The Online Photographer

TOP's Upcoming Dye Transfer Print Sale—Wait, What, How? Why?!

Written by Ctein

It's not normal to announce a TOP print sale this far in advance, but Mike and I have been planning this one since the beginning of the year. It's time for the big reveal.

Ctein's Thanksgiving Dye Transfer Inventory Print Offer
Starting on Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving in the USA) and running for one week, Mike and I will be having a unique and massive dye transfer TOP sale. Every dye transfer print I have remaining in my inventory, regardless of size and rarity, will be on sale for $650. That's only modestly higher than my "closing the darkroom" sale price five years ago and it's a third to a tenth of my current studio and gallery prices. [And it's very inexpensive for large dye transfers, even twenty years ago. —Mike the Ed.]

We are putting out the word early, because this is going to be different, more complex, and bigger than any previous sale.

Does this mean I've started printing dye transfer again? No, absolutely not. The darkroom is gone forever, and I've sold off all my remaining supplies to other master dye transfer printmakers (of whom there are only a handful left in the world). Even if I changed my mind and acquired supplies, I've sold half of the matrix sets and work prints*. I couldn't print those pictures again even if I did still have a darkroom.

However, not being able to make new prints doesn't mean I don't have prints. In fact, I have a substantial inventory from throughout my career as a fine-art photographer and master dye transfer printmaker. Dye transfer printing, one of the most difficult photographic printing methods in the history of the medium, was sufficiently time-consuming, especially nailing the first print right, that when I did make one that satisfied me I'd make four or five additional prints at the same time. Although still a complex process, those duplicate prints were relatively quick to make (emphasis on "relatively"). Whenever a particular picture got close to selling out, I'd schedule a reprinting session and make a new set of inventory prints.

Consequently, at any given time I would have three prints of a particular photograph in inventory. That was the average then. Now, some of my portfolio photographs are completely sold out. Some, there's only one print remaining. Others, a half dozen.

Altogether, though, there are a lot of prints—and all of them are going up for sale.

Okay, why? In large part because I'm a huge fan of these sales and have been ever since Mike came up with the idea back when he was editor of Photo Techniques magazine. The idea of being able to get these rare prints into your home for a fraction of what you would normally have to pay really appeals to me. I like the idea of people owning my work, and the more people the better. I'd rather sell a lot of prints for less money than fewer prints at higher prices.

You may well feel differently, and that wouldn't be nonsensical of you. This is the way I am; feel free to have different mileage.

How it's going to go
All right, then, how is the sale going to work? Differently from previous sales, definitely differently.

To begin with, you can start thinking about what you'd like to buy right now. I've built a webpage that shows everything in my inventory. Space program photographs, volcano photographs, astronomical photographs, subtle colors in nature or garish colors by the hand of Man—everything.

For another, there will be three different ways you can buy these. The first two will be familiar: you can pay with personal check drawn on US funds or via PayPal.

The third way? You can buy prints on layaway. I do layaways, but it's never before applied to a TOP sale. This time it will. That will help people in a tight budget who may well never have a chance to buy a dye transfer from me again. You can see my layaway terms on my website.

There will be one minor difference. For this sale the layaway period will be 13 months, because then it works out to an even $50 per print per month. Plus a little extra in the last month to cover shipping and handling.

Limits
Each picture only exists in a limited number of copies, all of which will be noted on the inventory page by the time the sale begins, updated every day of the sale. However, there is no limit to the number of prints you can buy (subject to this availability), regardless of how you're going to pay. If you wanted to buy three prints, you could pay $1,950 (+S&H) direct or $150/month for 13 months.

There will be incentives for multiple-print purchases. Buy three prints and you can select any digital print from my website as a free bonus. Buy six prints and you can select two digital prints. Buy a dozen and you get four free digital prints.

Fairness to all
Toughest question: what happens if more people want a particular photograph than I have prints of? Because that's going to happen. Here's where it gets interesting.

Longtime TOP readers will remember my matrix-set sale, five or so years ago. Here's the link if you want to refresh your memory. We had a similar although smaller problem then. Typically there was one matrix set for a particular photograph. Instead a first-come first-served I asked people to list up to three alternatives to their preferred choices. No one was obligated to—it was not a demand. I took all the orders and optimized the selections to give as many people as possible one of their choices. It was a pretty hairy analysis, but 98% of our buyers got what they requested.

I'm going to do something similar with this sale. Not quite the same, because that's infeasible with a sale of this magnitude. My plan to cut this up into manageable pieces is to ask buyers to list several alternatives they'd be happy with (assuming there are any: again, no one is obliged to do this). Each day I will optimize among the orders I got for that day, confirm the orders with the prospective buyers and arrange for payment. I'll also update the webpage showing the offerings in real time, so fewer people will be frustrated by ordering something that's already unavailable (fingers crossed for luck).

I won't be giving any preference to the time of ordering within a single day, but I'll complete one day's optimization and allocate those prints before going onto the next day's orders. Hence, there is a daily aspect of first-come first-served, and ordering on an earlier day will improve your chances of getting what you want.

Uncharted waters
Well, there you have it— that's my plan so far. I may have to alter it on the fly as we get closer to the sale. Everything could sell out in the first 24 hours. It might happen—the 160 prints I offered in the "closing the darkroom" sale sold out in a matter of hours [six hours and two minutes to be precise —Mike the Ed. again].

Will it? We'll see. I've never done a sale quite like this before. TOP has never done a sale quite like this before. I think I've planned it out well, but we will be in uncharted waters. It will be an adventure.

It's going to be glorious.

Ctein

*If you want one of those, check out the How to Order Prints page and the Matrix and Work Print Sets page.

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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Ctein Prints Have Shipped

No foolin':

All orders from our recent Ctein print sale have been shipped. If there is anyone who hasn't gotten a "your order has shipped" email from Ctein and an email from the USPS with the tracking number by today (be sure to check spam folders), they should email Ctein at ctein@pobox.com.

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.

Everything must fade away

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

Ken: "I got Ctein's email Saturday though I haven't heard from the Post Office about any tracking numbers. But no matter: I received my print about a half an hour ago. Wow, very nice! Thanks to both TOP and, especially, Ctein. Once it is framed, it will have a prominent place on the wall in the living room."

The Beauty of Physical Prints

...Or, why I chose the Ctein prints I chose for the current print sale.

[UPDATE: Sale ended 2 p.m. EST Saturday, March
9th, 2019. Thanks to all who participated!]

Printmaking—a word that encompasses making photographic prints, and the prints themselves—has always been an exceedingly important part of my enjoyment of photography. I'm both a part of the audience and a maker. I like objects. I like pictures of all sorts. But I especially enjoy well-made photographic prints.

Having done it professionally for a spell in the '80s and '90s, I'm aware of some of the problems and pitfalls. Without a doubt, one of the problems is representing light—or, I should say, representing light with reference more to the experience of seeing the real light than with reference to the photographic conventions we've all come to take for granted (some of us with more sanguinity than others). Few things in my opinion are more difficult to get right than Christmas lights. I don't personally care for photographs of Christmas lights, but they're a subject that Ctein has pursued for years and clearly greatly enjoys, so I thought, why not? I thought his bereft fans hereabouts would approve of seeing samples from various themes in his work. I envisioned this as a print that people might frame but put away for 11 months of the year, and then bring out for holiday guests! But the amazing thing is how close he got to the visual impression you'd get seeing those lights. They seem to glow. And it's just not easy to print objects so they seem to be emitting light.

As far as the icefall print is concerned, I could gas on for a while about the quasi-abstract properties, the movement of the lines, the richness of detail that pulls your eye around and about inside the print, and the tension of field-flatness versus the sense of bas-relief that you get from the three-dimensional ice. But really, for me, the ice print is just about those astounding blues. It seems like there are only a few colors and yet at the same time dozens of colors, all them shifting and shimmering, playing off each other; the color seems bright and vivid yet at the same time subtle and gentle. I don't know quite how he does this. Anyway all those tensions (never mind the tension inherent in a vertical wall of ice in the first place) make the print both quiet—yet another contradiction?—but with a lot going on.

The star of the show in my humble opinion is the Canadian Northern lights photograph, taken on a cold night near Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories. Primarily, it's a spectacular display; you can almost hear the eerie "music of the spheres" as a ghostly soundtrack to the visuals. There are a couple more things I like about it. The leaning traffic sign—recognizable by its shape—and the receding line of telephone poles (you can hardly see them in the JPEG) give the scene on the ground a desolate, remote feel, intimating the inhospitable vibe of the cold nighttime landscape. Then in the middle of the picture there is just a hint of pink or reddish color, which gives the flagrant greens more depth and subtlety. Finally the stars. You can see what must be thousands of them (unlike the four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire, I'm not going to count them all). How the printer (human) and the printer (machine) managed to image such tiny pinpoints of white I'm not even going to ask. The JPEG just can't begin to resolve all this. Again, this print is something of a printmaker's virtuoso trick—taking light of such fathomless complexity and translating it into the limited range, palette, and resolution of pigment ink on paper such that it really does convey not just the visual impression but the emotional impression of real light, real sky. It's remarkable.

It's what realistic, naturalistic, representational fine printmaking is all about in photography. Love it. Isn't it a shame that just as the best-ever (or best-ever-so-far) method of color printing really comes of age, with such gorgeous materials, the making of fine prints itself is starting to go out of fashion? Even I look at 99% of the photographs I see on screens—and I love prints.

Don't forget Ctein's return visit here is going to be brief—this sale lasts only three days. It ends tomorrow. [UPDATE: Sale ended 2 p.m. EST Saturday, March 9th, 2019. Thanks to all who participated!]

All I can tell you if that if you like the pictures you will like the prints. Very enjoyable to look at, and a pleasure to see.

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.

Want to help?

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

David Dyer-Bennet: "I've seen, not the print sale versions, but other versions of the aurora print, and I think the Christmas lights print (I've seen a number of Christmas lights prints and am thus not utterly certain it was exactly that image), and they are everything Mike says they are. As for the colors in the icefall print, my answer is 'that's what's there when you see it.' (I'm only moderately confident it's the waterfall I'm thinking of; but the colors are a property of ice, not a property of the particular waterfall; you'll see similar colors in many glacier and iceberg photos). And in my experience they seem reasonably compatible with modern digital color imaging (not always the case). Which makes them no less gorgeous, and the higher compositional elements of that image no less excellent."

