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Dye Transfer and Me, Part IV: Where Most of the Work Is

Fig. 1

Words and photos by Ctein

Dye Transfer and Me: A Meandering Half-Century Journey: As a prelude to the big Black Friday Dye Transfer Sale I'm writing a series of columns talking about dye transfer—how it worked, what it meant to me and other photographers and printers, and our perpetual jousting with Eastman Kodak. (Important note: You cannot put in print orders or requests before the sale. Please don't email me your preferences in advance.)

Part 4 of an Uncertain Number...

In Which There is More Hacking of Process
My first meeting with Frank McLaughlin in 1978 was a high point in my life. Frank was warm and welcoming and knew everybody in the dye transfer world. Frank introduced me to Phil Condax, Louis's son and a curator at the Eastman House—we also became lifelong friends—and Tom Rankin and the other folks at Frog Prince, a commercial dye transfer lab in San Francisco. Frank knew there was strength in networking and he made certain we networked.

Frank brought in Bob Speck, who developed the dye transfer process for Kodak under the direction of its inventor, Louis Condax. Pretty exciting! Bob and Frank pored over my prints and gushed fulsome praise, to a degree that anyone with a smaller artistic ego than mine would have found embarrassing (I coped). They declared they had never seen better dye transfer prints. I expect my feet didn't leave any footprints as I was departing Kodak.

Frank's favors didn't stop with introductions. He put in a word about my work with Kodak's public relations department which, a few years later, produced its own substantial rewards, and he introduced me to my biggest and best clients. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Fig. 2.

Dye transfer changed what I photographed. This print medium could handle anything I could record on film, and that was a lot. Color negative films had an exceptionally long exposure range, well over 10 stops of straight-line curve. I could photograph in the middle of the desert, at noon, and make prints that held detail in the highlights and the shadows (figure 2).

Night photography was—and still is—one of my passions, though not the way it was usually done back in the era of available darkness, pushing films to their max. In college, I'd begun to wonder what kind of photographs I'd get if I went all the way to the other extreme—slow films, processed for minimum grain and maximum tonal quality. The first time I saw what urban landscapes at midnight looked like on Panatomic X, I was hooked.

Fig. 3.

When I moved to color and medium format, it was the same. It demanded patience, a flashlight, and a good book. Occasionally the exposures were only a few minutes; figure 3 ran 45 minutes. I discussed reciprocity failure last column—contrast went up, and the scenes were contrasty to begin with. Well, that's what contrast-control masking and dye transfer were for. I dealt with previously impossible-to-print-well negatives like figure 1. That vein of work continued throughout my film and darkroom career, culminating in the Christmas in California series.

Dye transfer was a "hi-fi" printing process that exposed problems the same way a really good sound system reveals a poor recording. I loved telephoto lenses (still do), and long lenses are prone to lateral chromatic aberration—the color fringing that occurs towards the edges of the frame because the lens produces red, green, and blue images of slightly different magnifications. Before digital image processing, which made the fix simple, it was something you lived with. I could ignore it in smaller prints, but I was printing large in dye transfer. Worse, the high color purity of the dye transfer process made those fringes more obvious. Worst, color fringes in a dye transfer print look like bad technique! It takes a technical eye to distinguish lens aberrations from mis-registered color separations. This would not do.

I measured the exact amount of the color fringing and calculated how much I'd have to raise or lower the enlarger head to compensate. It was a millimeter or so over a throw distance of about a meter. When I printed a negative made with my 300mm lens I carefully adjusted the enlarger head between the matrices to compensate for the aberration. Mostly, it worked. I rarely got perfect results—enlargers really aren't designed to be manipulated that way with any degree of precision alignment—but there was much less color fringing than there would have been if I done nothing.

Other complications—I've mentioned that one of my misconceptions was that dye transfer prints would be technically the equal or superior to chromogenic prints in all respects. Among other delusions, I expected dye transfer prints to be as clean and flawless as a well-executed Ektacolor print.

Oh my, but that is to laugh! We're talking about a process that involves multiple generations, large trays of liquid dyes, rinses and washes and multiple hand transfers. Why in the world I ever imagined that would produce spotless and flaw-free results, I have no idea.

Any bits of dust on my negative or contrast masks produced a white spot in the matrices that would have to be retouched out of every print I made. You can bet I went to great lengths to be as clean as possible, and sometimes I achieve perfection...but more often, not. Further, any bits of dust or air bubbles that got trapped between the matrix and the receiving paper would keep the dye from transferring to the paper, leaving a little bright red (minus cyan), green (minus magenta) or blue (minus yellow) spot that also needed to be retouched.

If a bit of grit got embedded in a matrix or it got scratched, then there'd be a little bright spot or streak to spot out of every print thereafter. Manipulating large sheets of soft, wet emulsion for print after print, stuff would happen. Even careful craftspeople aren't perfect, as much as we'd like to be.

Little particles of dye precipitated out of the liquid baths. If they settled on a matrix and weren't entirely removed in the rinse step, those dye specks would transfer themselves to the receiving paper to create a minuscule pinpoint spot of pure cyan, magenta, or yellow. Fortunately, the yellow specks were invisible to the human eye, but the cyan and the magenta? Not so much. They had to be bleached out, and the cleared spot retouched in with dye.

Sometimes there were only a few. Sometimes there were hundreds. Very rarely were there none. Dye specks like that are so common in dye transfer prints that it's one of the more reliable diagnostics for telling if what you're looking at is a dye transfer print. Peer really closely and the odds are good you'll see a primary-color speck somewhere in the light areas.

So, spotting had to be done. A lot of spotting, and I wanted it to be perfect, because I didn't know any better. Nobody knowledgeable was trying to turn out perfect dye transfer prints. (Okay, almost nobody—Frank Tartaro's lab in New York was as obsessive about this as I was.)

It helps that the dyes used to make a dye transfer print are the same ones you use for spotting and retouching. Any finishing work you do can be flawless and invisible, if you're good enough. And your brushes are good enough. I'd buy six or eight 000 brushes to find one that produced the perfect pinpoint spot of dye. I coddled those perfect spotting brushes, but over the course of my career I wore out several generations. Lots of print spotting!

Potassium permanganate selectively removes cyan dye. Happily, that was the most common dye speck. I tried the finest spotting brushes I had, but they made far too big a blotch. I can't recall what inspired me, but I discovered that toothpicks, whittled down to a needle point, proved ideal. I could take out a spot a tenth of a millimeter across and leave the surrounding area almost untouched.

