made washed out the shadows and made them progressively more blue. Printed conventionally, there is no fix for this. With dye transfer, I fixed the white point to keep it neutral but increased the green contrast (magenta dye) a little and the blue contrast (yellow) a lot. That eliminated the atmospheric scattering problem.
Dye transfer's inherent color fidelity and gamut are unsurpassed. Dye transfer prints can have a maximum density approaching 3.0. No other printing process, analog or digital, can reach that level of density and saturation. That gives dye transfer prints an extremely large color gamut.
Even more important, dye transfer's dyes have high color accuracy, especially the yellow, which is comparable to what you'd see in a digital printer. Chromogenic yellow has a strong magenta component—it looks more like "Kodak box" yellow. In a conventional color print, distinct hues between orange and yellow blend into the same shade of yellow-orange. When I printed Figure 2 on chromogenic paper, it was a uniform orangeish-tan, almost monochrome. The dye print distinguishes the yellows, tans, and oranges.
Figure 2
Worse, chromogenic papers can't produce a vivid green. That poor yellow inevitably introduces a magenta component, which is the complement of green, muting it. I printed the illustration in the previous column as one of my very early dye transfers because a chromogenic print clobbered the delicate yellow-greens.
Dye transfer originally had better light-fading and dark-keeping characteristics than any other commercial process. The light stability of chromogenic and Cibachrome prints caught up, but dye transfer is much superior when it comes to dark storage. A dye transfer print in the dark at room temperature has a projected life of 300 years. I am confident in that number. Dye transfer materials did not change significantly over half a century and Kodak regularly measured reference prints that had been kept in the dark. There's 50 years worth of data that says that their accelerated tests are accurate. No other material has been around long enough to give us that sort of real-world confidence.
Now you know why I wanted to make, as Charlie put it, "some good prints." In 1975, I had the will and the money. The means came next. The easy part was ordering boxes of chemicals, dyes, paper, and Pan Matrix Film. It was an awful lot of money. A single box of 25 sheets of 10x12-inch Pan Matrix Film (for making 8x10 prints) ran about $300 (in current bucks). That'll make a maximum of eight prints, assuming nothing goes wrong and no do-overs. Reality was often less kind. Film for 16x20 prints? Three times that much. 11x14 paper? $4/sheet.
Equipment came cheaper. Dye transfer requires laying down the three primary colors separately and in perfect register on a sheet of receiving paper, using "pin registration." It's very low-tech and surprisingly precise. I wasn't sure I could afford a proper register punch (those supplies were really expensive), but I had a good three-hole punch. I punched a sheet of film, gave it to a friend who had a lathe, and he cut two sets of hex-head screws down to exactly match the holes in the punched sheet. I took one set, mounted them on a thin sheet of wood using the punched film to get them aligned exactly, and attached the pin assembly to the end of a vacuum exposure easel that I built out of Masonite, two by fours, and a spare vacuum cleaner. I saved myself hundreds of dollars.
Well, guess what—that primitive vacuum register exposure easel worked beautifully for my entire dye transfer printing career. A few years later I replaced my three hole punch with a real used (and affordable!) Kodak Register Punch and my custom-cut pins with a Condit Manufacturing pin strip (also affordable). That was it for the next 35 years.
My original register transfer easel was a horrible kludge of wood, aluminum, brass hinges and masonite. It was cheap. It worked—after a fashion. It gave me good alignment on the transfers, but it was a royal pain to use. As soon as I switched to Condit pin strips, I abandoned it for a much more elegant design, a simple sheet of heavy plate glass with the pin stripped glued to one end. Like the exposure easel, it served me well for the rest of my career.
There were a bunch of other equipment problems to address. I've mentioned I had some misconceptions about dye transfer. One of the big ones was that, knowing that dye transfer prints were "better" than any other kind of commercially available print, I assumed that they were as good or better in every respect. Specifically, that dye transfer prints would be as precisely reproducible as conventional color prints and come out as clean and flaw-free, with nice sharp framing and white borders.