Ctein Print Offer

Ctein, Frozen Azure Cascades, 2014

Our old friend Ctein returns with some recent prints.

(For those of you who might be new here, Ctein, pronounced "kuh-TINE," wrote more than 300 columns for TOP in the years up to 2016, when he departed for a new career as a science fiction novelist. He wore many hats, being the site's resident technical expert, computer expert, and tea and parrot aficionado among many other things.)

We're offering three beautiful inkjet prints on premium 17x22" paper for $169 each, along with a free bonus print for people who buy three or more.

You can see large JPEGs of all the prints at the order page. Best seen on calibrated screens.

 

[UPDATE: Sale ended 2 p.m. EST Saturday, March
9th, 2019. Thanks to all who participated!]

 

Ctein, Golden Honey Xmas, 2017

If you're not familiar with our print sales, we open the order period for only a short time—in this case, three days. This sale ends on Saturday at 11 a.m. California time (PST), which is 2 p.m. in New York and Montreal (EST), 7 p.m. in London, and 6 a.m. Sunday in Sydney. Then the prints that have already been ordered and paid for are made and shipped. PLEASE NOTE! We do not accept orders after the deadline. Once the sales period closes, it's too late. Packing and shipping is $28 per package to anywhere in the world, regardless of the number of prints you order, and all prints  are both self-insured by Ctein (he'll send you a replacement if it gets lost or damaged in transit) and guaranteed (you can return it for a full refund if you're not satisfied once you see what you bought).

Twenty percent of the proceeds go to The Online Photographer, so every print sold benefits this site.

Ctein, Green Auroral Drapes, 2016

These prints represent three longtime motifs in Ctein's personal photography: natural patterns, Christmas lights, and skies. The latter includes all sorts of atmospheric phenomena and celestial bodies, everything from moonbows to nighttime rocket launches to stunning photographs of full solar eclipses. I personally think this last-mentioned motif is his biggest strength. One of Ctein's famous quotes is "nobody cares how hard you worked," but people certainly do care about what results you end up with! And this may be the single most outstanding print of an aurora borealis photograph I've ever laid eyes on—it has an eerie presence and great beauty. The JPEG does not do it justice. It's frankly entrancing. As it happens he worked exceedingly hard on the print, but we don't care. What we care about is that it is an utterly stellar print (oh, you must forgive me for that).

If you order three or more prints (in any combination), you'll get a bonus print for free—it's an infrared picture from 2016 which Ctein tells me is one of the most popular pictures he's made in recent years. You can see the bonus print on the order page.

 

[UPDATE: Sale ended 2 p.m. EST Saturday, March
9th, 2019. Thanks to all who participated!]

 

Nice to have Ctein back for a visit! Hope you like TOP's first Print Offer of 2019.

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.

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Meeting the Man

Guest report by Roger Bradbury; photos by John Cross

-

I’m Roger Bradbury, from Milton Keynes in England. I volunteered to organise a get-together for TOP readers to meet Ctein while he was on holiday in London. Ten of us met Ctein and his partner Paula on a sunny May Saturday afternoon at the Photographer’s Gallery Cafe, just off Oxford Street.

I’d made a table sign with ‘Ctein’ written upon it in big red letters to distinguish us from all the other photographers there and when our man had arrived a bit before our 2:30 start time, there was already a crowd waiting for him.

I think that everyone who had emailed me to say that they were coming was there, plus one chap who read about it and just turned up. I made him welcome. We happily chatted about Photography. Some of us brought our own work and passed it round. I had brought to show a 1962 Ilford Sportsman given to me by a relative, and we explained to Ctein the hire purchase agreement that was still with it.

L. to R.: Paul Parkinson, Ctein, Paula (partially hidden behind Ctein), [unidentified], Vid Stojevic, Chris -----, Steve Jacob, Mike Farley, Roger Bradbury

We all stood up to look at the pictures that Ctein had brought to show, many of which we had already seen online. But as has been said here before on TOP, there’s a big difference between looking at a JPEG on a screen, and looking at a print. He had also brought some of his dye transfer prints to show us. He had a lot to say about various aspects of photography and printing, and I tried to remember it all.

Paul Parkinson, Ctein, and Paula

It all went very well, and the meeting broke up at about 5:30, when Ctein and Paula had to leave to catch a train.

A few of us went for a pint afterwards. We talked about meeting up again in London, perhaps to see exhibitions. I went home a contented man.

Roger

©2016 by Roger Bradbury and John Cross, all rights reserved

Original contents copyright 2016 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.

TOP's links!

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

Chris: "I very much enjoyed that story, and I'm now kicking myself for not going (although we are 100 miles outside London). I would have loved to see those prints up close and personal, and to hear what the printer has to say about them!

"One thing that would have slightly increased my enjoyment would have been some photo captions that identified the people in the images (other than Ctein, of course). Is that me just being nosy?"

Mike replies: If people will please identify themselves, I'll add the info as captions to the pictures.

Jed Soane: "If I ever open a pub it's going to be called The Dodge & Burn."

SeanG: "For me, these get-togethers are a significant part of photography. I've had the pleasure/fortune of meeting and chatting with Ctein, and other fans/enthusiasts, at the Minneapolis Photo Center and I can't express how pleasurable it is to be in the company of such pleasant, curious and knowledgeable people. Thanks for the story. Cheers!"

Paul Parkinson: "That'll be me in the Dodge and Burn t-shirt! I, too, thoroughly enjoyed the afternoon and wished I could have stayed longer. A memorable afternoon for sure. As to where you get it—try here."

Ctein's European Tour: Latest Updates

Here is the latest and bestest (and last) info on the Ctein London and Paris meetups:

From Roger Bradbury, organizer of the London gathering:

There’s been a change of venue, though the day and time remain the same. We are now meeting at The Photographer’s Gallery Café, 16–18 Ramillies Street, London, W1F 7LW. Ctein and Paula will meet us there on Saturday 7th May, at 2:30 p.m. Oxford Circus is the nearest underground station.

The café’s website shows that there seems to be quite a range of food. If we are going to be handling other people's cameras and/or photos, it would probably be a good plan to eat beforehand, to avoid leaving greasy thumb prints.

If you are interested, please email me via my contact page. This would help me to get an idea of numbers and if we have to make further alterations to the plan, I can contact you. You will also get my phone number.

From Thomas Paris, organizer of the Paris gathering:

Ctein and Paula will be in Paris this week and they've agreed to let me (Thomas Paris) pick a place where we could get together with some of you Parisian readers of TOP. We're hoping to meet you at the Moncoeur Belleville café on Thursday evening, 28th April, from 7:30 p.m. on. You'll find it by Parc de Belleville, at 1, rue des Envierges and can get there with metro lines 11 (Pyrénées station) and 2 (Belleville station). They serve both drinks and food, so you can have your dinner there, but you'll want to be careful with food as I'm pretty sure we'll be showing both gear and prints.

Booking is not necessary, but I would appreciate it if you could shoot me an email ( mercen@gmail.com ), so I could tell the café how many people they should expect will show up. That would also give me a chance to keep you informed should we have a change of plan at the last minute.

This supersedes all previous announcements. From now on if you're interested in either gathering please contact Roger or Thomas directly.

Mike (for Roger, Thomas, and Ctein)

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined authors. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

TOP's links!

Getting Together With Ctein in London UK

From Roger Bradbury

Recently TOP's friend Ctein wrote: "Paula and I will be in London the first two weeks of May, in case someone there wants to arrange a get-together while we're in town.”

I'm arranging the get-together (I'm Roger Bradbury). I’m told that previous get-togethers have gone very well, so I’m looking forward to it.

I’m going to go with Andrew Lamb's suggestion of The Camera café, at Aperture Photographic, 44 Museum Street, London, WC1A 1LY. Ctein and Paula will meet us there on Saturday 7th May, at 2:30 pm. Holborn, then Tottenham Court Road, are the nearest underground stations.

The café website shows that there's a small range of food, but lots of choices if you drink tea or coffee. If we are going to be handling other people's cameras and/or photos, it would probably be a good plan to eat beforehand, to avoid leaving greasy thumb prints.

If you are interested, please email me via my contact page. We don’t have to book a table (I’ve phoned them) but it would nice to get an idea of numbers and if we have to make any alterations to the plan, I can contact you. You will also get my phone number.

—Roger

[Note: Comments are open on this post in case you have questions or experience any difficulties. —Ed.]

Ctein in London

Our friend Ctein writes: "Paula and I will be in London the first two weeks of May, in case someone there wants to arrange a get-together while we're in town. If so, they should please email me: ctein@pobox.com."

Past get-togethers have been enjoyed by all. Hope somebody can coordinate a meeting. Cheerio and tally...oh, you know.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2016 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.

TOP's links!

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

David Paterson: "I would dearly love to meet and thank the man whose heresy—'let the printer control the colour'—has transformed the printing experience for me. London is at least a ten-hour drive away, along heavily congested motorways (interstates) and just too far for my gratitude to stretch. So thanks, Ctein, come up to Scotland some time—the glens are echoing to the sound of my 3880 churning out lovely A2 prints."

Things Ctein-y

First, here's the ultimate authority on how to pronounce "Ctein":

M4a:

This is Ctein

MP3:

This-is-ctein

 

 

 

Secondly, enough people have inquired about the Micro 4/3 "Moon and Bay Bridge" demo print that Ctein is going to make a few more. Without being set up for a large-volume sale, the least he can do it for this time is $75. Add $25 shipping and handling for a total of $100—still nice and inexpensive. The prints will be be just like they were in the $19.95 print sale—Premium Luster paper, unsigned, with a legend printed at the bottom, etc.—but this time they'll be shipped flat. And this time he can take international orders.

This isn't a formal and proper TOP sale (although he will be giving TOP 20% of the proceeds), so if you're interested simply e-mail Ctein (ctein@pobox.com) with a query.

Mike

[UPDATE, Tuesday evening: A big THANKS! to everyone who sent me MP3's of the Ctein file. I hate it when I do that...when I posted that request I wasn't remembering that I had to be gone all afternoon taking the car in to be serviced, and wouldn't be around to post the MP3 and thus alert people that I'd already been provided with help. Sorry for causing duplication of effort! But thanks very much to everyone who helped, all the same. —Mike]

Original contents copyright 2016 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.

TOP's links!

