The Online Photographer

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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Featured Comments from:

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.

Open Mike: Puffing and Printing and Other Odds and Ends

"Open Mike," my Sunday feature in which I gab on more than usual, is sometimes a day late. Like for instance this week.

Eclipsed eclipse: I was very disappointed last night. I had a vision of sitting on the balcony and watching the Super Blood Moon eclipse over the towering trees, and the day had been clear and lovely. But clouds moved in at exactly the wrong time and I couldn't see a thing. Rats.

Dew Drop Inn: This weekend I enjoyed a visit from my artist second cousin Elizabeth Claire Rose (check out her website) and her husband Eric. They moved to Pennsylvania from Montana two years ago. Eric worked ski patrol and wilderness rescue and was a wildland firefighter (he points out that it's not always forests that burn) in Montana; now he's a brain-trauma rehab nurse. Elizabeth and Eric were my fifth set of visitors since I moved in here on August 19th, which is more visitors than I'd get in any given year in Wisconsin. They are dynamic young people, accomplished and interesting, and I really enjoyed reacquainting. We had a campfire out back at the fire pit.

Intaglio etching by Elizabeth Claire Rose

My little stretch of East Lake Road is four miles from end to end, which means if I start at the house and go to one end and then the other and then back home again, I've gone eight miles. I biked that the other day and saw nine human beings the entire way, comma, yikes. That's only slightly better than one human-sighting per mile. At night you can hear the coyote howling out on the bluff; from the sound of that spooky nocturnal chorus I think there might be more coyote around here than human beings. Say what you like about Upstate New York, pro or con, one thing for sure is that there just aren't a whole lot of people here.

I might need every visitor I can get, is what I'm saying.

Big announcement! Tune in Wednesday of this week for some exciting photographic news from a good Friend-o'-TOP. You know him well, and he's back in a big way.

Puffer: I'm not a big fan of Nike, but I am a fan of its advertising agency. (Or agencies.) The company's latest ad amplifies on its "just do it" mantra in a nice way. It seems to say that just being in the race is a victory.

It's a sentiment I can get behind. Last Winter I went to the YMCA in Corning and did some sprints around their indoor track. Big mistake. Afterwards, my knees hurt so badly and for so long I thought I'd done permanent damage. Only then did I dive in and read up on re-entry running, and everyone says that when you're older and haven't run in a long time it takes a long, long time to strengthen your legs and bones enough to run and that you've got to take it slow, slow, slow.

So I started walking every day, sometimes twice a day, eventually adding very short sections of very gentle jogging. Again and again I'd feel my oats and overdo it (I like speed—a sprint is my reward), then get right back into it after laying off for a couple of days for recovery.

I'm happy to say all that groundwork has started to pay off. I'm now up to two miles a day, with more jogging than walking (pushing 60, I subscribe wholeheartedly to Jeff Galloway's run-walk-run method)—I'd say I walk no more than a third of my distance, sometimes more like a quarter. Yes, it's an open question how long my knees will hold out, but I'm hyper-conscious of my body as I run, and my form, and I'm in it for the long haul, so I'll be careful and continue taking it easy. It's certainly nice to huff and puff every day—feels great. I like running.

Print Offer: ...Coming right up. I'll let you know in advance about the date it starts, so you won't miss it. This one's a single print, a sweet treat.

Printer: I've taken the plunge and purchased an Epson P600 printer. Ctein's advice was enigmatic: "You're going to like the P600 for black-and-white printing better than any other inkjet printer on the market now. Whether you should buy it is another question," quoth the hirsute Gandalf-y Dumbledore-ish one. That was it. No further elaboration. Shall I cast rune-stones and scrutinize them for signs as to what he meant? No, no...tea leaves, it should be, of course.

If anything at all significant comes of this you will hearing more about it in coming days and weeks and wintry months; if nothing does, then you won't. Either way I won't gab on about it here. (You know, "just do it.") I purchased the P600, a box of 11x17-inch Canson Baryta Photographique paper (which features on the front of the box a photograph of a man who is worried about the high cost of the paper inside), and...well, a box. To put the prints in. I have high hopes, good spirits, and optimism.

See the worried man? He's thinking, 'Good Lord, this costs $2.50 a sheet!!'

Trubba: Mike got himself in trubba again yesterday. (I seem to be getting myself in trouble a lot lately.) This time, I said, "I could come up with a whole long list, a learning program if you will, of very specific exercises to help people to see better with a camera." This disappointed a number of people. Reader Ernest J. Zarate held my feet to the fire, writing, "Why offer that you have all this knowledge and skill, just to say, 'Well, I possess this knowledge, but, no, I refuse to share it with you'? It boils down to: you could, but you deign not to. What? Are the very people who support TOP via the mechanisms you've set up for that purpose not worthy?"

Um, ouch! That smarted.

Of course you are worthy. But what I had in mind would have to be a book. It's not top-o'-the-head knowledge. And, about researching and writing and illustrating a book, I feel somewhat the same way I feel when people suggest that I travel, or lecture, or teach courses, or visit foreign countries, or do personal appearances. Namely, that if I were doing all that, I would not be doing this. Most people who care one way or the other don't want to endure my silence for eight months while I go write a book. I blog, and that's what most people want me to do. Y'see how that goes? I could do all sorts of other things, but then I would not be writing TOP. I joke that my ankle is chained to the leg of the [sit-stand] desk, but really, that's as it ought to be.