False! But not knowing any better (I still hadn't seen a dye transfer print) I strove for that. Getting clean edges on the image area was a trial. In ordinary printing a hinged four-bladed paper easel overlays the print paper and crops the photograph exactly where you want. I suppose one could engineer a four-bladed pin registration easel that would ensure that those blades overlaid each sheet of Pan Matrix Film in exactly the same position. I wouldn't have been able to afford it if they had.
After some trial and considerable error, I hit upon the idea of masking the edges of my negatives directly, using strips of opaque metallic tape to define the crop. It worked—also, after a fashion. It never produced super-sharp nor super-straight edges. Geometric imperfections in my laying of the tape were magnified by the enlargement factor.
Eventually I figured out a better approach that did produce the super-crisp edges I longed for. I cut out full-size masks from opaque sheet film and punched the end so that I could register them on the exposure easel. After I installed a sheet of Pan Matrix Film on the easel and turned on the vacuum, I laid to the mask down on top. You can tell the photographs I printed in the very early years from later ones by the sloppy borders—they got a lot better once I surmounted that learning curve.
By the end of 1975, I was ready to start working. Learning how to develop Pan Matrix Film, not easy! I had to develop three sheets of large, un-hardened emulsion uniformly and to exactly the same degree, by interleaving them in a tray of developer in pitch darkness (panchromatic, remember?) with a total development time of only two minutes. Compared to that, learning to dye, rinse, and roll prints was relatively easy.
I learned all the steps in Kodak's magnificent 24-page pamphlet and, truthfully, it wasn't all that hard. Just one small problem.
After six months, I'd burnt through all the money from Charlie's first check and was into my second, and I was still getting lousy prints. Development was hit or miss and I couldn't get a complete and clean transfer, where all the dye in the matrix migrated over to the print paper like it was supposed to. Something was wrong and I didn't know what. In June 1976, I penned a letter to one Mr. Frank McLaughlin at Eastman Kodak that began as follows:
Dear Mr. McLaughlin—
I was given your name by the local Kodak representative as one to contact on questions about the dye transfer process. I began teaching myself the technique about six months ago—while I have most of the aspects under control, a few problems pop up with annoying frequency....
I had no idea what kind of response, if any I would get. I had never tried writing to a major company like Kodak before, and I had no faith that a nobody like me (yes, then I was a nobody, no publishing credentials, nada) would get anything more than a boilerplate "thank you for your interest in our product..." response.
My lack of faith was badly misplaced.
...Which is where we will pick up with the next thrilling installment!
Ctein
Original contents copyright 2019 by Ctein. 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:
hugh crawford: "I always thought those funky edges of the image that revealed the separate layers of the image were pretty neat. Well not literally neat but a cool example of letting the process show."
William Schneider: "At Ohio University a long time ago, there was a small room set up with equipment required for dye transfer. Being a daunting process, only a handful of students ever attempted it. One professor there, Arnold Gassan, worked with the process. In that room, I recall colorful stains on the countertop, floor and walls. I suspect that this could be a very messy process. Perhaps tie-dye shirts were an unintended badge of honor for practitioners."
Ctein replies: Dear Hugh, You're not wrong. It's just that I grew up with a different aesthetic around photographic prints. Not "fine art" prints like serigraphs or lithographs, which I also did—there, unfinished edges were part of the expected look. Heh, no one ever required artists to be consistent. From a commercial point of view, all my clients wanted those clean edges. Over my entire career, I didn't have one ask, "Can you do unregistered edges for me?" Interestingly, unfinished edges are still part of the platinum print "look," where practitioners have to prepare and brush the light-sensitive emulsion onto raw paper stock. The aesthetics of the brushstrokes at the edge of the image area are an important of the quality of the print.
Dear William, Oh yeah, a very good way to turn new (dress) clothes into old (work) clothes—wear them in the darkroom. Shoes, too. Having dilute acetic acid repeatedly dripped on them doesn't leave them very happy.
Fred: "Wow. As a former mediocre (at best) black-and-white printer I am very fascinated with this series. It feels to me like 'inside baseball' at its best. I am eagerly awaiting the next installment."