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

Gordon Cahill: "Awesome. My copy of Ctein's print has skyrocketed in value. Better investment than the stock market.   :-)  "

Steven Ralser: "That print convinced me to go to Micro 4/3 and I haven't looked back. My back is thanking me. "

Ctein's X-Mas: The Limits to Growth

Written by Ctein, TOP Technical Editor

Happy holidays to one and all! As long-time readers know I'm inclined to write an X-mas column with the emphasis on the “X.” That is, the essential but unknown part of the equation. The stuff we don't know is as interesting as the stuff we do.

(I just like this photo. A whole lot.)

This year, I'm going in a slightly different direction. The answers are fundamentally unknown, because they are speculations about the future. I can make well-educated guesses. My crystal ball is, though, unreliable.

The inspiration for this column is a thread I read not too long back on another site I frequent which was discussing whether the new 20-megapixel Micro 4/3 cameras were a waste of time. I'm not going to tell you which site or what thread, because within a page it had degenerated into the unfortunately-common ignorant blather that pollutes such discussions. I was mentally composing a rebuttal when I realized it would make a nice X-mas column. I will say one thing about that other thread: I think it should be against the law for people to invoke “laws of physics” unless they, in fact, hold degrees in physics! You can be pretty sure that anyone who says that, and doesn't, is going to be wrong.

All right, then. How far might image quality be pushed, without resorting to nonstandard technologies? Let's just stick with the usual Bayer array cameras for the moment and get to the more exotic later. I'll be talking about Micro 4/3 because that's what I currently use and care about. We could have this conversation about any format, and a lot of what I say will apply across formats.

One last thing before I get started: in the interests of holiday harmony, please suppress the impulse to write comments in the vein of “I don't need X; I don't see why anyone would need X.” Take my word for it that someone out there needs X, even if it's not you. In the interests of peace on Earth, goodwill towards bloggers, let's not go there, okay? Thank you!

Pixel count seems to be what everyone goes at first. How much can that get pushed before we really do run up against physical limits where we're sacrificing quality for quantity? My best estimate, at the moment, is that Micro 4/3 sensors can pick up another two stops in sensitivity before they start to approach real physical limits. Maybe three, but I'm not sure of that.

In practice, that means you could ultimately quadruple the pixel count of the OM-D cameras to 64 megapixels with no loss of sensitivity or increase in noise compared to today's 16-megapixel models (actually, the perceived noise would be a little better, because it would be finer). Another way to parse it would be that if you keep the pixel count where it is currently, you can expect to see half the noise at any given ISO, or a 4X speed increase for the same noise level.

Or you could split the difference, at 32 megapixels and twice the ISO, with modestly lower noise.

We've got a way to go in terms of pixel counts before we are forced into unpleasant tradeoffs. Understand, the engineering and technology has to advance to allow this, but there's nothing in the laws of physics that prevents that. It's just steady progress.

Well then, how about exposure range? Currently, we are running around 12 stops and change. That's pretty good! Exposure range isn't directly a function of pixel count, but there are some connections. Again, my best guess would be that along with upping the pixel count, you can probably squeeze another two stops of exposure range out of the conventional technologies. Call it 14 stops.

The bit depth? That's really a function of the readout electronics. We are nowhere near close to theoretical limits. It's what's cost-effective to make. You want true, clean 14-bit output? You'll get it. Sixteen bit? Hang in there.

Okay, so pretty damned impressive sensors are in our future. Can we really make use of them? Are lenses good enough? Oh yeah, really, they are! Too long to discuss here, but you can read this column and the links back from there and learn more about this subject than you ever really wanted to know.

I can tell you for a fact that the 45mm and 75mm Olympus lenses will hold up just fine, corner-to-corner, when a 32-megapixel camera comes along. I can't swear to it for a 64-megapixel camera; I can't reliably extrapolate my existing test data that far. It wouldn't surprise me. In any case, we are future-proofed for at least a factor of two improvement in resolution, and better lenses come down the pike every day.

Of course, sane people don't demand corner-to-corner pixel-level sharpness as a criterion for a useful camera system. I'm just saying that even if you do, I've got to proofs of existence in my kit, and I know there are others out there.

To infinity...and beyond!
What happens if we don't restrict ourselves to the current conventional camera technology? In that case, there are another two stops of sensitivity and efficiency waiting for you before we hit physical limits. Those Bayer arrays we use today are only about 25% efficient, at best. Those colored filters toss out out three-fourths of the light before it even gets to the sensor. At some point we're going to have commercially feasible detectors that are truly panchromatic: they'll detect photons of any color and measure their energy as they detect them. That stuff exists in the lab; it's not particularly useful for commercial sensors. (No, Foveon sensors are not the answer. They're inefficient, and the other technical problems that they have aren't going to be solved with the level of industrial investment and interest out there. They'll go on as a niche product but, basically, they're the Wankel rotary engines in the world of digital cameras.)

As for exposure range, the sky is the limit. There already exist logarithmic-response sensors in industrial cameras that have over a 20-stop exposure range. There's a whole bunch of reasons why they're not likely to appear in conventional cameras anytime soon, not the least of which is that you need a huge bit depth in the readout and conversion electronics to make them useful for pictorial photography. That's not a physics limit, that's just my opinion that I don't think it's the development path we'll see. But, we might!

Some clever folks at MIT have demonstrated different approach. They've built a system where, when a pixel gets saturated with light, it dumps its charge and starts filling up again. Meanwhile, a counter records how many times a pixel dumps its charge during the course of the single exposure. Hence, instead of each pixel being limited to a charge range of 0.0 to 0.9999, it can, in effect, catch a range from 0.0 to N.9999, where N can be a fairly large number. Three or four stops additional range is no problem.

Further down the pike, it's going to get a lot more interesting. The past year has seen the development of electronics that can operate at optical frequencies. Currently they are working in the infrared, but I have no doubt it will push down into the visible within a year or so. That's a monstrous game-changer; it's like going from crystal radio sets to high-frequency vacuum tubes that let you build REAL radio electronics. The same thing's going to happen in the optical part of the electromagnetic spectrum. It'll be unimaginable.

That's your really, really big X for the holidays.

Now, go do whatever it is you do on December 25 and have fun doing it! That is an order!

UPDATE 12:26 p.m., December 25, 2015: I just gotta share this! My Xmas gift from my Other Significant Other, Laura.

Paula and I both agree this wins the Gift Of The Day (and there were some strong contenders).

Ctein

©2015 by Ctein, all rights reserved

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Featured Comments from:

John Camp: "One thing that Ctein somewhat brushed past is the issue of 'human use.' Possibly the most revolutionary and fast-developing device of our time is the computer—but in terms of mass/commercial/consumer computing, there really hasn't been much in the way of advancement in the past five years, because the very large majority of people don't need and won't use those advancements. In fact, we seem to be going somewhat backwards, with the widespread adaption of less capable machines, that happen to have the added capability of making phone calls and taking low-res photos. There has been some advancement in peripherals, like displays and linking cables (Thunderbolt) and flash drive speed, but those improvements really couldn't be classified as essential for most people. For 99% of users (the number pulled from between my buttocks), a 2010 screen provides about as much function as a 2015 screen. The potential for much faster products is there, but 99% of computer users don't need it, so they won't buy it unless the cost is low enough and they're replacing a computer that no longer serves their purposes.

"I think the same is true of cameras and printers—the high-end cameras now serve almost all purposes that cameras need to serve for 99% even of high-end users. Sure, there'll be 1% who want that OM 64-MP sensor...but it's the 99% who'll have to finance that research and development, and I have some reason to think that they won't be interested in doing that. In other words, the stuff we have now is good enough for 99% of photo purposes, and I think that 99% will increase to 99.1, 99.2 and so on because display is shifting more and more to digital, and useful digital displays don't require extreme resolution. Will we get the 64-MP OM? Maybe, but if so, I think it'll be a side effect of other advances, with the other advances (whatever they are) providing the financing for the spinoff."

Ctein replies: John, I think you're mostly correct, but...the effect of horsepower races and prestige and bragging rights on product development is not ignorable. I thought digital printer improvements would pretty much grind to a halt when they equaled (and surpassed) chromogenic prints by pretty much every meaningful measure. Seeing as chromogenics satisfied 99.999% (conservatively) of photographic needs. That happened a good decade ago. There's no real consumer-driven need for printers to have gotten better (folks like me and Charlie Cramer are an insignificant market share). That hasn't stopped steady improvements—it's a horsepower race. Similarly, the market for 120 format cameras and films collapsed before the turn of the century. Film and camera makers continued to churn out new medium-format product because it was considered the prestige market.

Wayne Fox: "I enjoyed the article.

"Regarding the idea of most people not needing it (I assume we are discussing buyers of photo gear which means they are after more than their very capable smart phone can deliver), I have a slightly different perspective. To me it’s about most captures not needing it—but then some do. As one who produces prints for photographers, at least 20–30 large prints or canvas wraps a month leave my store which suffer from serious quality issues because someone wants a bigger print than the detail in the image can pleasantly render. Many small prints also suffer because they have been cropped and not enough data is left to render the image at the desired size.

"So to me it's not 'if' we need need, it, but 'when' we need it. When I'm out shooting, most of the things I shoot could have been easy handled by a less capable device, but then a few times a year I get an image that looks best printed large (which happens to be what 'floats my boat' so to speak). I've had discussions with many customers who say they are completely happy with their current gear, because they never print larger than 13x19, then they show up and want a 40x60. We never know when we are going to capture that special image or need to do some serious cropping. Ironically this means our gear is good enough for most of what we shoot, but perhaps isn’t good enough for our best work."

"As far as the computer analogy, I agree for most needs were met by computers a few generations ago. But I’m not sure we are using less capable computing devices, it's more about a new class of device supplying what we need in a more convenient form factor. A current iPad Pro has more computing and graphics power than most computers of just a few years ago, so the device is still continuing to get more powerful, but the form factor has changed the game. To compare that to cameras, perhaps the 99% number regarding photography works if you consider everyone who takes pictures (which is most of the human population).

"But just as computers can be broken down based on needs, there are niche markets of people who need more computing power. And fortunately there are enough photographers who want more than a cell phone can deliver so we have a niche market size large enough to appeal to several companies to supply those needs. Once we narrow our field to this group I don’t think the 99% number is accurate (again because I think at that point we are talking about captures which need it, not people).