It also helped that I'm phenomenally nearsighted. In my youth, without my glasses my "infinity" working distance was only four inches from my nose!

Permanganate left a brown stain that I removed with sodium bisulfite applied, again, with a sharpened toothpick. Then I had to quickly wipe off the bisulfite with 1% acetic acid, because bisulfite itself would start to bleach dye if left on the print.

Unfortunately there wasn't a strong selective bleach for magenta. There was a general-purpose bleach that would attack all three dyes—it was Kodak's R-18 B&W film reducer formula. R-18 is a mixture of potassium permanganate and sulfuric acid. It bleached great, but it turned out to have problems that I discovered only when I went after the other "dirty" part of dye transfer—stained borders.

In theory, the totally clear parts of the matrix film, where there is no gelatin emulsion to carry the dye (see process description) should print as pure white. Well, they don't. Usually they'd carry a few CC of dye density over to the print paper. Even though I'd figured out how to get sharp borders on my prints' image areas, the surrounding borders would usually have a faint dye stain. Some people considered it a mark of the process. I considered it unattractive.

After I made a print, I'd bleach the area around the image with R-18 bleach, removing most or all of the dye from an inch or three around the image to provide clean white border suitable for framing. Then I'd wipe that whole area down with sodium bisulfite, rinse it off with 1% acetic acid, and dry the print. Nice.

What I didn't realize was that the sulfuric acid in the reducer was creating residual sulfur compounds in the paper. I was turning archival paper into non-archival paper! The paper started to turn brown and get brittle where I'd applied the bleach. Fortunately for me, the the consequences of that became apparent in less than a year and I hadn't sold any prints yet. I needed a better solution—pun intended.

I dug into the chemistry and decided that it wasn't sulfuric acid in particular that was important, it was that it acidified the potassium permanganate. Perhaps glacial acetic acid would do—it wasn't anywhere as strong an acid as sulfuric but if it drove the pH low enough....

It did. R-18C (for Ctein flavor) worked just as well as the Kodak formula and it meant I didn't have to contaminate my prints with sulfuric acid. Not so incidentally, it also worked just as well as R-18 as a film reducer. I passed that information on to Kodak, although I don't think it ever made it into the literature. Now you know.

Why have I spent so much time talking about print spotting and finishing? Because that's where most of the work is! After the first print, I spend far more time on that than on transferring prints. That's the reason I've had to put something like a thousand hours into preparing prints for the upcoming sale.

Ctein

Original contents copyright 2019 by Ctein. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Dye Transfer and Me, Part III: Sweat and Tears

Words and photo by Ctein

Dye Transfer and Me: A Meandering Half-Century Journey: As a prelude to the big Black Friday Dye Transfer Sale I'm writing a series of columns talking about dye transfer—how it worked, what it meant to me and other photographers and printers, and our perpetual jousting with Eastman Kodak. (Important note: You cannot put in print orders or requests before the sale. Please don't email me your preferences in advance.)

Part 3 of an Uncertain Number...

In Which Our Hero Doth First Engage the Great Yellow Beast with Stealth and Guile
When we left off in Part 2 (and mid-1976) I had written to Frank McLaughlin at Eastman Kodak about my ongoing and unsolvable-by-me problems getting good prints out of the dye transfer process. It was an act of desperation. It paid off.

Frank's reply answered all my questions, included a "DT care package" of every related publication Kodak had, and concluded with "The dye transfer process is complicated and sometimes frustrating, but...keep at it. If I can be of any assistance, please let me know."

Fortified, I plunged back into the learning pool. By the end of the year I had the process under control (no, not "mastered," never mastered). They were small prints and artistically insignificant, to teach me how to manage the process and it. The art would come later, after I learnt craft.

Finally, the big moment—my first full-size (20x24-inch) print for my portfolio. I chose this photograph (figure 1) because I knew it would benefit from dye transfer's unique qualities. I needed a long density range to render everything from the disk of the sun to the near-silhouette Saturn/Apollo 17 vehicle with appropriate brilliance. In addition, the Ektacolor print was monochrome orange. I knew there was more of a range of hues than that, and dye transfer, with its excellent yellow (see Part 2) was the ideal medium for this photograph.

Fig. 1

I ordered a box of 16.5x21.25-inch Pan Matrix Film, the largest sheet size it came in. Not quite large enough for a 16x20 image area, not if I wanted big enough borders to handle the film, but close enough. It would've been nice to have 20x24 film, but it was already fabulously expensive—800 current bucks for 25 sheets.

Into the darkroom! I spent a day making test strips, nailing down the correct exposure and color balance. My first process innovation had been controlling the color balance using the dial-in filtration in my enlarger's color head. The usual way to control color balance was to vary the relative exposures for the red-, green-, and blue-light-exposed matrices. I knew how to color balance this way, but it had disadvantages. I had to do annoying calculations to make fine color shifts as appropriate RGB exposure adjustments. More significantly, exposure times much beyond 90 seconds would induce reciprocity failure.

Photographers think of reciprocity failure in film as being about time. Really, it's about intensity. The lower the light level hitting the film, the less effective the film is at recording it. Reducing the light intensity by a stop reduces the recorded image by more than a stop, because the weaker light isn't recorded as efficiently as the stronger.

Reciprocity failure causes contrast to increase. A one-stop luminance difference in exposure might become a 1.1- or 1.2-stop effective difference in what the film records, or worse. The lower the intensity (the longer the required exposure) the stronger the effect. This would be very bad news for color separations. They all have to have the same contrast or you'll get color-crossover in the highlights and shadows, even if the midtones are correct.

Many of my exposures were going to be a lot more than a 90 seconds. Well, I couldn't get rid of reciprocity failure, but I could equalize the exposure times by dialing color filtration into my enlarger's color head. For example, if the red exposure was half that of the green and blue, dialing 30CC (one stop) of cyan filtration into the color head would make the red exposure time match the other two. Yes, with very long exposures there'd be an overall contrast increase, but I had tools to correct that.

This worked beautifully. My most extreme case was a dense negative of a very high contrast subject which needed a very strong contrast-reduction mask. I wound up with 12-minute exposures, but the print looked gorgeous.

Okay, enough about my cleverness. It's a new day; it's time to make my first big set of matrices.

They are horribly dense, badly overexposed. What happened?!

In my enthusiasm, I'd forgotten to stop the lens down after focusing. There went $100 worth of film.

Matrix Set 2. The exposures are just fine, but two of the sheets of film stick together in the developing tray and I can't get them apart fast enough (developing this stuff was hard). There's a big blotch in one of the matrices.