You've got me right where you want me.

Right where I should be.

Right?

Mere decor: I've never decorated a house before, really. Turns out it's kind of fun. I only have about nine pieces of furniture to buy, and I'm not going overboard of course, but I feel like I'm getting everything just about the way I want it. It's like the house itself is a minor work of art: you envision, then reify. All about proportion and appropriateness. It's very satisfying the way it all seems to be coming together.

I can't find the comment in which a reader recommended Horning Chair Shop, a Mennonite furniture maker near here, but if it was you and you're reading this, thank you. They're very nice people up there—the shop is at a farm—and make solid, wholesome furniture. They will eventually be building me a game table and a couch.

What's your sign? Oh, and take a look at the sketch for the sign out front:

...Of course, I'm hoping we'll get the name spelled right on the actual sign. It's "Johnston with a 'T,'" as everyone named Johnston always has to say.

For some reason I'm very jazzed about the sign.

More anon, as ever. À votre santé.

Mike

"Open Mike" is the detectably more self-centered than usual weekly editorial page of TOP.

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:

David Philips: "We had clear skies in Massachussetts last night and though you can see countless eclipse photos today I'll show you my sequence anyway:

"I also started running recently and though I only have 60% of your years the walk-run method made it possible for me to get into it without hating it. I still haven't learned to love running on roads but now that I'm able to run a few miles without stopping I've started going into the woods. There's something special about running through the forest."

Geoff Wittig: "Coyotes are one of the distinctive features of rural New York these days. They're so canny and elusive you rarely actually see them, but at night they're frequently heard. I listened to them for a while last night while shooting the eclipse, which was beautifully visible just 30 miles west of Keuka Lake as the crow flies (sorry!).

"Our local coyotes are actually quite different from the Western variety, as they're much bigger (up to 70 lbs) and sometimes hunt cooperatively, both ascribed to their possession of up to 20% wolf DNA. I really like them, as I find their nighttime 'singing' pleasantly haunting, and they've cut down on the numbers of racoons, which around here are more nuisance than 'Disney cute.' A lot of the older locals despise coyotes, sort of a lingering legacy of the urge to exterminate every predator not on two legs, I think."

Rodger Kingston: "I love your Sunday OT Features, no matter what day of the week they appear. With regard to Jeff Galloway's 'run-walk-run' training program, nothing new there. When I was in Marine Basic Training over 50 years ago, that was how we did forced marches, except they called the components 'march' and 'quick time' (with a third component, 'collapse,' often showing up at the end)."

benny_pea: "Any chance of finding out where one might get a copy of that etching? It really is rather beautiful...."

Mike replies: Elizabeth sells them in limited editions of usually somewhat fewer than 30. You should contact her, but might get a belated reply, as they are hiking in the Adirondacks. She charges in the range of $200–$500, so they're not expensive.

Scott L.: "Re 'I'm not a big fan of Nike, but I am a fan of its advertising agency,' The Onion said it best many years ago in an article called 'Nike to Cease Manufacturing Products':  'Citing creative confinement and a desire to focus exclusively on what it does best, the Nike Corporation announced Monday it will cease manufacturing athletic shoes and other sports-related merchandise in order to devote itself fully to the creation of state-of-the-art television advertisements. "The last few years, it became impossible to maintain our high standards of advertising while faced with the daily distractions of making sneakers," said Phil Knight, Nike founder and CEO. "By discontinuing our entire product line, we will ensure that Nike remains the world's leader in the field of incredibly cool TV commercials well into the 21st century."'"

Roberto: "Epson P600 and Canson Baryta? Did the same and very happy with it. I suggest you buy also a box of matte paper, like the Canson Rag Photographique (you need to use the matte black for something anyway). I got it in the Canson Discovery Pack and I'm quite impressed."

Jim Freeman: "The decor in the dining room looks somewhat Eggleston-like, probably just a coincidence. Your joy with the move to New Yawk comes through in nearly every post."

Joel Becker: "I love the outdoor sign, but please, please leave '.com' off of it. It looked bad in 1999, and it looks bad now. If you want to specify the web address (as opposed to the entity name), put it at the bottom sized to fit in one line."

Mike replies: Really? I don't have that sense. What do other people think of the ".com" on the sign? There's still time to change it.

David Dyer-Bennet: "You may have the extra 't's people keep leaving in my last name!"

Product Review: Epson SureColor P800 Printer

Written by Ctein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is my standard grayscale test target:

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

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

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

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

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

I'm jazzed.

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

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

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

and especially this one:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ctein

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

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

©2015 by Ctein, all rights reserved

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Is This Duotone You Speak Of?

Center spread from a fund raising brochure I produced in 1992 for St. Mary of the Plains hospital in Lubbock, Texas. The duotone printing, done at a firm in western Massachusetts, was executed the old fashioned way—with process camera negatives made from my silver prints by an elderly craftsman who spoke with a Scots accent. He looked at the prints, very carefully, and slowly, having decided how he wanted to interpret my work for the press, said, “You’ll nae be wantin' any black printer in the shadow tones, then?”

-

Written by Carl Weese

In my recent book review post, I touched on the topic of different offset litho reproduction processes. The most common today is CMYK, which produces “full color” printing. Monochrome photographs can be printed in CMYK, but it’s not ideal. Multiple plate offset printing with black and gray “spot color” inks is a better way to get really good monochrome photographic reproductions that are also smoothly consistent form after form, and so page after page in the publication.