Written and illustrated by Ctein
The last of my Topaz Labs reviews concerns a nifty little program with the intriguing title of "JPEG to RAW AI." It is, as they say, a one trick pony, and the trick is in the title. Hand it a JPEG of your choice and it will generate a RAW file (or 16-bit TIFF, if that is your preference).
If you have no interest whatsoever in working with JPEGs, you can skip out on this column and go do something more productive with your time. No worries, it won't be on the final exam. I'll wait...
dum ta dum ta dum hummm...
Okay, the class is a lot smaller; you can all move in closer so I don't have to shout.
So...why would Ctein, the Guy Who Does Everything in RAW, even care about a program like this? One reason is that sometimes it's not my call. Remember that two of the pillars that make CteinCo the multinational powerhouse that it is are custom printing and photo restoration. Sometimes the best file that a client can provide is a JPEG. Sometimes it's a really crappy JPEG and what they want to know is whether I can turn it into a semi-decent photograph.
Another reason is that, umm, "stuff" happens. As in, my camera had a bad hiccup (or I did something dumb—take your pick), reset itself to all its defaults, and I didn't realize I was photographing in JPEG instead of RAW mode.
Also, I know that some of you prefer to photograph in JPEG mode (I don't judge). That's just fine, until you want to manipulate some photo in a way that pushes it outside of its comfort zone. Like, say, punching up a dusky and hazy blue sky and all of a sudden the contouring that wasn't visible in the original high quality JPEG becomes unacceptable banding. Because, eight bits! The dreaded picket-fence histogram. Simply switching the image mode from 8-bit to 16-bit doesn't get you out of that one, because the contouring is baked into the image.
It is true that you can't get something for nothing, but a JPEG isn't nothing, it's just a badly mangled something. Like the aforementioned hazy sky. You know it's not supposed to be contoured, it's supposed to be smooth. That's just common sense. Enter Artificial Common Sense—train a deep-learning network to recognize what the mangling looked like and undo as much of it as possible. Build the rules it invents into a standalone program, and you have JPEG to RAW AI.
It cannot work big miracles. It cannot take a truly crappy JPEG and turn it into a fabulous photograph. But it can work many small miracles and that can be the difference between intolerable and tolerable image quality. Consider this:
(Click to enlarge)
I created this JPEG for illustration purposes from one of my original photographs. I compressed it at Photoshop's lowest quality JPEG setting so that the artifacts would be really obvious even after TOP's TypePad interface gets done with it (fingers firmly crossed).
I handed that JPEG off to JPEG to RAW AI and let it massage it at its automatic settings (there are sliders to manually change the degree of artifact removal and sharpening). In a couple of seconds I had this:
'Nuff said?
Understand that this is an extreme case. I wanted something that would come through clearly when published here. Most of the time the results will be a lot less dramatic. But—most of the time—they'll be visibly better than the original JPEG you ran through JPEG to RAW AI.
Unlike the previously reviewed GigaPixel AI and Sharpen AI, JPEG to RAW AI is not a monstrous resource hog. You should pay attention to the system requirements Topaz Labs puts forth, but I think it will run acceptably on most any system, as you can set processing preferences. You can have it run as a background task, control the amount of graphic memory consumption and even turn off GPU utilization entirely. It won't be fast, but it should do the job.
As is usual for Topaz Labs, JPEG to RAW AI has a 30-day fully-functional free trial. You don't have to spend $99.99 to find out if this particular pony is worth it to you.
Next? As a prelude to the big Black Friday Dye Transfer Sale, I'll be writing several columns talking about dye transfer—how it worked, what it meant to me and other photographers and printers, and our perpetual jousting with Eastman Kodak. Indeed, there was jousting, almost from Day One (my Day One, that is). On yeah, dirt will be dished. Stay tuned.
Ctein
Ctein, pronounced "kuh-TINE," rhymes with fine, is one of the most experienced and accomplished photo-writers alive. He was TOP's Technical Editor before leaving for a new career as a science fiction novelist. He has written two books of photo-tech, Digital Restoration from Start to Finish and Post-Exposure. This is his 345th column for TOP; older columns can be found under the "Ctein" Category in the right-hand sidebar.