Another $100 worth of film. Grrr.

Set 3: The exposures are good, the development feels good. As I rinse the magenta matrix in hot water to remove the excess emulsion (see the process description), the entire image slides off the film! I'd accidentally exposed one of the matrices wrong-side up, and that's what happens if you do.

At this point my memory fails me. I can't recall what went wrong after that...traumatic amnesia, I'd guess. All I know is that I went through four —that's right, four—more sets of matrices, and there was something wrong with each and every one and it was different each time.

What I do remember is being in tears. I'd expected that very expensive box of film would get me (optimistically) a half dozen finished prints, but I had zero. I gave up for the day.

The next day, calm and less tearful, I went back into the darkroom, took a deep breath, centered myself as much as I could, and made Matrix Set 8. It was good. My first successful portfolio print, achieved through sweat, blood, and tears.

Okay, no blood—there were enough of the other two, thank you.

Fortunately, I never had another experience remotely like that first one. Occasionally I would screw up a set of matrices—galling, and expensive—but the majority of the time everything went fine. In fact, I can't remember much about my dye transfer printing for the next year, it was so uneventful. It's what they say, no news is good news.

Not that I didn't come up with all sorts of little questions; and in early 1978 I sent a long list of them off to Frank McLaughlin. He courteously answered most of them and encouraged me to continue writing him. I did, and we quickly struck up a friendship that lasted for the rest of his life.

Correction: something noteworthy did happen in June of 1977—my first professional publication, an article on contrast masking color negatives, appeared in Petersen's Photographic, the big photography-craft magazine in the US (circulation: 300,000+). It was an article Bob Nadler at Camera 35 had wanted, but it had taken me a couple of years to get around to writing it and by that time Bob had moved on. That taught me an important lesson—never, ever put off writing an article that an editor has asked for! I sent the orphaned article to Karen Sue Geller at Petersen's, who bought it and launched my writing career.

As I wrote back in Part 1, one of the reasons I had a five-part series for Petersen's Photographic, "Dye Transfer for Beginners," in 1980, was so that no one else would ever have to go through the hell I went through climbing learning curves I didn't even know were there when I started. There was a second reason. I was scheming.

I met up with Bob Nadler in early 1978 when he was in San Francisco on a book tour. On hearing of my success in learning how to make dye transfer prints, he told me that Kodak was thinking seriously about killing off the process or, at the very least, eliminating shipments of anything less than professional-lab quantities of supplies. Think thousands to tens of thousands of current-dollars minimum orders. That would eliminate the likelihood of anyone new taking up the process—a slower path to demise, but no less certain.

That would not do. With Frank's off-the-record and sometimes tacit support, I approached Petersen's later that year with the idea of a five-part series on making dye transfer prints. Karen had also heard the rumors and said she'd be on board with me doing that...but only if I could guarantee supplies would be available in reader-affordable quantities. I said I could. Technically, that wasn't true at that moment.

Okay, nothing technical about it.

My then-partner Terry and I made annual driving trips cross-country each fall, so a few months later I was in Rochester meeting Frank for the very first time. I told him that he could tell Kodak that Petersen's had "committed" (nudge nudge, wink wink) to running a series on dye transfer. Frank was a loyal Kodak employee, but he was more loyal to dye transfer. Our co-conspiracy worked. Kodak management bought it and canceled their plans for discontinuing or drastically restricting product availability.

"Dye Transfer for Beginners," Part 1 of 5, appeared in January of 1980. Through a scheduling SNAFU (Paul Farber's, not Karen's), Part 2 did not appear in the February issue but was delayed until March. The magazine got no fewer than five letters from readers asking what had happened to the second installment, which was incredible!

I know how funny that sounds in these days of instant Internet communication. It was different back then. When all correspondence with magazines was by mail and there was no such thing as a "Web presence," letters from readers were few and far between. It was significant when an article got even two letters from readers. Five? That was unheard of. We had a hit on our hands and dye transfer was safe for another few years.

It was my first joust with Kodak. It wasn't going to be my last by any means, and I won them all, save at the very last. Okay, a few beyond the very last. Yes, friends, more dirt will be dished. Stay tuned to this channel.

Ctein

Original contents copyright 2019 by Ctein. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

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

Dave: "Ctein, Thank you for writing this series! Such interesting tidbits about the dye transfer process, along with a fortuitous series of events that allowed you to learn the process and practice it for years. The columns read as though they were part of fictional story, but you persevered by learning the process, asking questions to your contact at Kodak, figuring out a way to prolong the manufacture of dye transfer materials, and more to come! Even though I know nothing about dye transfer, this series fascinates me with all the twists and turns of the story. I commend you for continuing after the first results were disastrous and expensive! I can almost imagine how you felt when that expensive box of film was depleted without a decent print—'traumatic amnesia' indeed! I'm eager to read the next part in your series."

Dye Transfer and Me, Part II

(Part 2 of an Uncertain Number)

Figure 1 (see text)

Words and photos by Ctein

As a prelude to the big Black Friday Dye Transfer Sale, I'm writing several columns talking about dye transfer—how it worked, what it meant to me and other photographers and printers, and our perpetual jousting with Eastman Kodak. (Important note: You cannot put in print orders or requests before the sale. Please don't email me your preferences in advance.)

Back to our story...

When we last left our intrepid hero it was 1975 and he was about to attempt to scale mountains that he imagined were molehills (okay, maybe not so intrepid, not so heroic). As I said, I had misconceptions.

Why bother? Dye transfer had two major advantages over other processes: control and inherent quality. It was like having Photoshop in the darkroom. You had multiple tools for controlling curve shape, both the overall grayscale curve shape and the individual RGB color curves.

You could change the contrast, saturation, and overall print density range independently. You could make these adjustments to the overall print or to the individual primary colors. There were always several paths to each aesthetic end; for instance there were three different ways to increase contrast that had different effects on saturation and print density range. There are, in fact, so many different ways to control the print appearance that I don't believe anyone has ever entirely mastered the process. I certainly reject the term "master" for myself. There is just no end to the learning curve.

I photographed Figure 1 at a considerable distance, so normal light scattering in the air made washed out the shadows and made them progressively more blue. Printed conventionally, there is no fix for this. With dye transfer, I fixed the white point to keep it neutral but increased the green contrast (magenta dye) a little and the blue contrast (yellow) a lot. That eliminated the atmospheric scattering problem.