An offset press halftone plate when printed can only distinguish 50–70 levels of tone. (The wide variation depends on the type of paper, the press, the care taken, etc.) Even 70 levels severely limits print quality. Almost as soon as offset lithography was developed, people figured out that they could make a vastly better monochrome print (neutral, warm, cool, livid green, bright magenta, anything you want) by using multiple plates with different inks. Two, three, four—as many as you can afford. Separation negatives were shot so that in a tritone, for example, one recorded primarily highlight values, another mid-tones, another the dark values. Using one black and two gray inks, (counterintuitively, the black ink is best used for the highlight printer, as I learned from the Scotsman) the result, this not being an ideal world, isn’t 210 levels of tone, but it’s a whole lot more than 70. A really well executed page can rival the original silver print.

Process cameras are about as common as dodos today. So, Adobe Photoshop has a duotone function, which includes the ability to make tri and quad tones, from digital files that have been captured, or scanned from film or prints. You can specify any Pantone ink formula for each separation, and you can adjust the curve for each. These controls are the digital equivalent of what a skilled tradesman used to do with the process camera. The file (incorporated into the page layout document) is then output as two, three, or four ultra-high resolution imagesetter negatives at the print firm, then plates for the press are burned from the separations. The plates are mounted on a multi-station press with the specified inks in the correct fountains, or the plates and inks can be used in sequence for multiple runs through a single station press in registration. If all goes well, the result is a publication with beautiful reproduction.

There’s a completely different way to use the duotone dialog. You can use it essentially as a Photoshop filter, best done in a duplicate layer, to manipulate the tint and tone of a file that you will send to a photo quality inkjet printer. The result, however, just to get picky about it, isn’t a duotone—it’s not made with differently inked multiple plates on a printing press. It’s a composite RGB print. Photoshop and the print driver interpret the file data into RGB, because that’s the only language the inkjet printer can understand.

Recently I’ve been studying and experimenting with the Photoshop duotone function because I plan to use it for the plates in an upcoming book project, and I plan to do the tritones myself. It’s a powerful dialog and can create interesting monochrome effects. However, despite the time I’ve spent learning to work with it, I don’t plan to use it on files destined for my inkjet printers. I can get the results I want easier-faster-better with Epson’s Advanced Black & White print driver module for my 3880, or with Photoshop color management and custom ICC profiles for my HP Z3200.

If  you try the Photoshop duotone tool and there’s something you love about the interface and you find it helps you reach the results you want, then by all means go ahead and use it for files intended for inkjet printing. These choices are all subjective. Me, I’m only planning to use it on work destined for a Heidelberg.

Carl

Carl Weese is a photographer, writer, and workshop teacher, based in Connecticut. There are many online galleries of his pictures at his website, and he publishes a daily picture blog.

©2015 by Carl Weese, all rights reserved

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Where Can You Buy Custom Profiles?

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

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

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

 

 

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

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Are Profiles Obsolete?

Greetings, all! Here's the quick news wrap up, before I get into the topic of today's column—

• For those of you betting on what new camera I'm going to get, so far I haven't decided to get anything. On the other hand, I have fallen in love with the Tesla S (I got to drive a friend's).

• Tragedy has struck! My SuperFocus glasses have developed a leak! I am not at all sure Howard Davidson and I can repair the leak, in which case they are shortly going to become useless. The alternative, Adlens' Focuss, aren't in my area yet, plus they are the devil I don't know. I've been scouring the Internet for a pair of frames I could buy, but I haven't found any. If any of you folks with better search skills than I have can locate one, please email me directly at ctein@pobox.com.

[Update — the search is over. A kind and generous reader has provided me with two pairs of frames. I can't believe it. I am a very thankful and very happy camper.]

• The early-October book tour for Saturn Run is being finalized as you read this. John Sandford (John Camp, here at TOP) and I will only be hitting a limited number of cities—Scottsdale, the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Minneapolis, and Houston (John only). Sorry if that doesn't include your city, but that's where the publisher deems we will do the most good.

Oh yeah, and we just got a starred review in Publishers Weekly. Yay for us.

• I am well along on working with/testing the 27-inch Retina iMac and the Epson SureColor P800 printer. Proper reviews will be forthcoming over the next week, but for now I can tell you I'm mighty happy with both of them. It's these tests that lead me to this column's topic. So without further ado…

Custom color profiling has two main roles in ensuring you get as faithful and accurate color as you can. First is monitor profiling. You only need one monitor profile for each color temperature you work at. Much of the world goes with D65, which is the display manufacturer's default. I prefer D50 for all my personal work-- it's a better match to how prints look. Monitor profiles are something you make for yourself, with a gadget like ColorMunki (which I use) or Spyder.

The remarkable truth is that if it weren't that I wanted a monitor calibrated to D50, my retina iMac wouldn't need profiling at all. At the display default of D65 it's damn near perfect sRGB out of the box. I created a custom D65 calibration and the colors didn't shift one visible bit between the system defaults and my calibration. The grayscale got slightly more linearized in the shadows, which are a bit more open with my custom profile. It is not a large difference.Without switching back and forth, I'd never notice.

Most people are happy working at D65. If you are, and your retina iMac comes out of the box looking as neutral as mine did (there's some manufacturing variability, there) you're done. You don't need a custom calibration.

Of course, this is going to vary with make and model of computer or monitor, etc. But, it's noteworthy that there are any circumstances where I wouldn't see the need for monitor profiling. It indicates the direction things are moving.