"I don't know whether a game changing new form factor is in store for photographers (wouldn't surprise me) but as the equipment becomes more capable through progression as outlined by Ctein, many who don't think they need it will find on occasion they wish they had it. The good news is if you don’t want or can’t afford to be on the bleeding edge in gear and don’t rush out and buy the latest and greatest, at least there are enough photographers who do to keep driving the technology forward. This means eventually almost everyone will find occasion to be using better gear than they have today, and will find on some occasions, some captures benefit."

What A Long Strange Trip

Written by Ctein, TOP Technical Editor

Last Saturday, as you might know, was TOP's 10th birthday. This site has been putting my life through changes for almost as long as it has Mike's. Okay, not quite 10 years, more like 9.3. Close enough.

It started in the summer of 2006, about nine months after Mike started TOP (which I had no idea he was doing; we were not in regular contact). I was having a conversation with a friend of mine about where to take my writing career. I was looking at the future of photography magazines, and the number of magazines that wanted in-depth and honest product tests and advanced how-tos had been steadily declining for 15 years. It wasn't going to be too much longer before I wasn't writing for anybody. I needed to do something to keep my name in the public eye. It wasn't just about earning money as a writer; an invisible artist is a broke artist.

My friend suggested I start a blog, which she'd enjoyed doing for a year or so. I said that was a non-starter for me. I don't write for the public for free. It's too much like real work. I'm a professional and I get paid for my words. I'd blog when hell froze over (exact quote).

That very same evening I got a call from Mike. He wondered if I might write a column for his hitherto-unknown-to-me blog. He couldn't pay me a lot; in fact he was worried I'd be insulted by the amount he could afford to pay me. But it was important to him that professionals be paid for their work, even if it's a token. It was the principle of the thing. No argument from me! I said I'd give it a try, although I wasn't sure how many column ideas I could come up with. Whatever, I'd run with it until I ran out of ideas.

As soon as I got off the phone with Mike, I called my friend. "You are not going to believe this. Hell just froze over."

True story; I couldn't make up stuff this improbable.

Shortly thereafter, this first column appeared.

As for running out of ideas? 300+ columns later, when I stopped doing my regular column, I still had a massive topic backlog.

The first TOP dye transfer print sale happened a little more than two years later, a bit over seven years ago. This was something Mike had started back at Photo Techniques magazine—offer readers master-quality prints at a ridiculously low price, so they could see for themselves what really good prints looked like. By taking all the orders and money in advance, the photographer could print in volume to meet a known demand, allowing them to charge a low price. I did on a couple of sales for PT, and each earned me a few thousand dollars. Mike was figuring TOP ought to do as well or better. With hundred-buck prints, we might hope for as much as $10,000 in sales!

Mike diffidently asked, if I wouldn't mind, would I consider giving him a 10% commission on sales? I told him hell no. Absolutely not. He was going to take 20% and not a point less, or I wouldn't do it.

He caved. I'm a tough negotiator.

We thought about putting a cap on the sales, but it seemed really tacky and faux-egotistical, like those ads you see for "limited edition collectibles." I could deal with 100 prints. Hell, if a miracle occurred and we doubled down on that, which had never, ever happened in the history of the program, I could deal with that.

So, this piece ran.

So began the madness...

When the sale ended after ten days, I'd sold 750 prints. AUGH! I felt like Mickey Mouse and those blasted marching broomsticks. Damn near killed me.

But, suddenly, print sales were big money for me and Mike. We've both been riding that pony ever since. It's carried me through several tight periods.

The final blowout dye transfer sale paid for (most of) the remodeling on my house when I shut down the darkroom two years ago. As for Mike, these ongoing print sales with multiple photographers were what enabled him to get out of his shoebox of a house into something where he could stretch out both arms and not bruise his knuckles.

Oh yeah, changes.

Then came the big one.

I (virtually) met John Camp through TOP about 6 1/2 years ago, through our respective posts and comments on TOP. I mentioned in a column that I'd be going to the Twin Cities for vacation. John dropped me a note suggesting that since he lived on the Eau Claire river, not far from the Twin Cities, it might be a chance for the two of us to meet face-to-face. We did. We hit it off.

Almost from the beginning he nagged me about writing fiction. I would having none of it. Nonfiction is easy; fiction is HARD! You have to make up all those lies and keep them straight. Not for me, nuh uh. I was adamant. John knew enough not to push it.

Until, about 3 1/2 years ago, when the science fiction novel he'd been noodling around with came to a dead stop for him. He rang me up on the phone with a proposition. There is a (fairly) faithful summary of that conversation in this column I wrote for John Scalzi's blog, Whatever.

Fast-forward to the present. Now I'm a New York Times best-selling novelist who does photography. Talk about weird….

And none of this weirdness would've happened if it hadn't been for TOP.

I'd say the next 10 years couldn't possibly be more peculiar than the last.

I know better.

Ctein

©2015 by Ctein, all rights reserved

Mike adds: My non-knuckle-damaging new new house, built A.D. 1880, has 600 sq. feet more than the shoebox. It's cheaper in every way but one than the old new house back in Waukesha. (The one: propane is expensive.) I love this house. It's lovely inside, and the back yard is wonderful, protected on three sides by that high ridge you see behind the house. That's the family room on the right, in what used to be the one-car garage. So far, a handful of TOP readers have visited! Stop by if you're ever in the Finger Lakes.

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'Saturn Run' Takes Off!

[UPDATE: If you missed the interview, the John Hines Show is available as a podcast, for streaming or download. Thanks to Richard Parkin for this. —Ed.]

Two good friends-o'-TOP will be on the radio tomorrow morning. For the Tuesday launch of their co-authored sci-fi thriller Saturn Run, John Sandford (known as John Camp around here) and our own Ctein will be interviewed live on the John Hines Show on WCCO-AM (CBS), Minneapolis, Minnesota, at 11:00 a.m. Central Time (that's 9 a.m. on the Left Coast, noon on the Least Coast). It should run about half an hour. WCCO streams on the Web for folks who aren't in the Twin Cities area.

Additionally, John and Ctein kick off a multi-city book tour soon. They'll be visiting Scottsdale, Arizona; San Francisco, California; Seattle, Washington; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Houston, Texas, either separately or together. Here's the full schedule.

The link leaves out two appearances by Ctein only in Minneapolis—on October 10th at Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction Bookstore, and on October 14th at Dreamhaven books. Contact Ctein at ctein@pobox.com for details on those.

Of course you can pre-order Saturn Run for imminent delivery if you haven't already! Break a leg, John and Ctein!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2015 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Photoshop vs. Printer-Managed Color Printing

Written by Ctein, TOP Technical Editor

I promised last week in my P800 review that I would follow up with a detailed explication of my test results regarding printing from Photoshop using custom-made profiles vs. using printer-managed color. If you don't have any idea what I'm talking about, read the section of that review entitled, “Color management and profiling” along with the first featured comment. That should bring you up to speed.

Before I dive into my results, I'm going to issue a bunch of caveats as well as respond to some commonly asked questions about my “conversion” (ahem) to printer-managed color. Then we can get to the nitty-gritty.

First, and this is really important, printer-managed color won't be a superior approach if you're running Windows. What I'm recommending only works under Mac OS, which allows you to specify the output printer color space as AdobeRGB. Under Windows you're limited to sRGB, which throws away way too much of the color gamut of the printer. Some people have proposed various hacks to circumvent Windows' sRGB limitation. They may or may not actually work. If they do, they're exploiting loopholes (effectively, bugs) in the code. There's no guarantee they'll continue to work in the future.

Printer-managed color is obviously unsuitable if you're having to coordinate with outside clients who aren't running exactly the same set-up as you are. For example, you can soft-proof even if you're running printer-managed color (I'll get back to that), but the results won't be exactly the same as when you're running with profiled color. If you're working with someone else who needs to see soft proofs, what they'll see on their monitor won't be quite the same as what you see.

Similarly, if you're running a whole bunch of different makes and models of printers in one environment and you need them all to behave as consistently similarly as is possible, you need Photoshop-managed color. You can't be having each printer's own drivers calling the shots, with their individual idiosyncrasies.

Finally, I'm confident of my results when Epson x880series and P600 and P800 printers are being used. That's all I tested. Printer-managed color might very well be superior with other printers as well. Or not. I suspect it is with many, but you'll have to run your own comparisons to determine that.

Okay, those are the limitations in scope. Understand that for me this is not some theoretical discussion. I am so convinced of these results that my future work will be printed with printer-managed color. You get to decide for yourself. It's a tough decision; it took me years to get to this point. Old habits die hard.

I get asked three big questions about this:

Q: Don't you have to give up soft proofing?

A: I find soft proofing a useful approximation of what a print will look like, with an emphasis on the word “approximation.” A soft proof fails to convey the nuances of the print for me and the precise interrelationships of the tones and colors on paper. All it does is give me a ballpark estimate. This is not a monitor limitation. It's true I'm running only a calibrated sRGB monitor, but the differences I see have nothing to do with the color space.

Consequently, I find that choosing any appropriate canned profile (whether provided by the printer or the paper manufacturer) works well enough. Different profiles make subtle differences in the on-screen rendering. The differences are small compared to the discrepancies between what's on the screen and what I see in a print. So, no, I don't care that I'm not using exactly the right profile for creating the soft proof; the ballpark estimate I'm getting isn't much different.

Q: Doesn't this mess up if you're using a non-Epson paper?

A: I mostly print on non-Epson papers. On all the ones I've tried, choosing the closest Epson equivalent in the printer driver works just fine. I imagine there could be subtle rendering differences between different papers on the market of the same type, but they're a lot smaller than the differences between printer vs. Photoshop-managed color.

Q: You're throwing away the part of the color space the printer can reproduce that is outside of Adobe RGB. That's a bad thing!

A: That would be true if there were no downside to retaining the entire color space. In this case, there is—worse distortion and incorrect rendering of tones and colors. What it boils down to is, do you want the maximally large color space, or do you want the most correctly rendered color space? Because, you can't have both.

To make an analogy, it's like choosing between two sound systems, one of which can output 200 watts and the other of which can output 500 watts. The 500w system is good, but the 200w system has much lower distortion. Which one do you buy? Me, I'll opt for poorer performance on the extreme transients in exchange for less ongoing distortion.

That's the situation I find with printing. Those outside-of-Adobe RGB colors have much less of an impact on my photographic prints than the distortions created by custom profiles.