Dye transfer's inherent color fidelity and gamut are unsurpassed. Dye transfer prints can have a maximum density approaching 3.0. No other printing process, analog or digital, can reach that level of density and saturation. That gives dye transfer prints an extremely large color gamut.

Even more important, dye transfer's dyes have high color accuracy, especially the yellow, which is comparable to what you'd see in a digital printer. Chromogenic yellow has a strong magenta component—it looks more like "Kodak box" yellow. In a conventional color print, distinct hues between orange and yellow blend into the same shade of yellow-orange. When I printed Figure 2 on chromogenic paper, it was a uniform orangeish-tan, almost monochrome. The dye print distinguishes the yellows, tans, and oranges.

Figure 2

Worse, chromogenic papers can't produce a vivid green. That poor yellow inevitably introduces a magenta component, which is the complement of green, muting it. I printed the illustration in the previous column as one of my very early dye transfers because a chromogenic print clobbered the delicate yellow-greens.

Dye transfer originally had better light-fading and dark-keeping characteristics than any other commercial process. The light stability of chromogenic and Cibachrome prints caught up, but dye transfer is much superior when it comes to dark storage. A dye transfer print in the dark at room temperature has a projected life of 300 years. I am confident in that number. Dye transfer materials did not change significantly over half a century and Kodak regularly measured reference prints that had been kept in the dark. There's 50 years worth of data that says that their accelerated tests are accurate. No other material has been around long enough to give us that sort of real-world confidence.

Now you know why I wanted to make, as Charlie put it, "some good prints." In 1975, I had the will and the money. The means came next. The easy part was ordering boxes of chemicals, dyes, paper, and Pan Matrix Film. It was an awful lot of money. A single box of 25 sheets of 10x12-inch Pan Matrix Film (for making 8x10 prints) ran about $300 (in current bucks). That'll make a maximum of eight prints, assuming nothing goes wrong and no do-overs. Reality was often less kind. Film for 16x20 prints? Three times that much. 11x14 paper? $4/sheet.

Equipment came cheaper. Dye transfer requires laying down the three primary colors separately and in perfect register on a sheet of receiving paper, using "pin registration." It's very low-tech and surprisingly precise. I wasn't sure I could afford a proper register punch (those supplies were really expensive), but I had a good three-hole punch. I punched a sheet of film, gave it to a friend who had a lathe, and he cut two sets of hex-head screws down to exactly match the holes in the punched sheet. I took one set, mounted them on a thin sheet of wood using the punched film to get them aligned exactly, and attached the pin assembly to the end of a vacuum exposure easel that I built out of Masonite, two by fours, and a spare vacuum cleaner. I saved myself hundreds of dollars.

Well, guess what—that primitive vacuum register exposure easel worked beautifully for my entire dye transfer printing career. A few years later I replaced my three hole punch with a real used (and affordable!) Kodak Register Punch and my custom-cut pins with a Condit Manufacturing pin strip (also affordable). That was it for the next 35 years.

My original register transfer easel was a horrible kludge of wood, aluminum, brass hinges and masonite. It was cheap. It worked—after a fashion. It gave me good alignment on the transfers, but it was a royal pain to use. As soon as I switched to Condit pin strips, I abandoned it for a much more elegant design, a simple sheet of heavy plate glass with the pin stripped glued to one end. Like the exposure easel, it served me well for the rest of my career.

There were a bunch of other equipment problems to address. I've mentioned I had some misconceptions about dye transfer. One of the big ones was that, knowing that dye transfer prints were "better" than any other kind of commercially available print, I assumed that they were as good or better in every respect. Specifically, that dye transfer prints would be as precisely reproducible as conventional color prints and come out as clean and flaw-free, with nice sharp framing and white borders.

False! But not knowing any better (I still hadn't seen a dye transfer print) I strove for that. Getting clean edges on the image area was a trial. In ordinary printing a hinged four-bladed paper easel overlays the print paper and crops the photograph exactly where you want. I suppose one could engineer a four-bladed pin registration easel that would ensure that those blades overlaid each sheet of Pan Matrix Film in exactly the same position. I wouldn't have been able to afford it if they had.

After some trial and considerable error, I hit upon the idea of masking the edges of my negatives directly, using strips of opaque metallic tape to define the crop. It worked—also, after a fashion. It never produced super-sharp nor super-straight edges. Geometric imperfections in my laying of the tape were magnified by the enlargement factor.

Eventually I figured out a better approach that did produce the super-crisp edges I longed for. I cut out full-size masks from opaque sheet film and punched the end so that I could register them on the exposure easel. After I installed a sheet of Pan Matrix Film on the easel and turned on the vacuum, I laid to the mask down on top. You can tell the photographs I printed in the very early years from later ones by the sloppy borders—they got a lot better once I surmounted that learning curve.

By the end of 1975, I was ready to start working. Learning how to develop Pan Matrix Film, not easy! I had to develop three sheets of large, un-hardened emulsion uniformly and to exactly the same degree, by interleaving them in a tray of developer in pitch darkness (panchromatic, remember?) with a total development time of only two minutes. Compared to that, learning to dye, rinse, and roll prints was relatively easy.

I learned all the steps in Kodak's magnificent 24-page pamphlet and, truthfully, it wasn't all that hard. Just one small problem.

After six months, I'd burnt through all the money from Charlie's first check and was into my second, and I was still getting lousy prints. Development was hit or miss and I couldn't get a complete and clean transfer, where all the dye in the matrix migrated over to the print paper like it was supposed to. Something was wrong and I didn't know what. In June 1976, I penned a letter to one Mr. Frank McLaughlin at Eastman Kodak that began as follows:

Dear Mr. McLaughlin—

I was given your name by the local Kodak representative as one to contact on questions about the dye transfer process. I began teaching myself the technique about six months ago—while I have most of the aspects under control, a few problems pop up with annoying frequency....

I had no idea what kind of response, if any I would get. I had never tried writing to a major company like Kodak before, and I had no faith that a nobody like me (yes, then I was a nobody, no publishing credentials, nada) would get anything more than a boilerplate "thank you for your interest in our product..." response.

My lack of faith was badly misplaced.

...Which is where we will pick up with the next thrilling installment!

Ctein

Original contents copyright 2019 by Ctein. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

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

hugh crawford: "I always thought those funky edges of the image that revealed the separate layers of the image were pretty neat. Well not literally neat but a cool example of letting the process show."

William Schneider: "At Ohio University a long time ago, there was a small room set up with equipment required for dye transfer. Being a daunting process, only a handful of students ever attempted it. One professor there, Arnold Gassan, worked with the process. In that room, I recall colorful stains on the countertop, floor and walls. I suspect that this could be a very messy process. Perhaps tie-dye shirts were an unintended badge of honor for practitioners."