Then there's printing. For printers, you have a custom profile for every paper you use, although you can often get away with one profile for each category of paper (matte, canvas, glossy, etc.). You can make them yourself with the right gear or send calibration prints to a service that'll make them for you.

I wrote two years ago about the problems I had printing this photograph...

...with a custom profile, and how much better it worked letting the printer manage the color, sans profiling. Getting this photograph right is a corner case, but it stands as an example where a custom profile couldn't do the job.

Dave Polaschek had been telling me that there are newer printers for which paper profiles are simply obsolete. He's convinced the most recent generations of printers can do a better job of rendering color all by themselves than handing the problem off to an external software profile. Some of you will recognize Dave's name from reader comments. Dave is way, way up the Photoshop engineering food chain. He's the guy who is responsible for the printing engine within Photoshop. It's just possible he knows something about printing.

We really are talking about “printer-managed color,” as Photoshop refers to it. Profiling is turned off entirely. No custom profiles, not even the canned profiles that get installed with your printer software. You're letting the printer engine do it all. It works fabulously well. Dave's right about this.

There are many caveats. This is going to depend upon your model of printer, the image handling software you're using, and your operating system. I'm using Photoshop, under Mac OS X, with Epson 3880 (a 6-year old design, it's worth noting) and P800 printers. I make no claims for any other setups, especially older printers. If you want to know if printer-managed color will work better on your system, you'll have to run some test comparison prints yourself. Here are some test files I use for ferreting out weaknesses in printer renderings. They're not a substitute for printing a suite of your more difficult real photographs, but they're a helpful addition:

http://ctein.com/TOP/cropped_gray_gradient_test.tif
http://ctein.com/TOP/color_gradient_test.tif

I did extensive tests of my best custom-made paper profiles (which may not be the best in the entire world, but they are pretty damn good) against printer-managed color. The printer won. There was never a photograph where my custom profiles for either printer produced a better print than the printer could do by itself. Sometimes my custom profiles did just as well. Sometimes they did worse.

The conclusion? For me, custom printer profiles are a thing of the past. I'll keep using the ones I generated for my Epson 3880 for existing prints, simply to ensure the prints look exactly the same as what I've already decided I like. For new work? It's all going to be printer-managed color.

For those of you running a setup like mine, here's the settings you need to know about. 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."

(Note for Windows users: currently you don't have an Adobe RGB option; you'll have to make do with sRGB. You may find it's good enough; I don't have a standalone Windows environment I can test this under. You're on your own.)