Now, on with the show!
For each of the photos, I made five prints—four with my custom profile and the one Andrew Rodney made for me, with both perceptual and relative colorimetric rendering and one using printer managed color. Some photos I tested on the 3880, some on the P800, most on both. Just doing my part to make the paper and ink manufacturers rich. Here's what I found with five of the dozen representative-of-my-work photos I used for testing:

• Xmas Spirit—This one is totally a torture test, but it's not atypical of photographs I do of artificial light sources (not just Christmas lights). There's plenty of out-of-gamut color in the magenta-reds, greens, and cyan-blues.

Relative colorimetric rendering fails badly with both custom profiles. It slams those primaries into the wall, with poor color and tone discrimination. It's especially noticeable in the large red areas. Perceptual holds much better separation, but distortions show up in the near-saturated colors. They don't stand out strongly, but they're there.

Printer-managed color does the best all-around job. It holds better gradation in the saturated areas than the custom profiles did with relative colorimetric rendering without introducing the outright distortions that perceptual rendering did. It retains subtle gradients with better fidelity and more delicately that either profile with either rendering intent. It does a better job of holding detail as well as tonal and color variations in the yellow-orange part of the spectrum (especially obvious in Pooh). I've observed this in other test prints of things like sunsets, with all those golds and yellows.

• Stream Bank near River Polly—This is one of my standard photographs, very typical of my nature photography. I even use it to optimize ColorMunki profiles. It has very small spots of out-of-gamut color in the dark greens with my profile, none with Andrew's.

It was interesting how little difference there was between mine and Andrew's profile. With the custom profiles, perceptual looked better than relative colorimetric rendering. I don't think objectively the custom profiles are inferior to the printer-managed color. Printer-managed color is slightly closer to what I created on the screen, so technically it's more accurate, but it would only be subtle tweaks of curves and hue saturation layers to make the prints interchangeable. I'm calling it a draw.

• Grasses in Liquid Sky—this is another one of my calibration photos because, although the blue sky colors aren't out of gamut, poorly calibrated printers and poor profiles render them distinctly too violet-magenta. I've seen this problem pretty consistently for years across printers and photographs for sky-bluish stuff. I could guess it has something to do with how the RGB space gets transformed into the CMYK space for output, but I really don't know.

I got mixed results on this one. On the 3880, printer-managed color slightly beats out either custom profile, although Andrew's is a bit better than mine. On the P800, printer-managed color is little worse than either custom profile and mine is better than Andrew's. In other words, the order is exactly reversed. I should mention that any of these prints are much better than any print from a factory-canned profile, either for the printer or from a paper manufacturer.

• Ripples in Stream—There are no out of gamut colors, but a good range of fine color and detail cover a large fraction of the color space.

Much like "Stream Bank," any of the prints would be aesthetically acceptable, but printer-managed color was more accurate, in particular in holding the correct hue in the orangish reds and the cyans-to-blues that dominate the lower half. The overall effect is that printer-managed color makes the print more (correctly) vivid, and the different areas are better differentiated.

• Tiffany Dome, Chicago—A lot that's out of gamut here—the blues and the olive green ribbons in the dome glass, almost every bit of the golden glass in the "sun" light.

All the prints render the golden glass more orange than it appears on the monitor (I can see that in the soft proof). Andrew's profile with relative colorimetric rendering does the best job of holding the hue, but it produces the worst overall result—differentiation is absent in the out-of-gamut areas and the print looks flat and lacking in texture. All four profile/rendering intent combinations do a worse job than printer-managed color in holding detail in the sun lamp, in producing accurate shades of blues in the dome and in keeping the greens olive-colored instead of pushing them towards a darker, pure green. Printer-managed color is a clear win.

For the heck of it, I printed out this photo at full 17x22 size on the P800 with printer-managed color, to compare with my earlier 3880 print made with my custom profile (perceptual). OH MY. It is soooo much better. Between the extended density range and color gamut of the P800, plus the better handling of the out-of-gamut colors by printer management. Hard to describe—it's like the difference one sees between looking at an Adobe RGB and sRGB rendering. The print looked great before; now it looks better than great.

I played with several more photographs, but eventually better becomes the enemy of deadlines, and they didn't tell me anything the earlier tests hadn't already. My conclusions are that, except in uncommon cases, perceptual rendering is going to be superior to relative colorimetric if you're using a custom profile. It shows more artifacts in the comparison prints from mine and Andrew's gradient torture-test files, but those artifacts rarely up as a problem in real photographs.

Far more often than not, though, the very best results are going to come from using printer-managed color. "Grasses in Liquid Sky" was the only photograph where the custom profile was of clear benefit, and that was only on one of the printers. Sometimes (rarely) printer-managed color is spectacularly better. Most of the time the differences are small. In the few cases where a custom profile is doing better, the differences aren't large.

Whew! I'm done. I'm going to go back to making pretty pictures and pretty prints.

UPDATE, Saturday: Quite a few of you have said that you can get AdobeRGB color out of printer-managed color under Windows. I'm not in a position to check that out; I'm not even in a position to argue with you. What I said about Windows' sRGB limitations comes from Adobe's printer guru. I'm not saying he's infallible (neither would he) but he knows so much more about this than I do. I can't argue his case. It would be like Mike trying to stand in for me in an argument about physics. I just don't know enough.

Instead, what I'm going to give you folks is a simple 20-minute, two-print test that will tell you if you really are getting AdobeRGB color out and not just sRGB color. For this you need an image file with a really wide range of colors and tones. Preferably something that was done in ProPhotoRGB space. You want something that comes as close as possible to filling up the printer's entire color space. If you don't have any such photograph of your own in your collection, grab Andrew Rodney's torture test file. This is a 16-bit ProPhotoRGB file, and it will destroy any printing system out there. (Don't be distressed by any weirdnesses or artifacts you see in prints made with this file–– it's designed to break things, and those things will almost never matter in a real photograph.)

Make two prints from that file, using what you believe to be sRGB output to the printer and AdobeRGB output. You should see a very clear difference between the two, with the “AdobeRGB” print having a greater color range (that is, producing more intensely saturated colors at the extrema) than the sRGB print. If you do, then you've got a hack that works. At least it does until such time as Microsoft rewrites their code. If you don't, then no matter what the settings in your printer software are telling you, that “AdobeRGB” data is still going through the Windows' sRGB bottleneck.

That's all I've got. Have fun!

Ctein

©2015 by Ctein, all rights reserved

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Michael Perini: "Simpler is better, and your results seem very encouraging.

"You mention an Adobe RGB workflow. In your introduction to Andrew Rodney's piece you recommend ProPhoto RGB (which most of us use): '...if you're working in ProPhoto RGB color space. And, really, you should be, because most if not all digital cameras can produce colors that fall outside of Adobe RGB.'

"So do your recommendations hold for a ProPhoto RGB Workflow? Thanks."

Ctein replies: Michael, yes. Most of my work is in ProPhotoRGB space. The Tiffany Dome photograph is a good example of that. It contains a lot of colors that lie outside of Adobe RGB gamut.

In fact, this is a place where soft proofing is useful and accurate. Under the View menu in Photoshop, the third item down is “Gamut Warning.” If you click that, the screen grays out any colors that are outside of the space you're simulating. You can pick AdobeRGB as the “Device to Simulate” under “Proof Set up” (the top item under View) and you'll see what colors in your photograph actually do lie outside of AdobeRGB space.

There may not be any. Some digital photographs fall entirely within AdobeRGB space. Just because your camera can capture colors outside of AdobeRGB space doesn't mean that there necessarily are any in any particular photograph. But, one never knows in advance, and it could change when you start messing with the photograph in Photoshop, which is why I recommend converting from RAW into ProPhoto RGB space.

Product Review: Epson SureColor P800 Printer

Written by Ctein

[Note: This is going to be longer than your usual TOP post. There's a lot to talk about. If you feel it's “longior, non legi,” don't say I didn't warn you!

P.S. Two important illustrations were missing from the first post of this article (under the nighttime snow photograph). If you didn't see'em before, refresh and scroll down. —Ctein]

The new Epson SureColor P800 printer (currently specially priced at $995 from B&H Photo after the mail-in rebate) is the 17-inch wide model in Epson's new line of printers that run from 13-inch wide through 44-inch wide. The print quality should be similar or identical on all of them. I reviewed the P800 because it's the direct successor to my current standard printer, the Epson 3880.

The big deal about the Epson SureColor P800 (hereafter simply referred to as the P800) is Epson's new Ultrachrome HD ink set. It's the same set of colors as in the x880 series—MK,PK,LK,LLK,LM,M,LC,C,Y—but they've been reformulated for an increased density range. More density range means richer blacks, more tonal range to work with in the print, and higher maximum saturation in the colors. This, of course, is what got me most interested in this printer. More on this anon; much more.

There are couple of other new features to the printer that I liked. You can tether it to your computer with the standard ethernet or USB cables, or it can connect over your Wi-Fi network. I didn't relish stringing another cable across my office, so I gave the Wi-Fi option a try. All of my testing was done on my 27-inch 5K retina iMac running the most current versions of Mac OS X (Yosemite) and Photoshop CC (2015). Wi-Fi worked perfectly. I performed the usual setup dance: first install the printer software on the computer, then turn on the printer. I next selected wireless connection from the touchscreen on the front of the printer. The printer looked for the Wi-Fi network, configured itself appropriately, and that was it! The printer was installed on the iMac and also accessible from any other computer in the house that was on that network. Easiest setup I've ever had.

Another feature I especially liked was that you can tell the printer whether it should be able to automatically switch between matte black and photo black inks depending on the print medium, or whether it will require you to manually initiate the switch (in which case the software will prompt you that the printer needs your attention). Why do I like this? Because I have, on occasion, accidentally chosen the wrong print medium, or decided to, say, print out an invoice that just came in while I'm in the midst of working on photographs, forgetting I'm set up for the latter. With the “convenience” of automatic ink swapping, I am rewarded by wasting five or more minutes of my time switching between inks, not to mention a few dollars worth of ink going down the drain. The first time I made this mistake with the P800, which happened pretty quickly (in my defense, I was making a lot of test prints under a lot of different conditions) I switched the printer over to manual. It's pretty good proof against the particular kind of fool that I am.

No doubt that there are a bunch of other features that will matter to other people. I didn't use them, so I won't report on them.