Ctein replies: Dear Hugh, You're not wrong. It's just that I grew up with a different aesthetic around photographic prints. Not "fine art" prints like serigraphs or lithographs, which I also did—there, unfinished edges were part of the expected look. Heh, no one ever required artists to be consistent. From a commercial point of view, all my clients wanted those clean edges. Over my entire career, I didn't have one ask, "Can you do unregistered edges for me?" Interestingly, unfinished edges are still part of the platinum print "look," where practitioners have to prepare and brush the light-sensitive emulsion onto raw paper stock. The aesthetics of the brushstrokes at the edge of the image area are an important of the quality of the print.

Dear William, Oh yeah, a very good way to turn new (dress) clothes into old (work) clothes—wear them in the darkroom. Shoes, too. Having dilute acetic acid repeatedly dripped on them doesn't leave them very happy.

Fred: "Wow. As a former mediocre (at best) black-and-white printer I am very fascinated with this series. It feels to me like 'inside baseball' at its best. I am eagerly awaiting the next installment."

Review: Topaz Labs JPEG to RAW AI

Written and illustrated by Ctein

The last of my Topaz Labs reviews concerns a nifty little program with the intriguing title of "JPEG to RAW AI." It is, as they say, a one trick pony, and the trick is in the title. Hand it a JPEG of your choice and it will generate a RAW file (or 16-bit TIFF, if that is your preference).

If you have no interest whatsoever in working with JPEGs, you can skip out on this column and go do something more productive with your time. No worries, it won't be on the final exam. I'll wait...

dum ta dum ta dum hummm...

Okay, the class is a lot smaller; you can all move in closer so I don't have to shout.

So...why would Ctein, the Guy Who Does Everything in RAW, even care about a program like this? One reason is that sometimes it's not my call. Remember that two of the pillars that make CteinCo the multinational powerhouse that it is are custom printing and photo restoration. Sometimes the best file that a client can provide is a JPEG. Sometimes it's a really crappy JPEG and what they want to know is whether I can turn it into a semi-decent photograph.

Another reason is that, umm, "stuff" happens. As in, my camera had a bad hiccup (or I did something dumb—take your pick), reset itself to all its defaults, and I didn't realize I was photographing in JPEG instead of RAW mode.

Also, I know that some of you prefer to photograph in JPEG mode (I don't judge). That's just fine, until you want to manipulate some photo in a way that pushes it outside of its comfort zone. Like, say, punching up a dusky and hazy blue sky and all of a sudden the contouring that wasn't visible in the original high quality JPEG becomes unacceptable banding. Because, eight bits! The dreaded picket-fence histogram. Simply switching the image mode from 8-bit to 16-bit doesn't get you out of that one, because the contouring is baked into the image.

It is true that you can't get something for nothing, but a JPEG isn't nothing, it's just a badly mangled something. Like the aforementioned hazy sky. You know it's not supposed to be contoured, it's supposed to be smooth. That's just common sense. Enter Artificial Common Sense—train a deep-learning network to recognize what the mangling looked like and undo as much of it as possible. Build the rules it invents into a standalone program, and you have JPEG to RAW AI.

It cannot work big miracles. It cannot take a truly crappy JPEG and turn it into a fabulous photograph. But it can work many small miracles and that can be the difference between intolerable and tolerable image quality. Consider this:

(Click to enlarge)

I created this JPEG for illustration purposes from one of my original photographs. I compressed it at Photoshop's lowest quality JPEG setting so that the artifacts would be really obvious even after TOP's TypePad interface gets done with it (fingers firmly crossed).

I handed that JPEG off to JPEG to RAW AI and let it massage it at its automatic settings (there are sliders to manually change the degree of artifact removal and sharpening). In a couple of seconds I had this:

'Nuff said?

Understand that this is an extreme case. I wanted something that would come through clearly when published here. Most of the time the results will be a lot less dramatic. But—most of the time—they'll be visibly better than the original JPEG you ran through JPEG to RAW AI.

Unlike the previously reviewed GigaPixel AI and Sharpen AI, JPEG to RAW AI is not a monstrous resource hog. You should pay attention to the system requirements Topaz Labs puts forth, but I think it will run acceptably on most any system, as you can set processing preferences. You can have it run as a background task, control the amount of graphic memory consumption and even turn off GPU utilization entirely. It won't be fast, but it should do the job.

As is usual for Topaz Labs, JPEG to RAW AI has a 30-day fully-functional free trial. You don't have to spend $99.99 to find out if this particular pony is worth it to you.

Next? As a prelude to the big Black Friday Dye Transfer Sale, I'll be writing several columns talking about dye transfer—how it worked, what it meant to me and other photographers and printers, and our perpetual jousting with Eastman Kodak. Indeed, there was jousting, almost from Day One (my Day One, that is). On yeah, dirt will be dished. Stay tuned.

Ctein

Ctein, pronounced "kuh-TINE," rhymes with fine, is one of the most experienced and accomplished photo-writers alive. He was TOP's Technical Editor before leaving for a new career as a science fiction novelist. He has written two books of photo-tech, Digital Restoration from Start to Finish and Post-Exposure. This is his 345th column for TOP; older columns can be found under the "Ctein" Category in the right-hand sidebar.

Original contents copyright 2019 by Ctein. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

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

parkylondon: "Many thanks for this series Ctein. They've been very useful and have helped me fine tune my Topaz AI collection. I remember, fondly, our afternoon in The Photographers Gallery in London and look forward to meeting you again one day. Thanks."

More Artificial Common Sense: Topaz Labs GigaPixel AI

Written and illustrated by Ctein

I am, for the most part, not a fan of "sharpening for output" nor of upsampling programs. Sharpening for output has, for me, translated into harsh, unrealistic edges and a degradation of what I would (imprecisely) call photographic quality. It also seems to be fundamentally misapplied—the times when I do need sharpening output are when I'm printing very small, not very large, as the printer rendering algorithms tend to suppress very fine, low-contrast detail.

As for upsampling, I gave that a thorough inspection about a dozen years back in these very pages:

It's Bigger, But Is It Better?