Click "Save" and "Print," and wait for your results. If you do this test, please report back here and let us know what you find. It would be nice to have an assemblage of information on which printers work better with printer-managed color and which don't.

~~~~~~~

Follow-up: All right, there was a big flaw in my methodology. My test files were created in Adobe RGB color space.  Now, there's nothing wrong with working in Adobe RGB space, but digital cameras can produce colors that fall outside that space (which is why you want to do your RAW conversions into ProPhoto RGB), and good printers can render colors outside of Adobe RGB space. You can argue about how significant that is in practice.  Mathematically,  the printer gamut looks much larger than Adobe RGB; perceptually, I would describe it as being only a little larger.  The impact on the vast majority of photographs is subtle, in my judgment.  But it's not nonexistent.

I don't see anything wrong with working in Adobe RGB space (although I don't normally, myself, not when working with original digital photographs). It's not quite as good as ProPhoto RGB, but most of the time you'll be hard-pressed to see any difference. Had I limited myself to discussing working in Adobe RGB, I'd stand by my assertions. There, I really haven't seen any evidence for the superiority of custom printer profiles, to date.

But I didn't. I made a blanket assertion, and it was wrong.

Ctein, Technical Editor

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How's This for a Preservation Scheme?

Buy three boxes.*

When you get a great portfolio-worthy shot, make three prints.

Put one in a box at your house.

Put the second in a box at your friend's house.

Send the third to a relative to put in a box in their house.

When the boxes fill up, buy three more boxes.

In the immortal words of the third fiddle, viola.

Of course, I don't do this, so I can't claim that this is a feasible backup system. (It seems to me that one of the crucial tests of a backup system is, does the person who's talking about it actually do it? If he doesn't, it's a black mark against the system right there.)

Mike

*I like 8x10x1 boxes because you can put them upright on a bookshelf like a book. And who doesn't have bookshelves somewhere in the house? Can't be said of any friend of mine. Plus, 8x10s are scan-able on flatbed scanners.

P.S. Here's what's wrong with this plan. You'd send your pictures to your friend and your relative, but 1) they'd show them to other people, eventually crimping and dog-earing them and getting them dirty; 2) they'd like some of them and want to frame them for the mountain cabin or Junior's dorm room, or they'd take a few of them out of the box to take over and show another friend or send to Aunt May, and the pictures would never find their way back to the box; or c) you'd get a call 11 years from now (which would also be 10 years and five months since you last added a print to their box) and it would be your friend or relative saying, "I've got this box with 23 of your pictures in it and I have no idea where it came from. So I'm sending it back to you. Here's the tracking number...."

Oh well, on second thought, never mind.

I tell ya, the only way to preserve your work is to be famous. Then everybody wants it, there will be plenty of copies around, and people who own the prints will take care of them. The rest of us are probably screwed.

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Dave Levingston: "I've been working for more than three years on what I've been calling my 'Immortality Project.' It involves making sets of prints to be boxed and given to various friends and family for safekeeping.

"There's even one museum that has agreed to take a box.

"Originally the plan was for each box to hold about 300 prints of my best photos. After working on it for a while I realized that I would have to be immortal to complete the project. (About 20 boxes of various sizes from 17x22 to 8.5x11.) So, I've scaled it back to 100 prints. After three and a half years I've printed about 35 of them.

"I might get the 100 done before I die or, worse, go blind. And the hope is that someday 50 years after I've left this life, someone, somewhere will open one of those boxes and enjoy what I put in it. That's about as good as we can hope for, I think."

Shaun: "Printing up a self-published book is another way to go. Of course fine art print fidelity isn't in it, but it is an inexpensive way to put your best photographs in one place which can be easily distributed and passed down through a few generations. Leave a copy laying around and those photographs that are normally hiding in archival boxes will actually be seen."

Print Presentation: Larry Jasper Shows Us How It's Done

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post referred to "poly" as being short for "polyethylene." That's wrong—it's polypropylene. I never could keep the polys straight.

Come to think of it, my neice used to have a squadron of dolls named Holly, Lolly, Polly, Molly, etc., etc., collectively called "the 'ollys." And I never could keep them straight either.

Thanks to Michael Wall for this—the Polly Propylene correction I mean—and sorry for the error. —Mike the Ed.]

TOP reader Larry Jasper recently sent me some prints and I was impressed by the craftsmanship of his presentation. Thought I'd share.

The key protection is provided by the so-called "poly bag" (poly being short for polpropylene), which is extremely transparent and offers easy viewing plus great protection for repeated handling without dirtying the overmat.

Archival Methods poly bags, sold in boxes of 100, run about 60¢ each for 17x22" size and 33¢ each for 13x19" bags.

I deliberately caught a reflection here so you can see the bag. Except for reflections, polyethylene is crystal clear.

Larry's mat is "floated," meaning the edge of the overmat is set back from the edge of the picture. This demands precision in the cutting of the mat, because the gap should be equal all around (it doesn't look so below because of a trick in perspective, but it is), and it also demands that care be taken in matching the color of the printing paper and the color of the mat. But it looks more elegant and relaxed than an overmat that covers the edges of the print.

The latter has another disadvantage in that it can't show the exact edges of the print as the photographer intended.

Overmat, closed. Note the good match between the shade of white in the printing paper and the mat.

An overmat is created when two pieces of identically-sized mat board are hinged in the middle like the spine of a book. The print is mounted to the solid piece, and the piece with the cutout folds down on top of the print.

Overmat, open. The hinge is usually linen tape, a high-quality cloth tape.

The print is centered into the mat and then attached with a "T-hinge" of linen tape. One piece is attached to the edge of the print from the back, left partially sticking out; the part that sticks out is then taped down to the mat board from above.

T-hinge from above. A second piece of tape, sticky side up, is attached half to the underside of the print and half to the piece of tape you see.

Larry gilds the lily with a transparent photo corner on the bottom two corners; you really don't need to do this, though, except perhaps with very large pieces of paper.

Photo corner

A final touch is a studio emblem and a signature in pencil on the back:

Seal and signature