One negative change: the printer ships with smaller starter ink cartridges. Oh, they're not a whole lot smaller, probably 20%. The printer seems to require less ink to charge the system initially, so I'm likely getting close to the same amount of usable ink from the cartridges that ship with the printer as I did with the 3880. But, really, it feels kind of cheap on the part of Epson—would it have killed ya to have given me the full 80 ml cartridges? Really?

There, I got in my gripe. On to the prints, which is what we all really care about.

Print quality
The first thing I looked at was the ink droplet pattern, because that was really easy–– one test print. I was curious to see if the P800 was a big improvement over the x880 series the way the x900 series is. The pattern didn't look substantially different from the 3880, not in the league of the 4900. But, my particular review unit checked out at the high-end of the quality/uniformity range of 3880 printers that I tested a while back.

The dot pattern was very uniformly spaced, invisible to my eye even under the closest inspection. That is not true of my 3880, which falls in the middle of the quality distribution. I don't know if this is typical of the P series or if I just got lucky on this test unit. This could be a case where “your mileage will differ;” no way I could say without testing a couple of dozen of these printers. The P800's sharpness was slightly better than 3880, but that might just be due to more uniform dot pattern. (Any Epson people reading this, feel free to chime in with observations, on or off the cuff. Hint, hint.)

So much for ink droplet patterns and print sharpness. Let's talk about density range, what the fuss is about.

The short version: it is consistently better on all papers, both matte and gloss/semi-gloss, than the 3880. I don't have a reflection densitometer; to my eye it looks like about a 0.2 density unit improvement in the shadows. There is distinctly better separation in the lower tones (below value 20) but pretty much no difference in the midtones and highlights. It's an extended shadow range.

This is my standard grayscale test target:

You can download a variant of this for your own tests.

The following illustration shows an enhanced version of the lower half of the rightmost column in my test prints, which prints values from 0 up to 32, just the darkest shadows. I kicked the brightness and contrast way, way up in the scanner software, so there are lots of scan artifacts and blotches.

These comparison prints, on Canson Baryta Photographique (my preferred paper) give you an idea how much further down the blacks extend with the new printer. The black arrow shows the matching steps between D-max on the 3880 print and the P800 print (around value=15). The darkest steps, down to the last 2 or 3, are visually distinguishable in the P800 print under strong illumination, even though they merge together in the scan; the printer does hold separation in the shadows.

The improvement in density is especially noticeable with a paper like Epson Ultra Premium Matte, a lower grade matte paper with relatively weak D-max. A P800 print on this paper has better blacks that a 3880 print on Epson Hot Press Bright, a much better quality of matte paper. Of course, a P800 print on the Hot Press looks better still, but this printer is a great equalizer among matte papers.

What does 0.2 d.u. mean, visually? With a semi-gloss paper like my Canson, a typical high-end inkjet print has about the same density range as a high-quality darkroom print. A dye transfer print, the gold standard, would typically have 0.4–0.5 d.u. more density range than the best darkroom print (that can vary). The P800 pushes well beyond what one can get in a conventional darkroom print; it's about halfway to the density range of a dye transfer print. It's going to encourage me to try digitally printing some of my photographs that simply don't print well without the density range I could get out of dye transfer, notably my "Jewels of Kilauea" series.

I'm jazzed.

The higher density range also means you can print richer colors and a larger color gamut. The maximally saturated primaries can get more saturated. Understand that this does not mean that your print, overall, is more contrasty or more saturated. It's about the range you have to work with. Think of it as like getting a new digital camera with a longer exposure range than your old one had. Your photographs aren't more contrasty, overall, but you can capture more of the extreme brights and darks.

Will you see this in your prints? It'll depend upon the kinds of photographs you make. The improved density range has only a minimal impact on photographs that don't have important shadow detail. If you mostly photograph high key, you'll never see a difference. Similarly, unless your photograph has colors that push the limits of the color space or of saturation, the extra range this printer provides will be less important. In some of my photographs, I could see very little difference between the 3880 and the P800 unless I looked very carefully. In most there was some improvement.

In some, the difference was profound. Photographs like this one:

and especially this one:

...printed much better with the P800. When I made that series of nighttime snow photographs, I remember telling Mike that I had to work very hard to hold separation in the shadows and still print the photo down dark enough that it looked like a night scene. I was hoping that future printers would let me do a better job. This printer does. I was satisfied with the rendering I achieved on the 3880, but I like what I can do with the P800 a lot better.

These two scans enlarge a portion of this photograph near the right edge:

I've brightened the image and enhanced the contrast the same way I did with the gray scale scans, so you can see the difference in the shadow rendering between the 3880 (upper) and P800 (lower) prints. That is a subtle improvement in the print, but it makes a big difference in conveying the fine detail and producing a sense of depth in the shadows.

Am I going to go back and reprint my whole portfolio now that I have a better printer? Hell no. Better may or may not be the enemy of good, but it is certainly the enemy of deadlines and of making new work. I'll be selective. But, I will be reprinting some of my portfolio. It's worth it.

Now I move on to a more controversial subject (cue ominous music):

Color management and profiling
The main reason this review took so long to get done is that Dave Polaschek, Andrew Rodney and I continued our investigation of color management and profiles, and it turned out to be rather more complicated than expected.

Well, some weeks and well over 100 prints later (whew!), I've reached my conclusion. Printer-managed color is the way to go with an x880 or P-series Epson printer running under Mac OS. A majority of the time it produces better results than Photoshop-managed color with a good custom profile. Sometimes it's massively better. Otherwise, it's usually a tossup. A very small fraction of the time, the custom profile works better, but never fantastically better.

Why is this so? I have no idea. I can spout all sorts of logic and theory that says this should not work anywhere as well as it does. But as I repeat, ad nauseum, “Data trumps theory.” I've got an awful lot of data now.

If you're really obsessive, I suppose you can run out a bunch of test prints of each and every photograph you do, to compare printer-managed color to custom profile color (remembering that you need to try out both relative colorimetric and perceptual rendering intent). Am I going to do that?

Naaah. It'll be printer-managed color and that's that, unless I look at the print and decide something is wonky.

I will likely explore this topic in more detail next week in a column. I would prefer to not, repeat not, argue about it in this one, especially if it's a rehash of what we discussed before.

Here are the settings you need to know. When you pull up the printer control panel, choose “Printer Manages Colors” under Color Handling. Then click Print Settings… . Select the Color Matching submenu and click “Epson Color Controls.” Click the Printer Settings submenu and under Color Mode choose “Color Controls > Adobe RGB.” Choose the paper type that most closely matches the one you're using (it doesn't matter if there's an exact match—I rarely use Epson papers).

I reprinted one of my recent favorite photos on the P800 using printer-managed color. This photograph looks great with my usual custom profile on the 3880, but it's got a lot of out-of-gamut color (including pretty much the whole “sun” lamp) and it pushes the brightness range per print. Wow, was there ever a difference! It's hard to find a way to put into words (and it is, of course, impossible to illustrate here) but the P800 print is much more alive. The color is more accurate, there is separation and texture in the extremes of tone and color that's missing in the 3880 print. The latter looks flat, compared to the new print. I loved the old print. I love the new print.

Printer-managed color won't be good under Windows. Windows limits you to sRGB color space when printing in this mode, and that's just not enough. Stick with custom profiles for Windows. What about other printers, models and makes, on the Mac side? I have no idea; you have to run your own tests. Ya pays yer money and ya takes yer chances.

Conclusion
I've put in a request to buy my review unit. Not because I'll necessarily save much money buying it that way, especially with Epson's current $200 rebate through the end of October, but this printer is performing well and, noting my earlier comments on product variability, I'm getting a nice tight dot pattern out of this printer. I don't want to leave that to chance. And I don't want to have to pack up and return a printer and then unpack and set up a new one. Because, really, I am replacing my 3880 with a P800 either way.

Don't misunderstand; there is nothing wrong with the 3880, and if the P800 hadn't come along I'd still happily continue to use it. If you can grab one (new or used) for, say, 50–60% of the price of a P800, do so. Otherwise, there's no question in my mind that the P800 is worth the extra money.

Ctein

[The P800 from B&H Photo is currently $995 after the mail-in rebate. The smaller 13-inch P600 is around $570 with the rebate. IMPORTANT! The P800 rebate offer is good through October but the P600 rebate offer ends September 30, so you've only got a week on that one.]

Ctein is TOP's Technical Editor and a longtime professional custom printer.

©2015 by Ctein, all rights reserved

Original contents copyright 2015 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Bill Mitchell: "What is 'printer managed color'?"

Ctein replies: Bill, when the Print Settings control panel in Photoshop comes up, under "Color Management" there is a "Color Handling" setting. You can choose either "Printer Manages Colors" or "Photoshop Manages Colors" The latter lets you (well, requires you) to use a printer profile selected from the menu below that. The former shuts down Photoshop's control of the color and leaves it all in the hands of the Printer Control panel that pops up when you click "Print Settings...". In other words, it's a completely intuitive interface. Not.

Craig Arnold: "A wonderfully timely post. I've decided it's time to retire my older Canon dye printer. As my favoured print size is A3+ I don't have to have the P800, but it's not much more than the P600 and the bigger ink tanks make it a bit silly to go for the P600. However I am somewhat conflicted over the choice between the P800 and Canon Pixma Pro 1. Do you have any experience of the Canon?

"Also, there is much Internet angst over 'pizza wheel' marks on the P800 prints. I presume this is only with certain papers, but have you seen such a thing?"

Ctein replies: Craig, Sadly, no recent Canon experience. However, I just made a usage agreement with them for four of my photos, so I'm hoping they'll send me sample prints over time.

I've not experienced pizza wheel marks with any of my 3880's or the P800. I'm pretty sure the technical explanation is that the gods favor me and punish others because they are not so pure of heart and noble of spirit as I.

How Do You Fix Aliasing in High-Res Camera Photographs?

Written by Ctein, TOP Technical Editor

(Author's note: Please read the already-posted responses before commenting. Thanks!)

I am mining the group-mind that is the all-knowing TOP readership.

If you're using a camera that lacks an anti-aliasing filter and if you've had to deal with aliasing in any of your photographs, how did you deal with it?

(Okay, I mean aside from deleting the photograph.)

You've got this photograph you really like. It's exhibiting annoying aliasing. How did you fix it in Photoshop or whatever?

This question comes out of a conversation I had with Richard Anderson a few days ago. I was explaining to him why I was leery of any of the new non-anti-aliased cameras because I'd already had enough problems with aliasing in my photographs from working with them in the past. (If you've never had such problems, I'm happy for you, but that's not relevant to me.)