It's Bigger, But Is It Better? Part II

It's Bigger, But Is It Better? Part III

The takeaway, if all that is seriously longissimus, non legi [too long, didn't read —Ed.] is that the improvements were modest, nothing was superior under all circumstances, and Photoshop's built-in resizing algorithms worked, on average, as well as anything else. For the heck of it, I checked out the notion that upsampling to a printer's native resolution (360 or 720 PPI in the case of Epson; other manufacturers may be different) produced a higher quality print then letting the printer's driver handle this (which it does behind the scenes when you hand it something of a different PPI). It didn't.

In the years since then third-party programs have improved, but so has Photoshop. I haven't been induced to change my practices.

Except—a few years back, I watched a conversation between Jeff Schewe and Michael Reichmann. Jeff, printing from Lightroom to an Epson 3880 printer, found that files upsampled from their native resolution to 360 or 720 PPI in Lightroom printed out distinctly more sharply than those upsampled by the Epson print driver.

Jeff noted that that didn't mean that another program (or printer) would yield the same results. I use Photoshop, not Lightroom. They are two different products with two different development teams, so they may or may not share the same upsampling code.

But…Jeff is another one of those Great Printing Experts, and 95% of the time we're in agreement (especially around the recommended settings for the Epson 3880 printer to produce the very best quality). I'm not going to ignore his four-year-old results in favor of my twelve, nuh uh. I needed to test out his assertion on my P800 printer, with Photoshop.

Big surprise (not), Jeff turned out to be right. A dozen years ago, I was probably right, but a dozen years is forever in the digital technology world. It pays to occasionally recheck one's beliefs.

Photographs upsampled in Photoshop to my printer's native resolution look distinctly better than those left to the printer's ministrations. Better and cleaner fine detail, more nicely delineated edges.

Not all photographs benefit from this. In particular, for those where some degree of grain/noise is an integral part of the image (sometimes true in my color work, more often true in my black and white infrared), improving the acuteness of a print didn't make it better, as it also enhanced that grain structure, which had been tuned to just where I wanted it. Most of the time, though, I followed Jeff's advice and was much pleased with the improved quality. And I still avoided third-party upsampling programs.

Then Topaz Labs came out with GigaPixel AI, the second of their machine-learning-trained tools. The first had been AI Clear, which had mightily impressed me with its ability to sort out detail from garbage, so I wanted to see what this pony's tricks were like. The samples on their website looked unbelievably good, even taking into account that they were cherry-picked, because advertising.

I downloaded the program and handed it a modest task, taking what was already a very detailed and sharp photograph and upsampling it to my printer's native resolution for a 17x22-inch print (about a 1.5X enlargement) with GigaPixel AI.

GigaPixel AI was effin' amazin'. I'm talking markedly better rendering of fine detail, both at strong edges and in subtle fine gradations, along with finer grain/noise (and less of it). All of this without artifacts or suppression of delicate tonalities! The results looked entirely natural and much better than Photoshop's upsampling. Below are sections from the Photoshop (figure 1) and GigaPixel (figure 2) renderings, at 100% if you click through to the standalone images. [Bear in mind that TOP's TypePad interface softens illustrations somewhat. —Ed.]

Fig. 1.

Fig. 2.

I looked at 17x22" prints from the non-upsampled, Photoshop-upsampled and GigaPixel AI-upsampled files, and there was a clear improvement with each step. In fact, the difference between Photoshop and GigaPixel was substantially greater than between no upsampling and Photoshop.

GigaPixel doesn't improve the prints from every single one of my photographs. Only about 75% of them. Sometimes the improvement is nothing more than finer grain/noise, where GigaPixel has subdivided blobby grains into smaller discrete ones.

At other times the improvements do look unbelievable. Take a look at figures 3 (Photoshop) and 4 (GigaPixel AI). Look at the improvement in both fine detail and noise, compared to the original file, which you're not even seeing because I can't figure out how to portray it at the same scale without upsampling. It's about what I'd expect going from a 20-megapixel camera to a 30–35 megapixel one.

Fig. 3

Fig. 4

GigaPixel AI is a standalone program. It will accept a variety of input formats and will output JPEG, TIFF, or PNG. For fine printing you're going to want the 16-bit TIFF output, of course. I use GigaPixel AI last in my printing workflow, after I've done all my local corrections and pixel fiddling. I duplicate the Photoshop file, save it as a TIFF, and run that through GigaPixel AI. That way I preserve my options for resizing to my printer's native resolution, no matter what size I decide I'm going to print at.

GigaPixel AI occasionally blows up, sometimes globally, sometimes just in one small part of the picture. Not often, but it happens. Machine-learning systems can get very weird notions in their silicon noggins. When it's just some small bit of the photograph that's gone off the rails I resize the Photoshop file to the same dimensions as the GigaPixel TIFF, and paste that TIFF in a new image layer on the file. That makes it easy to do a comparison between the renderings, just switching that layer on and off. Sometimes I throw away the GigaPixel AI rendering or mask it so I can hide the parts where GigaPixel AI went wonky. This is not a frequent occurrence. Most of the time, GigaPixel AI wins with no fiddling.

What's the downside? You may not be able to run GigaPixel AI on your current system. GigaPixel AI demands substantial system requirements. GigaPixel AI performs an insane number of calculations while it does its image analysis. It can commandeer your GPU, if you choose that option, and it'll still take minutes to render an image. I think we're talking millions of calculations per pixel, tens of teraflops total, to upsample a single photograph.

As is typical for Topaz Labs, Gigapixel has a 30-day fully-functional free trial, so you don't have to spend $99.99 to decide if it's worth it to you.

Topaz Labs sends me the stuff for free, but there's no question that I'd pay whatever they charge for this program. It's a four-star wonder.

Ctein

UPDATE Wednesday afternoon: Ctein wrote a reply to several commenters. Because not all the comments he responded to are among the "Featured" ones, I published his reply with the rest of the comments in the Comments section. To get to the full Comments section of this or any post, click on "Comments ([number])" at the bottom of the footer of every post. —Ed.

Ctein, pronounced "kuh-TINE," rhymes with fine, is one of the most experienced and accomplished photo-writers alive. He was TOP's Technical Editor before leaving for a new career as a science fiction novelist. He has written two books of photo-tech, Digital Restoration from Start to Finish and Post-Exposure. This is his 344th column for TOP; older columns can be found under the "Ctein" Category in the right-hand sidebar.