Signatures can go wherever you please; on the back of the print is the usual place, or on the front of the print visible in the lower right. It's up to you. The signature is sometimes placed on the mat board, either on the front on the lower right or on the back as Larry has done. The disadvantage of signing the mat is that if the mat board is ever replaced the signature is lost, so conservators don't like that practice. The most accepted practice is to sign on the back of the actual print, but behind the margin rather than behind the image area. Signing inside the actual image area on the front is considered poor practice by most, though I've seen it done.

This method of "bagging" or sleeving a matted print is ideal—and most common—for ready-to-frame prints stacked in bins allowing people to browse. Classically, matted prints in portfolio boxes are not bagged if they're intended to be viewed by curators. In that case, sometimes white cotton gloves are provided in the portfolio case to encourage the curators not to get fingerprints on the mats. Portfolios which make the rounds, however, are sure to get dirty and will need to be rematted eventually.

I suspect bags were frowned upon historically only because the plastic used to not be perfectly transparent. Curators hated to have to take prints out of sleeves just to view them. I don't know if poly sleeves have made that practice more common at museums, but I don't see why protected prints like this couldn't be used in a portfolio for more utilitarian presentations.

For storing prints privately, another great method that I like a lot—and that requires far less work—is to take a piece of archival mat board the same size as the print and the bag and place the print and board in the poly bag together. The board doesn't need to be attached to the print at all. The board protects the print from being bent or crimped, and the poly bag protects it from handling, pests, and atmospheric pollutants. It's not as elegant as Larry's presentation but it's simple and clean and it works.

The benefit of Larry's method for buyers is that the print is matted and ready to be framed—and is protected in the meantime. And the benefit of Larry's method for us (photographers, I mean) is that we get to control how we want our prints to be matted. I suppose a few buyers might re-mat an already-matted print, but I don't think very many would.

Mike
(Thanks to Larry)

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Oskar Ojala: "Thanks for the presentation, I enjoyed reading. Couldn't be quite sure how the tape was supposed to be attached. I guess I need to get back to it tomorrow."

Mike replies: Does this help? The dotted line shows the bottom piece of tape, which is sticky side UP. It adheres to the back of the print, and leaves a tab sticking up. The second piece of tape (visible in the picture), sticky side down, crosses the top of the tab like a "T," hence the name T-hinge. Together they keep the print in position without obscuring any part of the front of the print.

The print is positioned in the window with the window closed, then weighted to keep it in position. Then the window mat is opened and the T hinge is made.

Much easier to show than to explain in words.

Ken Tanaka: "Nicely done. This is very similar to the standard storage format used for photographs in the collection at the Art Institute of Chicago and every other museum with which I'm familiar. The core purpose of the hinged mat in an archival collection is to enable a print to be handled without being touched. May I add three suggestions?

1. For long-term storage and handling I recommend placing a piece of glassine or other acid-free archival tissue paper over the print and under the over-mat. This is inexpensive surface protection and is also very standard procedure in museum collections.
2. Consider skipping using photo corners. They represent more long-term hazard than benefit. They often dry out, fall loose, and can end up sticking to a print's surface. They can also cause wrinkling by constraining the moisture expansion of some papers in non-controlled storage environments.
3. Skip the sticker. Yea, I know it's a branding thing. But anything stuck to a print is ultimately trouble and gives conservators chills. Your verso inscription is enough to authenticate the print."

Epson Announces Consumer 3880 Replacement

Epson recently announced the SureColor P800, which will parallel the workhorse 3880 in the new "prosumer" SureColor desktop lineup—a bigger version of the first SureColor model, the smaller P600 that was introduced to modest fanfare last September. The P800 is available for preorder (deliveries reportedly start mid-June, although no promises from Epson), and it's up on Epson's website.

The P800 will probably be the next-gen "sweet spot" home/desktop printer for avid amateurs and home enthusiasts, in the way the Nikon D750 hits the sweet spot among Nikon's full-frame traditional DSLRs*. Still, a printer like the P800 is for photographers who print heavily and at least once a week—like the carbureter in an old Alfa, it likely won't thrive unless it's driven hard and often.

[UPDATE: Several readers have said they leave their 3880s idle for considerable lengths of time without experiencing the head clogs Epsons were notorious for in the '90s. Still, it seems like heavier users are the ones who will see more benefit from a machine like this compared to a smaller paper-size printer with smaller carts like the P600 or Canon Pixma Pro-1.]

Like the 3880, the $1,200 P800 accepts 17-inch wide papers (sheets or rolls), and has large 80 ml ink cartridges (although the ones that come with the printer only have 64 ml). Ink carts retail for $60 each, making a full inkset $540 (about half the cost of the printer), although a full set of 3880 inks goes for $456 and the UltraChrome HD inks might eventually drift down toward that level.

Other big news: Epson expects the new UltraChrome HD inkset to have approximately double the print life expectancy (LE) of the previous generation of inks. The company is so far stating LE of 60 years, but has indicated that more extensive testing currently in progress will likely confirm 200-year LE for color prints that are stored, displayed, and protected properly, and as long as 400-year LE for B&W prints. The latter begins to rival the theoretical print LE of the very best-made silver-gelatin fiber-base prints, long postulated to be ~500 years. Personally I don't plan to live to be more than 150, so this is all sort of moot.

Finally, you can shrug off Epson's claims that the new P800 desktop printer is the smallest printer ever for its paper size. It might be, but it's only slightly smaller than the 10" high, 15" deep, and 27" wide dimensions, all closed up, of the 3880. Not enough difference to notice, much less count.

I'd recommend that anyone considering a P800 first read Michael Reichmann's P600 review over at The Luminous-Landscape.

Mike
(Thanks to Mike Plews for the nudge)

*I can tell when a product hits this sweet spot because I want it even though I don't need it. Very annoying. But fun.

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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Ed Hawco: "Well that's typical. I put off digital printing for years because I expected it would be too much trouble, too difficult to learn all the intricacies, and too expensive for my modest printing needs. Then I turned around in January and made the plunge; I got a shiny new 3880, expecting to spend a year learning the ins and outs of using it (and digital printing in general).