Original contents copyright 2019 by Ctein. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
parkylondon: "Many thanks for this series Ctein. They've been very useful and have helped me fine tune my Topaz AI collection. I remember, fondly, our afternoon in The Photographers Gallery in London and look forward to meeting you again one day. Thanks."
Written and illustrated by Ctein
I am, for the most part, not a fan of "sharpening for output" nor of upsampling programs. Sharpening for output has, for me, translated into harsh, unrealistic edges and a degradation of what I would (imprecisely) call photographic quality. It also seems to be fundamentally misapplied—the times when I do need sharpening output are when I'm printing very small, not very large, as the printer rendering algorithms tend to suppress very fine, low-contrast detail.
As for upsampling, I gave that a thorough inspection about a dozen years back in these very pages:
It's Bigger, But Is It Better?
It's Bigger, But Is It Better? Part II
It's Bigger, But Is It Better? Part III
The takeaway, if all that is seriously longissimus, non legi [too long, didn't read —Ed.] is that the improvements were modest, nothing was superior under all circumstances, and Photoshop's built-in resizing algorithms worked, on average, as well as anything else. For the heck of it, I checked out the notion that upsampling to a printer's native resolution (360 or 720 PPI in the case of Epson; other manufacturers may be different) produced a higher quality print then letting the printer's driver handle this (which it does behind the scenes when you hand it something of a different PPI). It didn't.
In the years since then third-party programs have improved, but so has Photoshop. I haven't been induced to change my practices.
Except—a few years back, I watched a conversation between Jeff Schewe and Michael Reichmann. Jeff, printing from Lightroom to an Epson 3880 printer, found that files upsampled from their native resolution to 360 or 720 PPI in Lightroom printed out distinctly more sharply than those upsampled by the Epson print driver.
Jeff noted that that didn't mean that another program (or printer) would yield the same results. I use Photoshop, not Lightroom. They are two different products with two different development teams, so they may or may not share the same upsampling code.
But…Jeff is another one of those Great Printing Experts, and 95% of the time we're in agreement (especially around the recommended settings for the Epson 3880 printer to produce the very best quality). I'm not going to ignore his four-year-old results in favor of my twelve, nuh uh. I needed to test out his assertion on my P800 printer, with Photoshop.
Big surprise (not), Jeff turned out to be right. A dozen years ago, I was probably right, but a dozen years is forever in the digital technology world. It pays to occasionally recheck one's beliefs.
Photographs upsampled in Photoshop to my printer's native resolution look distinctly better than those left to the printer's ministrations. Better and cleaner fine detail, more nicely delineated edges.
Not all photographs benefit from this. In particular, for those where some degree of grain/noise is an integral part of the image (sometimes true in my color work, more often true in my black and white infrared), improving the acuteness of a print didn't make it better, as it also enhanced that grain structure, which had been tuned to just where I wanted it. Most of the time, though, I followed Jeff's advice and was much pleased with the improved quality. And I still avoided third-party upsampling programs.
Then Topaz Labs came out with GigaPixel AI, the second of their machine-learning-trained tools. The first had been AI Clear, which had mightily impressed me with its ability to sort out detail from garbage, so I wanted to see what this pony's tricks were like. The samples on their website looked unbelievably good, even taking into account that they were cherry-picked, because advertising.
I downloaded the program and handed it a modest task, taking what was already a very detailed and sharp photograph and upsampling it to my printer's native resolution for a 17x22-inch print (about a 1.5X enlargement) with GigaPixel AI.
GigaPixel AI was effin' amazin'. I'm talking markedly better rendering of fine detail, both at strong edges and in subtle fine gradations, along with finer grain/noise (and less of it). All of this without artifacts or suppression of delicate tonalities! The results looked entirely natural and much better than Photoshop's upsampling. Below are sections from the Photoshop (figure 1) and GigaPixel (figure 2) renderings, at 100% if you click through to the standalone images. [Bear in mind that TOP's TypePad interface softens illustrations somewhat. —Ed.]
Fig. 1.
Fig. 2.