Original contents copyright 2019 by Ctein. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

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

Michael Elenko: "I was sold on GigaPixel AI somewhat out of desperation earlier this spring. I was curating a group exhibition and during the hanging, one print just didn't meet my standards for sharpness. I learned that the print originated from an iPhone 8, and that a friend of the artist attempted to upscale it to meet our print size requirements by using a Photoshop algorithm. I then got involved, tried other Photoshop algorithms as well as Lightroom's approach (which I usually favor), and was not satisfied. I then remembered reading about GigaPixel AI, downloaded a trial, and used it on the image file. The result was revelatory, and just in time for the exhibition opening. I've since purchased the product and am revisiting old-but-good work from 15 years ago."

Topaz Labs Sharpen AI: Artificial Common Sense

Written by Ctein

Please bear with me, Faithful Readers...this is a photography column. It'll just take me a bit to get us there.

I am irritated by the success that corporate/marketing droids have had in co-opting the term "A.I." That stands for "artificial intelligence," and has, in the past, commonly meant some kind of general intelligence that deals with the real world in all its perplexity. The ultimate goal may be (trans)human level, but it's gradable down—you could have parrot-level AI, or cat-level or even goldfish-level (currently, we've reached the some-but-not-all-insects level of AI).

Now it's been degraded to refer to any system that uses one of the deep learning networks (there are many different flavors of those) to learn how to do a sophisticated task. They're popping up all over, and they do amazing things. But Artificial Intelligence? Nah, I don't think so.

(What are those promoters going to do when we get genuine AI? Call it AIFRTTH—Artificial Intelligence, For Real This Time, Honestly? Maybe that's the first question we should ask real AI, if we ever get it.)

I think there's a better descriptor for what these programs do: Artificial Common Sense. I'm not being flippant. I think it's right and significant, and it lets us take these programs seriously. Believe me, we should be taking them seriously.

Common sense is something that we've thought of as being a fairly sophisticated function, a way of distilling down the otherwise unfathomable complexity and intricacy of the world into something we can manage almost intuitively. "Sophisticated" isn't the same as intelligent; dogs and cats exhibit a great deal of common sense, but down at their level of mentation.

At the human level, common sense isn't necessarily either smart or correct. Everyone here has likely had the experience of getting into an argument with somebody who, backed into a losing corner, utters those fateful words—"but, it's just common sense that...." What then comes out of their mouths is invariably wrong. Common sense is not, in fact, good at dealing with the esoteric. But it's pretty damned good at dealing with everyday life and figuring out what's important and what's ignorable.

At the forefront
Which brings me to photography software. Consider the sorts of manipulation and filter programs we use routinely, like noise reduction, enlargement, and sharpening routines. As humans, we look at a photograph and we can easily figure out what is noise and what is detail, because we just know what the world looks like. Sure, there are the edge cases, where the subject detail is getting so similar to the grain/noise in the photograph that we're not sure if the feature we're looking at is real or an artifact of the media. But by and large, we know the difference. When we sharpen or enlarge a photograph, we want the real detail improved and enhanced, not the grain and the artifacts. When we run noise reduction, we don't want it to degrade the real image detail and tonality. We know and can see the difference because, well, we just know. 'Cause we're smart, sophisticated real-world data processing machines.

Until recently, we could imagine that this kind of discrimination was also a sophisticated function, something that would require a pretty high level of real AI to achieve. Sure, we've got algorithms that do a fair job of brute-force faking it, but it's pretty obvious that they're faking it with frequency filters and threshold discriminators and the like. They don't really understand a photograph, not the way we do.

Now we've got software, based on some deeply learnt neural networks, that appears to be doing the real thing, making the same kind of common sense decisions about a photograph that we make when we look at it. These programs don't work by some programmer handing them a finished set of rules and equations. Instead, they throw problems and solutions at them and say, "Okay, now figure out how to get from A to B." The more cases the networks have to chew on, the cleverer the solutions they invent. After chewing on a few million comparison photographs, they've got some pretty clever ideas.

At the forefront is Topaz Labs. For several years now they've been turning out, in my opinion, the best Photoshop filters that money can buy. Yeah, that's sometimes a matter of taste. For example, I've got at least a half-dozen different noise-reduction programs, because no two of them work the same way and each works better on some kinds of images and noise than the others.

In the past year, Topaz Labs have leapt ahead of everyone else by harnessing these buzzword-AI-tools to develop standalone programs and plug-ins that are beyond good. They are unbelievably good. That's not hyperbole—I look at some of the results and I simply don't know how it's possible for a "dumb" program to achieve them.

This column I'm going to talk about Topaz Sharpen AI, a standalone program currently in version 1.4.0 and on sale for $59.99. (These programs are frequently updated, not to fix bugs or add features, but to incorporate the very latest cleverness that the neural net has figured out as it chews on ever more real-world cases.)

Sharpen AI is already scary clever. The photograph below (figure 1) is the very first photograph I threw at Sharpen AI. I did not cherry-pick it out of hundreds of trials. It sold me on the software.

Figure 1

(Note: Even if you click through to the enlarged versions of the figures, you're not seeing them at 100% and there may be compression artifacts—the limitations of the host publishing software. I've put a full-resolution version up on my website here with no compression artifacts, for any who want to pixel-peep.)

This is a photograph I'd normally throw away—I was on a moving boat and it was late in the day. It's the best of a pretty poor sequence, if I'm being honest. I figured it would be a good test case. The first program I tried was Photoshop's Shake Reduction filter. This algorithm is supposed to analyze the photograph, calculate what's causing the blur, and undo it. It's called deconvolution. The tricky part is coming up with exactly the right point blur function and applying it without generating artifacts. As you can see in figure 2, Shake Reduction still isn't very good at that. In fact, I've yet to find any but the simplest and most minimal cases of subject blur or camera shake where it produced an artistically-usable result.

Figure 2

Then I handed figure 1 off to Sharpen AI, selected the "Stabilize" processing mode and let it rip at its auto-default settings. Two minutes later, I got back figure 3.

Whoooaaa...

Yup, two minutes. Sharpen AI is not only clever but a hard worker. On a Retina iMac with a 4GHz i7 processor, it takes that long using seven threads to process a 20-MP image. That is a heckuvva lot of gigaflops, on the order of 50,000 calculations per pixel. Not your everyday sharpening routine, nosiree. In fact, just updating the preview within the application can take as much as 30 seconds. Not surprisingly I have "auto update" turned off; otherwise every time I moved one of the adjustment sliders the program would want to take another 30 seconds to update the preview. (Almost always, Sharpen's automatic settings produce the best results, so I'm not sure why I bother. I guess I'm just a fiddler.)

Once you've gotten past being awed at the overall improvement, take a close look at the thin twigs and branches along the lower sides and the bottom of the picture. Sharpen AI has brought them back into an amazing focus without any ringing artifacts and while leaving the background largely untouched.