"Instead I spent about a week learning that stuff and now I know as much as I'll ever need to know. (Thanks to Ctein, by the way, for providing encouragement in a TOP comment that there isn't really that much to learn.)

"So now I have this great 3880, and I'm turning out beautiful prints on expensive Hahnemühle paper. Except that I don't sell prints, so I have an expanding pile of going-nowhere prints and a printer that just became obsolete. :-/

"Whatever. You always remember your first printer, and I'll remember this one for a long time because I'll be looking at it every day for the foreseeable future."

Steven Ralser: "I vaguely remember that you mentioned that Ctein was going to review the P600. Is this still going to happen? I need to replace my old canon iPF5000 and need to decide whether I should wait for the P800 or just get the 3880."

Mike replies: Plans to secure a review P600 fell through so Ctein has now requested a P800, since that matches his interests and the interests of readers more closely. We'll keep you posted.

UPDATE: Epson has no review units. We'll keep trying.

Chris: "I want it I want it I want it I want it. But not enough to force me to replace my R2400. Not yet."

TOP Classic: Voja Mitrovic, Printer to the Greats

[Since Peter's personal Print Offer is ongoing this week, I thought it would be a good occasion to reprise his article about his friend and custom printer Voja Mitrovic, originally published in August 2010. —Mike]

The Untold Story of One of the Greatest Printers in Photography

Voja Mitrovic at the Coupole, Montparnasse, Paris, 1993. Photo by Peter Turnley.

By Peter Turnley

This is the untold story of one of the greatest printers of black-and-white photographs in the history of photography—Voja Mitrovic. It is time that this man, who has literally been in the dark since arriving in Paris from Yugoslavia in 1964, be acknowledged for his important part in the history of photography and his collaborations with many of the great photographers of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Voja's story is also the story of the world-renowned photographic laboratory Picto, in Paris, created by Pierre Gassmann in 1950.

You've seen Voja's work without knowing it. He was a longtime printer for Henri Cartier-Bresson, from 1967–1997, and  has made prints for the past thirty years for the great Czech photographer Josef Koudelka. While others also printed H.C.-B.’s photographs, what is so important about the period Voja printed much of his work is that it corresponds to the time when collecting signed photographs first began to take off and change the public’s view of photography collecting and its connection to the art world. Henri Cartier-Bresson was one of the key photographers whose work was bought and collected during that period. It was during the time when Helen Wright was representing H.C.-B.’s prints in the United States where most of his prints were collected. A large number of the signed prints of H.C.-B. on any wall in the world printed from 1967–1997 were made by Voja—this fact is little known. He also printed at various times for many of the world’s other master photographers: Sebastio Salgado, Werner Bischof, René Burri, Marc Riboud, Robert Doisneau, Edouard Boubat, Man Ray, Atget, Helmut Newton, Raymond Depardon, Bruno Barbey, Jean Gaumy, Frederic Brenner, Max Vadukul, and Peter Lindbergh to name a few. I have had the great fortune that Voja has been my printer for the past twenty years. He printed the exhibition and reproduction prints for my books Parisians, McClellan Street, and In Times of War and Peace, and he has made all of my signed prints for collection.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, left, and Josef Koudelka, right, begging Voja Mitrovic not to retire at his retirement party, Picto, Paris, Dec. 22, 1996. Photo by Paolo Nozolino.

I first met Voja (by the way, the "j" in Voja is pronounced like a "y") in June of 1979. It was during my first sojourn of eight months in Paris in 1975 that I heard of the great photographic lab where Cartier-Bresson’s prints were made—Picto. John Morris, then the photo editor of the New York Times and an early and long-time mentor of mine, and the great Czech photographer, Josef Koudelka, who I had met one fall day in the Luxembourg Gardens after he photographed me kissing my then-girlfriend on a park bench, had spoken to me of this great laboratory, a center world-famous for amazing black-and-white printing.

My first visit to Picto was in late winter of 1976, and I will never forget the sight of men and women in their white coats looking over and discussing the tonal values of some Cartier-Bresson prints lying on a table. I had never studied photography—I had always thought from the outset that one’s vision was more a function of knowledge or experience with almost any other aspect or domain of life than photography and cameras, thus I was more interested in studying subjects like languages, history, political science, economics, and art. But from that first sight of H.C.-B.’s prints at Picto, while knowing that my life purpose was to be a photographer, I had a singular determination to come and work at this laboratory and to gain the practical experience of learning to be a great printer.

Picto was the creation of Pierre Gassmann (see my photo at right, taken in Montparnasse, Paris, in 1996), who had left Nazi Germany in 1933 to come to Paris. While working as a young immigrant photographer in Paris before the war and spending time around Montparnasse, Pierre Gassmann had met and become friends with the eventual founders of Magnum, Robert Capa, David Seymour, George Rodger, and Henri Cartier-Bresson, and also with photographers such as Brassai and Gisele Freund. After the war, in 1947, Gassmann put his own photography aside and began to make prints for the Magnum photographers, and then created Picto as a commercial enterprise in 1950. There is likely no one who had more knowledge of and contact with the important members of the world photographic community of the twentieth century than Pierre Gassmann. He was a very important mentor to countless photographers, including me. The famous photography laboratory that he created would intersect with the destiny of multitudes of photographers—and have a profound impact on the destiny of the young Yougoslav, Voja Mitrovic, who arrived in Paris in 1964.

Both Voja and Picto would have a tremendous impact on my own destiny. In June of 1979, after arriving back in Paris, I went to see Pierre Gassmann at Picto and asked for a job as a printer. Pierre, with his tough-love gruff voice, asked me what I knew how to do—and I exaggerated and told him that I was a great printer and knew how to do everything with black-and-white prints. He said to me, "We will see. You will have a three day tryout, and if you aren't as good as you say, you won't get the job." On my first day of my try out, I was given 100 negatives and told to make 8x10-inch prints of each by the end of the day. At 4 p.m., a tall, handsome man with a foreign accent, one of the printers in the lab—Voja—came to my enlarger and asked how it was going. I told him that I had only printed 20 negatives. He said to me, "You will never get this job—give me the negatives." I watched him take the hundred negatives to his enlarger, and in one hour, he printed the remaining 80 negatives, putting each sheet of printing paper in a closed drawer after exposing each negative. At 4:50 pm, he took out 80 sheets of exposed photographic paper and went to the open developing tank. I watched him chain develop all the prints, and one by one put all 80 prints, perfectly printed, into the fixer. At 5:10 p.m. that day, Pierre Gassmann walked into the lab and said, "let’s see how you have done." He put his foot on the foot pedal to light up the fixer tank with bright red light, and went through my 100 prints laying in the fixer-and a few seconds later, looked up and said to me, "you are as good as you said; you are hired!" After Gassmann walked out of the dark room, I took Voja aside, and said, "thank you. I will find a way one day to thank you for this!" He looked at me and said, "I was an immigrant also. I know what it means to need work—we need to help each other!"