I looked at 17x22" prints from the non-upsampled, Photoshop-upsampled and GigaPixel AI-upsampled files, and there was a clear improvement with each step. In fact, the difference between Photoshop and GigaPixel was substantially greater than between no upsampling and Photoshop.
GigaPixel doesn't improve the prints from every single one of my photographs. Only about 75% of them. Sometimes the improvement is nothing more than finer grain/noise, where GigaPixel has subdivided blobby grains into smaller discrete ones.
At other times the improvements do look unbelievable. Take a look at figures 3 (Photoshop) and 4 (GigaPixel AI). Look at the improvement in both fine detail and noise, compared to the original file, which you're not even seeing because I can't figure out how to portray it at the same scale without upsampling. It's about what I'd expect going from a 20-megapixel camera to a 30–35 megapixel one.
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
GigaPixel AI is a standalone program. It will accept a variety of input formats and will output JPEG, TIFF, or PNG. For fine printing you're going to want the 16-bit TIFF output, of course. I use GigaPixel AI last in my printing workflow, after I've done all my local corrections and pixel fiddling. I duplicate the Photoshop file, save it as a TIFF, and run that through GigaPixel AI. That way I preserve my options for resizing to my printer's native resolution, no matter what size I decide I'm going to print at.
GigaPixel AI occasionally blows up, sometimes globally, sometimes just in one small part of the picture. Not often, but it happens. Machine-learning systems can get very weird notions in their silicon noggins. When it's just some small bit of the photograph that's gone off the rails I resize the Photoshop file to the same dimensions as the GigaPixel TIFF, and paste that TIFF in a new image layer on the file. That makes it easy to do a comparison between the renderings, just switching that layer on and off. Sometimes I throw away the GigaPixel AI rendering or mask it so I can hide the parts where GigaPixel AI went wonky. This is not a frequent occurrence. Most of the time, GigaPixel AI wins with no fiddling.
What's the downside? You may not be able to run GigaPixel AI on your current system. GigaPixel AI demands substantial system requirements. GigaPixel AI performs an insane number of calculations while it does its image analysis. It can commandeer your GPU, if you choose that option, and it'll still take minutes to render an image. I think we're talking millions of calculations per pixel, tens of teraflops total, to upsample a single photograph.
As is typical for Topaz Labs, Gigapixel has a 30-day fully-functional free trial, so you don't have to spend $99.99 to decide if it's worth it to you.
Topaz Labs sends me the stuff for free, but there's no question that I'd pay whatever they charge for this program. It's a four-star wonder.
Ctein
UPDATE Wednesday afternoon: Ctein wrote a reply to several commenters. Because not all the comments he responded to are among the "Featured" ones, I published his reply with the rest of the comments in the Comments section. To get to the full Comments section of this or any post, click on "Comments ([number])" at the bottom of the footer of every post. —Ed.
Ctein, pronounced "kuh-TINE," rhymes with fine, is one of the most experienced and accomplished photo-writers alive. He was TOP's Technical Editor before leaving for a new career as a science fiction novelist. He has written two books of photo-tech, Digital Restoration from Start to Finish and Post-Exposure. This is his 344th column for TOP; older columns can be found under the "Ctein" Category in the right-hand sidebar.
Original contents copyright 2019 by Ctein. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Michael Elenko: "I was sold on GigaPixel AI somewhat out of desperation earlier this spring. I was curating a group exhibition and during the hanging, one print just didn't meet my standards for sharpness. I learned that the print originated from an iPhone 8, and that a friend of the artist attempted to upscale it to meet our print size requirements by using a Photoshop algorithm. I then got involved, tried other Photoshop algorithms as well as Lightroom's approach (which I usually favor), and was not satisfied. I then remembered reading about GigaPixel AI, downloaded a trial, and used it on the image file. The result was revelatory, and just in time for the exhibition opening. I've since purchased the product and am revisiting old-but-good work from 15 years ago."
Written by Ctein
Please bear with me, Faithful Readers...this is a photography column. It'll just take me a bit to get us there.