If you look closely at the edges of the birds and the nest in the sky areas, you can see some small artifacts—thin vertical lines that extend a few pixels away from the subjects. These are much more evident on the screen than they would be in a print. In fact, I printed out the full image on 17x22" paper and they were completely invisible. The birds and the nest looked perfectly sharp with no evidence that any enhancements had been run on the original photograph.

Other modes
Sharpen AI has three processing modes—Sharpen, Stabilize, and Focus. You've seen what Stabilize can do. Sharpen does more ordinary sharpening and is recommended for photographs that are otherwise in-focus and un-blurred. The effect is modest, but it's clean. So far, I haven't found an out-of-focus photograph where Focus improves things. Unlike Sharpening, which is understated, Focus seems to go way overboard. Perhaps I haven't found the right image to apply it to, but so far it's been useless.

On every photograph I've tried, Stabilize does the best job, better than Sharpen even on photographs that are in focus and don't have any visible camera shake or subject movement. I haven't reached the point of applying it to every photograph, even the ones that don't look like they need any sharpening, but I'm starting to wonder if maybe I should try that.

Sharpen AI will process all kinds of original files—TIFF, JPEG, PSD, and even RAW. I don't recommend using it on RAW, though, if you like the rendition of your usual RAW converter. Me, I like what Adobe Camera RAW does and Sharpen's raw converter doesn't produce the same results, in terms of tone, color or geometric correction. I'm not saying it's bad, but it's different, and even though Sharpen will output a new raw file, the new one won't render the same as the original. My recommendation is to make your usual corrections in your preferred RAW converter, generate a 16-bit TIFF from that and put Sharpen to work on the TIFF.

In past years, I've deleted photographs that were artistically appealing but unacceptably blurry, knowing that I'd never be able to pull prints from them that met my technical and aesthetic standards. I'm thinking I may have made a mistake.

Topaz Sharpen AI—recommended without reservation.

Next column (in a couple of weeks) I'll talk about Topaz Labs' Gigapixel, which is absolutely, positively the best upsampling program ever. It does all those image-improvement miracles that other upsampling programs claim to do... and don't.

Ctein

Ctein, pronounced "kuh-TINE," rhymes with fine, is one of the most experienced and accomplished photo-writers alive. He was TOP's Technical Editor before leaving for a new career as a science fiction novelist. He has written two books of photo-tech, Digital Restoration from Start to Finish and Post-Exposure. This is his 343rd column for TOP; older columns can be found under the "Ctein" Category in the right-hand sidebar.

Original contents copyright 2019 by Ctein. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Please help support The Online Photographer through Patreon

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

Aashish Sharma: "I haven't even started reading the article, but I'm writing to let you know how delighted I am to see Ctein back. I have always enjoyed his writing on everything and missed it while he was away. An article by him is even more welcome as it is my birthday! Thanks for writing, Ctein. I'll now go back and read it."

Michael Elenko: "Thank you for this post. I've had this pano HDR I created eight years ago. It was in the mountains, and the mosquitoes were the worst, even getting in my eyeballs. So I could not provide enough stability for the brackets to line up right, plus dusk was coming on, so my shutter speed was too slow for effectiveness. But the shot was special, just too mushy for my standards and a plethora of tried tools. Until I used Sharpen AI at the settings recommend by Ctein. Wowie zowie, this finally looks right. Thank you, I've waited for this."

Joe Holmes: "I tried a demo copy of Sharpen AI on a couple of my images and immediately paid for the software. I find that it can work miracles on certain images, though there are times when it gets everything wrong, when it simply cannot handle an image and leaves crazy artifacts. And then there are times when it does a brilliant job on certain portions of an image but creates bizarre and ugly artifacts on other parts, like the surface of a river or clouds. In those cases I can make the best use of it by bringing a Sharpen AI image into Photoshop as a layer and applying a layer mask to apply the best parts on top of the original image. Even with that extra work, it's worth it, because the results are way better than what I can do with other tools."

Marcelo Guarini: "First, thanks for the initial part of this post, about artificial intelligence. I'm a professor of Electrical Engineering at a university and I am tired of repeating the same to my colleagues, especially those who work in the so-called field of artificial intelligence. I will show them your comments so they can see that I am not the only one with the same opinion. Thanks for the term 'artificial common sense.' Artificial intelligence is too high-flown a term for what deep learning is.

"I have been using Topaz Labs Gigapixel from its inception, and have been very surprised by its excellent results. As you say, 'positively the best upsampling program ever.' Almost every time I open the program to use it, there is an upgrade available. I have been a beholder of its evolution through cumulative training and refinements. Today its results are much better than at the beginning; you can easily see the improvements. It is just a very cool tool. I will try Sharpen AI and will follow your indications regarding the different modes and auto-update.

"Thanks much for your post, and happy to see your reviews again."

Soeren Engelbrecht: "'Since it is often hard to distinguish common sense from equally common nonsense, professional advice is useful.' —Leslie Lamport."

Tom R. Halfhill: "I'm equally uncomfortable with the buzzphrase 'artificial intelligence'—and I write about microprocessors for a living. (I'm a senior technology analyst for Microprocessor Report, the leading newsletter in this field since 1987.) I prefer 'machine learning,' which I think is more accurate and less grandiose, but the 'AI' label is unavoidable because it has become so widespread. Essentially, it's sophisticated pattern matching and sorting. But at a high level, sometimes we don't understand how these neural networks achieve their results. We turn them loose for training on a huge data set, let them chew on it, then evaluate their performance. It's almost a black box, although programmers can delve deeply into the structure to see what's happening. Of course, we don't fully understand how the human brain works, either, so even 'natural intelligence' is mysterious.

"The Topaz Sharpen AI tool is indeed impressive. What I need is a dust-and-scratch removal tool that's equally good. I've scanned tens of thousands of old family photos that need more fixing than I can handle. The automated tools I've tried often can't tell a dust spot from a pearl earring or a scratch from a crease in clothing."

Ken Lunders: "Whoa!! I downloaded Topaz Labs Sharpen AI for a 30-day trial. Well, the trial has ended after less than hour. I'm now $59.99 poorer, but 100% happy with the purchase. I'm delighted to see Ctein providing content here once again."

eliburakian: "Damn, I just spent $300 on the whole Topaz AI suite after reading this and trying out the software. Thanks a lot, now I have some explaining to do to the spouse."

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 [email protected].

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 ( [email protected] ), 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: [email protected]."

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

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.