He thought there were Photoshop techniques for fixing this. I didn't know of any, and we couldn't find them with Google or Adobe Help searches (unfortunately "aliasing" has a strong attractor having to do with rendering type and vector drawings).

I turn to you. Are there post-capture techniques for fixing this? If so, it could change my mind about considering such a camera in the future.

Tips on printing
Totally different subject (well, not entirely): Pascal Jappy in France just posted a very nice interview he did with me by phone about printing. It even contains a useful tip or two that I haven't written about before that may be helpful to folks who've been unsatisfied with the quality of their digital prints. Check it out.

Ctein, TOP Technical Editor

UPDATE, Monday: Well, that got resolved faster than I expected!

A couple of points of note: it's hard to get the answer to a question if you don't know how to ask it. “Alias” as a search term is a big fail. “Moiré” works great. But if you (like me) think in terms of the former rather than the latter, it's a stumper.

(Not the first time I've encountered that problem. I still haven't mastered writing macros in Excel because Visual Basic uses such a radically different vocabulary that I can't even figure out how to phrase some questions. Instead of being able to search for specific points that stymie me, I'm forced to read whole chapters of books in the hopes that the information I need will fall out.)

Something else—the moiré adjustment brush setting isn't available before Process Version 2012. The files I was looking at with this problem predated that. They opened up with PV2010 as their default in ACR. No moiré adjustment! It's a good argument for converting to PV2012 on raw files that haven't been massaged into their final form. There'll be tools you didn't even know existed. (Important note: don't do this if you've got a raw conversion in pretty much final form, because there are no exact equivalencies between a lot of the functions in PV2010 and PV2012. The latter is superior, but it's different.)

As for the moiré tool itself, I'm lukewarm. In the real world (as opposed to studio) subjects where I see the problem, it's in areas where there's lots of fine detail of high contrast. When the tool is applied to those areas, it fixes the aliasing, but it also wipes out saturation and flattens out the color overall within the brush radius. Sometimes this isn't a problem; other times it's a big one. I know, I'm preternaturally sensitive to color. Well, that's who I am. For me this is a half-fix.

Still, that's an improvement. It only leaves me half-leery of these cameras instead of totally leery.

©2015 by Ctein, all rights reserved

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Peaking Photoshop Performance

Not enough RAM and a conventional hard drive will cause
performance to slow down just a tad.

Written by Ctein

[Author's note: I'm hard at work on the third edition of my book Digital Restoration from Start to Finish. It'll be out sometime early next year (I think). Meanwhile, here's an excerpt for your enjoyment and edification.]

Whether you're using Photoshop or some other image processing program, maximizing its performance is especially important when doing photographic restoration. It's easy to generate huge files, bigger than what you're likely to be working with from a digital camera. For example, an 8x10 photograph scanned at 600 PPI in 16-bit color yields a 30 megapixel, 180 MB file. I'll be talking about Photoshop, specifically, but if the image processing program you're running can make use of a scratch disk when it runs out of RAM, the same general advice will apply.

Here's the non-technical version: Stuff your computer with as much RAM as it will support. RAM is cheap. Less than 8 GB will badly cramp your style. Working on a large and complex restoration, double that is barely adequate. My 27" i7 Retina iMac has 32 GB of RAM, 24 GB of which are allocated to Photoshop. You want to leave enough RAM free for other machine functions so that they don't choke—75% is a safe amount to give Photoshop. I can still run out of RAM in Photoshop on occasion…but it's a lot less common now than it was on my old system, which only had half as much memory.

Next, after maximizing your RAM, get an internal SSD (solid state drive) and use it for your operating system, applications including Photoshop, and the scratch disk. You should also put the photograph you're working on there. That doesn't require a very large SSD. A 256 GB SSD will handle this with plenty of room to spare. You can put all your data files and photographs that you're not working on on a different drive. Of course, there's nothing wrong with getting a big one and putting everything on it, including all your data files, but they're a lot more pricey.

A hybrid or “Fusion” drive doesn't really cut it for photo restoration. They marry a small solid-state drive to a conventional hard drive. That speeds up activities that demand accessing only a few gigabytes of data, like launching and relaunching applications, working with text and spreadsheets, and so on. The thing is, the scratch files that your image processing program will generate when it runs out of RAM are huge. They'll swamp the solid-state part of the hybrid drive, and then it performs no better than a conventional drive. Don't get me wrong; they're a distinct performance improvement over a traditional hard drive—but nowhere near what you'll see with a pure SSD.

Practical comparisons
Now I shall get geekily specific. Those of you who don't care, you can skip to the end. You won't miss much.

To convey to you a sense of just how much difference sufficient RAM and an SSD can make, I ran a set of benchmark tests using Lloyd Chambers Photoshop benchmarking actions. They're designed to stress the heck out of Photoshop. For these tests, I used the medium scale benchmark, diglloydMedium, because the small one simply ran too fast on my new machine to do accurate timing, and it didn't push huge amounts of data to the scratch disk.

I first ran the benchmark with Photoshop allocated its full 24 GB of RAM. That's enough RAM that Photoshop didn't have to use the scratch drive. It ran diglloydMedium in a little over 11 seconds with a maximum CPU usage of over three cores (300+%), and it ate up about 15 GB of RAM.

Good enough. Then, what happens when Photoshop runs out of RAM, as it will on an under-equipped computer? I cut the Photoshop allocation back to 4 GB of RAM and ran the same benchmark with the iMac's internal SSD as the scratch drive. Even though data transfer to the scratch disk peaked out at over 900 MB/sec, the time to execute the benchmark almost tripled, to 30 seconds, and CPU usage barely exceeded 100%.

Next I took the SSD out of the picture. I changed the Photoshop scratch disk to a fast external conventional hard drive. This, by the way, is the way you should be running if you don't have an internal SSD as your system drive. If your system drive is a regular hard drive, putting the scratch files there only sets you up for what's known as “drive thrashing.” The disk head has to bounce all over the place to keep up with the competing demands from the OS, the running programs, and the scratch space, and that slows things down horribly. Not a problem with an SSD.

With 4 GB of RAM and a conventional hard drive disk, performance just cratered. The runtime was two minutes with a peak data rate of 150 MB/sec to the drive. CPU usage barely got to 30%.

In summary, running with insufficient RAM and a conventional hard drive slowed the benchmark by a factor of ten!

'Nough said?

Ctein

Photo-writer, sci-fi novelist, photographer, and physicist Ctein is TOP's Technical Editor.

©2015 by Ctein, all rights reserved

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Oh, Tea! (OT)

~ written by Ctein, TOP Technical Editor
(who is posting on-and-off while Mike's nomadic)

Folks, it's been a long time since I've regaled you with tales of tea. Partly, it's because I haven't written lately. Partly it's because Mike felt I'd hit that topic enough for a while. Oh, those perfidious coffee-drinkers.** But, here I am in the driver's seat of this jalopy, so…

The first tidbit is a fine little hack I came up with last year. You will all remember (of course) how much I love my Paio Infusion Tea Pot.

(photograph courtesy of Amazon)

It gets used every single day (well, any day that I'm not making macha, which is most of them). After a couple of years of use, the very fine screen on the bottom was getting pretty badly clogged up. The pot was draining slowly. With some very fine greens, it was hardly draining at all.

Scrubbing it with a toothbrush didn't work; the screen was way too fine and I couldn't get to the underside of it. I tried soaking it repeatedly in hot baking soda solution, which dissolved all the tannin but didn't clear out most of the holes in the screen.

I thought on it. Okay, dissolving the tannin isn't working. There's clearly bits of tea leaves clogging up the holes. What  would dissolve organic-matter clogs?

Put it that way and the answer is obvious. Drain cleaner! At least, so long as it doesn't dissolve the infuser. I knew it wouldn't attack the screen or the stop valve ball, which are stainless steel. (You don't want to try this on aluminum––it will dissolve!) I didn't know about the adhesives or plastics.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I poured a few ounces of liquid plumber stuff into the infuser, pressed the ball valve button to allow some of it flow through the screen, and let it sit for 10 min.

Success! My infuser came out looking practically like new.