I am irritated by the success that corporate/marketing droids have had in co-opting the term "A.I." That stands for "artificial intelligence," and has, in the past, commonly meant some kind of general intelligence that deals with the real world in all its perplexity. The ultimate goal may be (trans)human level, but it's gradable down—you could have parrot-level AI, or cat-level or even goldfish-level (currently, we've reached the some-but-not-all-insects level of AI).
Now it's been degraded to refer to any system that uses one of the deep learning networks (there are many different flavors of those) to learn how to do a sophisticated task. They're popping up all over, and they do amazing things. But Artificial Intelligence? Nah, I don't think so.
(What are those promoters going to do when we get genuine AI? Call it AIFRTTH—Artificial Intelligence, For Real This Time, Honestly? Maybe that's the first question we should ask real AI, if we ever get it.)
I think there's a better descriptor for what these programs do: Artificial Common Sense. I'm not being flippant. I think it's right and significant, and it lets us take these programs seriously. Believe me, we should be taking them seriously.
Common sense is something that we've thought of as being a fairly sophisticated function, a way of distilling down the otherwise unfathomable complexity and intricacy of the world into something we can manage almost intuitively. "Sophisticated" isn't the same as intelligent; dogs and cats exhibit a great deal of common sense, but down at their level of mentation.
At the human level, common sense isn't necessarily either smart or correct. Everyone here has likely had the experience of getting into an argument with somebody who, backed into a losing corner, utters those fateful words—"but, it's just common sense that...." What then comes out of their mouths is invariably wrong. Common sense is not, in fact, good at dealing with the esoteric. But it's pretty damned good at dealing with everyday life and figuring out what's important and what's ignorable.
At the forefront
Which brings me to photography software. Consider the sorts of manipulation and filter programs we use routinely, like noise reduction, enlargement, and sharpening routines. As humans, we look at a photograph and we can easily figure out what is noise and what is detail, because we just know what the world looks like. Sure, there are the edge cases, where the subject detail is getting so similar to the grain/noise in the photograph that we're not sure if the feature we're looking at is real or an artifact of the media. But by and large, we know the difference. When we sharpen or enlarge a photograph, we want the real detail improved and enhanced, not the grain and the artifacts. When we run noise reduction, we don't want it to degrade the real image detail and tonality. We know and can see the difference because, well, we just know. 'Cause we're smart, sophisticated real-world data processing machines.
Until recently, we could imagine that this kind of discrimination was also a sophisticated function, something that would require a pretty high level of real AI to achieve. Sure, we've got algorithms that do a fair job of brute-force faking it, but it's pretty obvious that they're faking it with frequency filters and threshold discriminators and the like. They don't really understand a photograph, not the way we do.
Now we've got software, based on some deeply learnt neural networks, that appears to be doing the real thing, making the same kind of common sense decisions about a photograph that we make when we look at it. These programs don't work by some programmer handing them a finished set of rules and equations. Instead, they throw problems and solutions at them and say, "Okay, now figure out how to get from A to B." The more cases the networks have to chew on, the cleverer the solutions they invent. After chewing on a few million comparison photographs, they've got some pretty clever ideas.
At the forefront is Topaz Labs. For several years now they've been turning out, in my opinion, the best Photoshop filters that money can buy. Yeah, that's sometimes a matter of taste. For example, I've got at least a half-dozen different noise-reduction programs, because no two of them work the same way and each works better on some kinds of images and noise than the others.
In the past year, Topaz Labs have leapt ahead of everyone else by harnessing these buzzword-AI-tools to develop standalone programs and plug-ins that are beyond good. They are unbelievably good. That's not hyperbole—I look at some of the results and I simply don't know how it's possible for a "dumb" program to achieve them.
This column I'm going to talk about Topaz Sharpen AI, a standalone program currently in version 1.4.0 and on sale for $59.99. (These programs are frequently updated, not to fix bugs or add features, but to incorporate the very latest cleverness that the neural net has figured out as it chews on ever more real-world cases.)
Sharpen AI is already scary clever. The photograph below (figure 1) is the very first photograph I threw at Sharpen AI. I did not cherry-pick it out of hundreds of trials. It sold me on the software.
Figure 1
(Note: Even if you click through to the enlarged versions of the figures, you're not seeing them at 100% and there may be compression artifacts—the limitations of the host publishing software. I've put a full-resolution version up on my website here with no compression artifacts, for any who want to pixel-peep.)
This is a photograph I'd normally throw away—I was on a moving boat and it was late in the day. It's the best of a pretty poor sequence, if I'm being honest. I figured it would be a good test case. The first program I tried was Photoshop's Shake Reduction filter. This algorithm is supposed to analyze the photograph, calculate what's causing the blur, and undo it. It's called deconvolution. The tricky part is coming up with exactly the right point blur function and applying it without generating artifacts. As you can see in figure 2, Shake Reduction still isn't very good at that. In fact, I've yet to find any but the simplest and most minimal cases of subject blur or camera shake where it produced an artistically-usable result.
Figure 2
Then I handed figure 1 off to Sharpen AI, selected the "Stabilize" processing mode and let it rip at its auto-default settings. Two minutes later, I got back figure 3.
Whoooaaa...
Yup, two minutes. Sharpen AI is not only clever but a hard worker. On a Retina iMac with a 4GHz i7 processor, it takes that long using seven threads to process a 20-MP image. That is a heckuvva lot of gigaflops, on the order of 50,000 calculations per pixel. Not your everyday sharpening routine, nosiree. In fact, just updating the preview within the application can take as much as 30 seconds. Not surprisingly I have "auto update" turned off; otherwise every time I moved one of the adjustment sliders the program would want to take another 30 seconds to update the preview. (Almost always, Sharpen's automatic settings produce the best results, so I'm not sure why I bother. I guess I'm just a fiddler.)
Once you've gotten past being awed at the overall improvement, take a close look at the thin twigs and branches along the lower sides and the bottom of the picture. Sharpen AI has brought them back into an amazing focus without any ringing artifacts and while leaving the background largely untouched.
If you look closely at the edges of the birds and the nest in the sky areas, you can see some small artifacts—thin vertical lines that extend a few pixels away from the subjects. These are much more evident on the screen than they would be in a print. In fact, I printed out the full image on 17x22" paper and they were completely invisible. The birds and the nest looked perfectly sharp with no evidence that any enhancements had been run on the original photograph.
Other modes
Sharpen AI has three processing modes—Sharpen, Stabilize, and Focus. You've seen what Stabilize can do. Sharpen does more ordinary sharpening and is recommended for photographs that are otherwise in-focus and un-blurred. The effect is modest, but it's clean. So far, I haven't found an out-of-focus photograph where Focus improves things. Unlike Sharpening, which is understated, Focus seems to go way overboard. Perhaps I haven't found the right image to apply it to, but so far it's been useless.
On every photograph I've tried, Stabilize does the best job, better than Sharpen even on photographs that are in focus and don't have any visible camera shake or subject movement. I haven't reached the point of applying it to every photograph, even the ones that don't look like they need any sharpening, but I'm starting to wonder if maybe I should try that.
Sharpen AI will process all kinds of original files—TIFF, JPEG, PSD, and even RAW. I don't recommend using it on RAW, though, if you like the rendition of your usual RAW converter. Me, I like what Adobe Camera RAW does and Sharpen's raw converter doesn't produce the same results, in terms of tone, color or geometric correction. I'm not saying it's bad, but it's different, and even though Sharpen will output a new raw file, the new one won't render the same as the original. My recommendation is to make your usual corrections in your preferred RAW converter, generate a 16-bit TIFF from that and put Sharpen to work on the TIFF.
In past years, I've deleted photographs that were artistically appealing but unacceptably blurry, knowing that I'd never be able to pull prints from them that met my technical and aesthetic standards. I'm thinking I may have made a mistake.
Topaz Sharpen AI—recommended without reservation.
Next column (in a couple of weeks) I'll talk about Topaz Labs' Gigapixel, which is absolutely, positively the best upsampling program ever. It does all those image-improvement miracles that other upsampling programs claim to do... and don't.