Kids, if you do try this at home (with or without adult supervision) I make no promises about what will happen to your particular tea strainer or infuser. You're on your own. Do remember to rinse it out very thoroughly when you're done. Lye tastes yucky.

~~~

When Jon Singer and I visited my friend Bill Waddington, the owner of TeaSource in the Twin Cities, in June he introduced us to two extremely unusual teas. I've never had anything like them before, and they're both wonderful.

The first is a white tea called Silver Bud or Ya Bao. This is a winter pick–– the leaves haven't even started to come out of the buds and the pick is of the entire bud.

(photo courtesy of TeaSource)

You brew it with boiling water. No kidding. Half-fill the pot with buds; they are very fluffy.  Try a two- or three-minute brew time for the first infusion. The brew is very very pale, nearly water-clear. It has a lovely floral aroma and extremely light and delicate flavor. It's almost all in the nose.

You can get up to four infusions if you increase the brew time by about 50% on each successive pot. It doesn't get bitter, it just takes longer and longer to pull enough flavor and aroma out of the buds into the liquor.

It's surprisingly inexpensive––$10 for 4 ounces, and that will fill up a quart-size jar with buds.

The website says that it "Can also be aged, as a puer." How strange! I've queried Bill about that; I'll let you know what he says.

The other tea he served us is a new puer that he'll be stocking in September. What makes Long Run Puer unusual is its brew time–– 15 seconds with boiling water. Yes, really, one-quarter minute is enough!  It produces a lovely brew. Not smoky nor heavy, but still very full-flavored. I suspect it will tolerate a lot of infusions. Bill thinks it will also age exceptionally well, although we won't know for years to come.

Enjoy your weekend and have a nice cuppa on me.

(** And now that treacherous swiller of java tries to bury this column with posts of his own. An unsavory lot, those bean-sippers.)

Ctein, TOP Technical Editor
(who is posting on-and-off while Mike's nomadic)

Original contents copyright 2015 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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My Shiny Retina iMac

~ written by Ctein, TOP Technical Editor
(who is posting on-and-off while Mike's nomadic)

I tend to buy computers towards the high end of the scale and keep them for a long time. I don't know if it is, in fact, more economical than buying towards the low end and getting a new machine every two years, but I find it a lot less annoying.

Both the laptop and the desktop machines here have been approaching the replacement point. My laptop is particularly long in the tooth. My 15" MacBook Pro is a 2007 model. I've upgraded it several times along the way, but one can only push so far. It runs a lot faster than when I bought it, but I'm doing more complicated things with much bigger files than I was eight years ago.

I have, without question, been salivating over the retina MacBook Pro. True 24-bit color, close to sRGB right out-of-the-box, that's a real nice thing to have a laptop. Plus, it's an incredibly powerful machine. It'll handily outperform our 27" 2009 iMac, which is still a satisfactory work machine. Pump that MacBook Pro up to 16 Gb of RAM, add an Adobe RGB external monitor, and I'd be a pretty happy camper.

The thing that's kept me from moving to a new laptop is that my e-mail program and a couple of other business-critical programs I use won't run under anything later than OS X 10.6. A new machine means a new OS, which means a new e-mail program, etc. Insert any number my previous rants about planned obsolescence here. You can Google for them. Adapting to new software, especially a program I'm using many times a day, is not my idea of fun. Still, the laptop was high on the replacement list.

Until this spring. The graphics card went out in the 27" iMac. Down it went to the Apple Store. Turned out the graphic card is a separate component, so it wasn't going to be an expensive repair. Whew! Only problem is they had to be able to find a graphics card. It took Apple over a week to come up with one because, you know, like, six years is old, dude. Insert aforementioned rants.

The iMac was out of the house for almost 2 weeks. Thank heavens, it happened during a rare window when I really didn't need it for anything. I can't count on that kind of luck, and I can't afford to be down for two weeks. That kicked replacing the iMac to the top of the list.

(The critical difference between my MacBook Pro and my iMac is that my MacBook Pro is 100% user-serviceable at my level of technical skill. I can easily get parts for it on the used market, and there's nothing in here I can't replace if I have to. The iMac is nowhere so accessible.)

The day the advance for the novel landed in my bank account, I was online ordering a new 27" retina iMac.

Dave Polaschek, of Adobe, was the one who convinced me that a retina iMac would matter to me. I'd been thinking, “I'm not doing 4K video and stuff like that, so why should I care about a 5K display? It's not like I can see the pixels in the standard display at normal working distance?”

Photoshop has a quirk. OK, it's designed in there on purpose, but it looks like a quirk. When you're running at screen magnifications of 50% or less, it cheats on the rendering, doing calculations in 8-bit color to speed things up and subsampling the image. This massively speeds up performance, so you can see near instantaneous real-time updates of what your file looks like even on a (relatively) slow system. if you've had the experience of working at the lower magnifications, jumping up to 67% or 100% to look at some detail and noticing that there's a visible lag while the screen updates, that's exactly what I'm talking about.

This has a downside. Screen renderings become inaccurate in annoying and sometimes really obstructive ways. View a stitched-together panorama at lower magnifications, and you'll see seam lines between the segments. That's an artifact of the subsampling, and it's only a minor annoyance. A major one is the banding and contouring that appears if you're working with adjustment layers that do any degree of substantial correction. I have that a lot, especially in my restoration work. the contouring isn't real, it's an artifact of each of those layers getting calculated at eight bits per channel. It can make it very difficult, sometimes impossible to accurately see (and work on) a full photograph.

The 27" retina display doubles the size of the image I can see the entirety of at 67% magnification and higher. Now my 12 and 16 megapixel photographs fit on the screen. It makes working on my photographs and restoration jobs a lot more comfortable and a lot faster. Plus, it's just plain nice to be able to see all that detail in the photograph without having to print it out

Dave was right. It was what I needed.

There are other ways I like my new iMac better. The newer thin-edge design is about 10 pounds lighter than the old machine. Not a big deal, except when you're trying to rearrange your office and lugging around a very awkward hunk of metal and glass. Apple eliminated the air gap between the glass and the screen that was on the older iMac and they substantially improved the anti-reflection coatings. I am no longer bugged by reflections from the glossy screen.

The color quality and brightness are better. Actually, I have way more brightness that I need. The color gamut of the retina display is a very close match to sRGB. My machine, out-of-the-box, was almost dead neutral and an exact match for sRGB. I did run a custom profile for the display, but other than opening up the shadows and linearizing them very slightly, I couldn't see any visible difference. If it weren't that I prefer a monitor calibrated to D50 then the iMac's native D65, I'd have been happy with the out-of-the-box display.

There was one unexpected bit of joy. Migrating from the old iMac to the new one was pain-free. I really wasn't expecting that. After all, I was jumping four generations of OS. A lot more stuff should break than did. Following Apple's instructions I hooked up my Time Machine backup from the old iMac, told it to migrate everything over, and let it run overnight. The next day the new iMac looked just like the old one… except better. I launched every single app — only four of them had broken, and only one of those was unexpected. That was solved by minor version upgrades, plus I needed a few new drivers for my printers.

I expected it to take days to get the machine configured. It took less than one.

You can get a basic 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display for $1,900. It's not the machine I would recommend if you're serious about Photoshop.

It'll have a 3.3 GHz Intel Core i5 CPU, 8GB RAM, a 1TB 7200 rpm drive and an AMD Radeon M290 GPU (2GB) graphics card. 8 GB of RAM is going to have you caching to disk pretty quickly in Photoshop, and then a rotating hard drive is going to be a real performance bottleneck.

The first thing you want to do, maybe the only thing, is max out that RAM at 32 GB. Don't buy the RAM from Apple; you'll save yourself $300 buying it from Other World Computing. It is the one part of an iMac that is user-upgradable.

I went for the whole-hog maximum machine: 4.0GHz QC i7 Turboboost 4.4GHz CPU, 1TB flash drive, and the AMD Radeon R9 M295X 4GB graphics card. Just because. The graphics card is the least important upgrade; there are some Photoshop operations where you may see an improvement because of it; it won't be much. It's more important if you're doing AV work or running multiple monitors. The better processor does produce a noticeable pick-me-up in a few circumstances. Both of these together add about $500 to the cost of the machine. Upgrading memory's far more important and cost-effective.

Then we come to that blasted drive. Apple has this thing called a Fusion Drive, which is a very, very smart hybrid drive. In a lot of circumstances it will substantially speed up performance. Photoshop is not that kind of circumstance. Especially not if your cache file and your photographs are on the same drive. What you want, what you need is 100% flash.

That'll cost you. Well, it cost me–– a $1,000 upgrade. All told, my maxxed-out configuration cost about twice as much as the baseline machine I linked to at B&H Photo. Oof.

Lastly I added an OWC Thunderbolt 2 Dock so I could continue to use my existing peripherals.

Oh my, does this machine fly. What difference does a flash drive make? For illustrative purposes, I copied a multigigabyte file folder from a subdirectory to the desktop. That meant I was “simultaneously” reading and writing from the same drive. Think of it as a stand-in for the worst possible Photoshop scenario, where the program is trying to simultaneously cache states, save a file, and load chunks of code.

On the old iMac, this read/write operation ran at about 40 MB per second. If I copied the folder to an external FireWire 800 drive, I could get it up to about 70 MB per second, because the drive head was no longer thrashing back-and-forth doing reads and writes on one drive.

On the new flash-equipped retina iMac? 400 MB per second. I don't know if would be even faster going to an external drive, because I don't own an external flash drive. Ask me if I care. 400 MB per second is good enough for me.

All in all, it's quite shiny. Even two months later. Still smells like a new computer.

Comments? Questions? The floor is yours.

Oh yeah, with one qualifier: if you're inclined to comment with a rant about PCs vs. Macs or Windows vs. Mac OS vs. UNIX, just don't go there. Save yourself the time and effort of composing such a dismissive missive, because I am simultaneously pre-bored and annoyed by such. They will be malleted.

 

Ctein, TOP Technical Editor
(who is posting on-and-off while Mike's nomadic)

Original contents copyright 2015 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Thoughts for Your Sunday ~ Making a Left Turn at Albuquerque**

Written by Ctein

First, a Short Public Service Announcement.

By now, all of you who ordered Kate Kirkwood prints should have received them (with the possible exception of a few international orders). If you have not yet received your print order, regardless of where you live, please e-mail me (ctein@pobox.com) so I can pay special attention to the tracking on those orders.

If I don't hear from you, I'm going to assume you received your order and it was in good shape and you are happy with the print.

~~~~~~

So… you know those two black-and-white photographs I posted a few days back? They're not isolated cases. Since the beginning of last year, despite the insanity of my recent life, I've added 50-odd photographs to my portfolio. (No, they are not up on my website; I haven't had enough time to do everything else and update  that. Real Soon Now.)

Two-thirds of those photographs are black and white.

Since the beginning of this year, 80% of what I've printed has been black and white.

I haven't done that much black and white work, relative to the color, in over 40 years. For the past two decades, up until very recently, my work (film and digital) has been between 95% and 100% color. It wasn't part of some strategy, it was simply that whenever I would decide to go out photographing my muse would be strongly, almost universally, inclined to choose color over black-and-white.

Something is different. The numbers have grown to be more than a statistical fluke.  It might be passing fad or fancy. It might be because I find black and white easier and more relaxing to print than color, and I have been overworked and exhausted for too much of the past couple of years. It might be that I am totally infatuated with infrared black and white, but that like most infatuations, it will pass. It might be true love, a  genuine secular change in  artistic direction for me.

Honestly, I don't know.  Mind you, I don't really need to know. I will find out in due time.

 (I do find some modest amusement in the notion that, given the several left turns my life has taken of late, in 10 years people might be saying, “Oh yeah, Ctein. The novelist. He does B&W photography too, you know. … didn't he used to do color or something?”)

 

So, what's new and different in your life, of late?

 

(**Thank You, Bugs Bunny)

Ctein, TOP Technical Editor
(who is posting on-and-off while Mike's nomadic)

Original contents copyright 2015 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.

TOP's links!

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Where Can You Buy Custom Profiles?

Folks, I'm spinning this off as a separate topic.

The title pretty much says it all. If you are using custom  printer profiles and you're not rolling your own, who's making them for you these days? I used to recommend Cathy and Eric but they've long been out of the business.  (That's “long” as measured in Internet-years, which is a lot like dog-years… except faster.)

Readers, what are your recommendations? Inquiring minds want to know.

 

 

Ctein, TOP Technical Editor
(who is posting on-and-off while Mike's nomadic)

Original contents copyright 2015 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.

TOP's links!

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