Ctein
Ctein, pronounced "kuh-TINE," rhymes with fine, is one of the most experienced and accomplished photo-writers alive. He was TOP's Technical Editor before leaving for a new career as a science fiction novelist. He has written two books of photo-tech, Digital Restoration from Start to Finish and Post-Exposure. This is his 343rd column for TOP; older columns can be found under the "Ctein" Category in the right-hand sidebar.
Original contents copyright 2019 by Ctein. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Aashish Sharma: "I haven't even started reading the article, but I'm writing to let you know how delighted I am to see Ctein back. I have always enjoyed his writing on everything and missed it while he was away. An article by him is even more welcome as it is my birthday! Thanks for writing, Ctein. I'll now go back and read it."
Michael Elenko: "Thank you for this post. I've had this pano HDR I created eight years ago. It was in the mountains, and the mosquitoes were the worst, even getting in my eyeballs. So I could not provide enough stability for the brackets to line up right, plus dusk was coming on, so my shutter speed was too slow for effectiveness. But the shot was special, just too mushy for my standards and a plethora of tried tools. Until I used Sharpen AI at the settings recommend by Ctein. Wowie zowie, this finally looks right. Thank you, I've waited for this."
Joe Holmes: "I tried a demo copy of Sharpen AI on a couple of my images and immediately paid for the software. I find that it can work miracles on certain images, though there are times when it gets everything wrong, when it simply cannot handle an image and leaves crazy artifacts. And then there are times when it does a brilliant job on certain portions of an image but creates bizarre and ugly artifacts on other parts, like the surface of a river or clouds. In those cases I can make the best use of it by bringing a Sharpen AI image into Photoshop as a layer and applying a layer mask to apply the best parts on top of the original image. Even with that extra work, it's worth it, because the results are way better than what I can do with other tools."
Marcelo Guarini: "First, thanks for the initial part of this post, about artificial intelligence. I'm a professor of Electrical Engineering at a university and I am tired of repeating the same to my colleagues, especially those who work in the so-called field of artificial intelligence. I will show them your comments so they can see that I am not the only one with the same opinion. Thanks for the term 'artificial common sense.' Artificial intelligence is too high-flown a term for what deep learning is.
"I have been using Topaz Labs Gigapixel from its inception, and have been very surprised by its excellent results. As you say, 'positively the best upsampling program ever.' Almost every time I open the program to use it, there is an upgrade available. I have been a beholder of its evolution through cumulative training and refinements. Today its results are much better than at the beginning; you can easily see the improvements. It is just a very cool tool. I will try Sharpen AI and will follow your indications regarding the different modes and auto-update.
"Thanks much for your post, and happy to see your reviews again."
Soeren Engelbrecht: "'Since it is often hard to distinguish common sense from equally common nonsense, professional advice is useful.' —Leslie Lamport."
Tom R. Halfhill: "I'm equally uncomfortable with the buzzphrase 'artificial intelligence'—and I write about microprocessors for a living. (I'm a senior technology analyst for Microprocessor Report, the leading newsletter in this field since 1987.) I prefer 'machine learning,' which I think is more accurate and less grandiose, but the 'AI' label is unavoidable because it has become so widespread. Essentially, it's sophisticated pattern matching and sorting. But at a high level, sometimes we don't understand how these neural networks achieve their results. We turn them loose for training on a huge data set, let them chew on it, then evaluate their performance. It's almost a black box, although programmers can delve deeply into the structure to see what's happening. Of course, we don't fully understand how the human brain works, either, so even 'natural intelligence' is mysterious.
"The Topaz Sharpen AI tool is indeed impressive. What I need is a dust-and-scratch removal tool that's equally good. I've scanned tens of thousands of old family photos that need more fixing than I can handle. The automated tools I've tried often can't tell a dust spot from a pearl earring or a scratch from a crease in clothing."
Ken Lunders: "Whoa!! I downloaded Topaz Labs Sharpen AI for a 30-day trial. Well, the trial has ended after less than hour. I'm now $59.99 poorer, but 100% happy with the purchase. I'm delighted to see Ctein providing content here once again."
eliburakian: "Damn, I just spent $300 on the whole Topaz AI suite after reading this and trying out the software. Thanks a lot, now I have some explaining to do to the spouse."