While I worked as a printer at Picto in 1979 and 1980, I saw first-hand the amazing work of Voja Mitrovic. After I left Picto, and had finished my graduate degree in international relations at Sciences Po in Paris (where I was a classmate of the current French president Nicolas Sarkozy), I began to assist Robert Doisneau in 1981, and then embarked upon my own career, traveling the world as a photographer. While at Picto, I eventually became a pretty good printer, but knew that I wanted more than anything else to continue being a photographer myself. I was clear about that before ever starting at Picto—but I am sure that my experience as a printer has helped me understand better what I want from prints of my own photographs, and it certainly has helped me appreciate even more the mastership of Voja's prints. I also knew that I didn’t want to spend a life in the dark, and realized early on that I could never be nearly as good a printer as Voja, who has now printed my work for most of the past three decades.

Voja was born in Foca, in Bosnia, Herzegovina, part of the former Yugoslavia, in 1937. His father was killed during the war when he was four years old, and from this early age, he became aware that he would have to work to help his mother and family. He came to photography by accident—his family had a cow, and daily he would deliver a liter of milk to the house of a local photographer named Radmilo Mazic. One day this photographer asked Voja's mother if her son would like to be his photographic apprentice. In Sept., 1953, Voja began to work as Mazic’ apprentice. Mazic had studied photography at a school in Zagreb with teachers from the Ecole de Graphisme of Vienna. It was during this apprenticeship from the age of 14 to 18 that Voja gained extensive knowledge and skills in photography and printing. At the age of 19, he was obliged to do his military service and entered a unit of aviation photography of the Yugoslav Air force. After his military service, Voja worked for five years in a photographic studio in Belgrade where he was involved in all aspects of photography, making photographs, and developing film and making prints.

In September of 1964, Voja and another friend decided to embark upon a trip around the world before getting married and settling down. He arrived at the Paris train station on September 4th, 1964, with one hundred French Francs in his pocket and a backpack full of clothes and sausages—the money being the equivalent then of not more than US$100 now. Voja quickly discovered that with his Yugoslav nationality, it would be difficult to obtain the necessary visas to travel to other countries, and within two days of arriving in Paris, he had already found a job retouching prints at a lab near the Gare du Nord. This first job enabled him to obtain a "carte de sejour" and a work permit, which enabled him to begin to learn the French language.

Two years later, on April 2, 1966, he answered an announcement in a newspaper for a job as a printer at a lab called Picto. When he arrived at Picto, he met Pierre Gassmann and was given a tryout with three other candidates. Gassmann told him that he had been happy with one of his previous printers who was from Yugoslavia, and that he felt that people like him, who came from Central Europe, were good printers and good workers. Voja was hired that day. He worked at Picto for the next thirty years, until his retirement on January 1, 1997.

While there have been several people who have printed for Henri Cartier-Bresson—people such as Georges Fevre, Pierre Gassmann, Philippe Jourdain, Toros, Daniel Risset, and since Voya’s retirement, Daniel Mordac—few people , even in H.C.-B's close entourage, are aware of the role Voja played in printing his photographs over thirty years, most importantly during the time of the “photo boom”, that period of explosive growth in the modern acceptance of photography, of print collecting and photographic exhibitions. Collecting signed prints of photographers began in earnest by a large public in the late 1970s and early 1980s. During this time, Voja Mitrovic printed a significant  number of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s collector prints, book prints, and exhibition prints. While I was at Picto in 1979 and 1980, Cartier-Bresson came to Picto almost every week to sign prints that would be sent to collectors in the United States—and many of these prints were made by Voja. I will never forget H.C.-B.’s frequent visits to the lab—witnessing him sign a print was a powerful sight, like a final conclusive act in a process of great creation—and it instilled in me the sense that a signed collector print is the summit of the photographic art. There was always an amazing spirit of conviviality at the lab between the printers and visiting photographers, and always a tremendous level of pride and respect within the walls of the lab. Everyone was aware that we were all involved with people and a process of artistic creation that was unique and special.

Voja Mitrovic and Peter Turnley, at Picto, Paris, 1994.

This was also a time when an important change took place in the world of printing—the introduction of multi-grade paper and filters, which allowed for a subtler rendition of details in both the shadows and the highlights of prints. It was also a time when the highest quantity of silver was in printing papers. Voja has indicated that there are certain qualities of richness in gray tonal values that he could never achieve with today’s papers, that he was able to obtain in the late 'seventies and early 'eighties. Also, since Voja’s retirement, many people, including myself, have noticed that the later prints of H.C.-B., sometimes became too pale, lacking detail in the highlights. Voja has indicated that this is not the fault of later printers' skills, but mostly because H.C.-B. himself changed in his printing taste a bit, asking for lighter prints in his latest years. He would often say that he didn't want his prints to be "dramatic" in the manner that was popular with many American photographers.

Most anyone who has ever spent any time printing in a darkroom knows the emotional difficulty and joy of making a great print. Josef Koudelka said that Voja has the mind of a computer. While I often saw other great printers at one point or another arrive at a moment of emotional and mental block when they couldn’t achieve a result they wanted with a print, Voja was always the picture of perfect methodical discipline, patience, and consistency. He has explained to me that from early age he knew he would have to work, and he learned quickly that whether he was doing something, or re-doing something, it was still simply work, and he respected that, and he would never become frustrated and emotional about doing something until it was done as well as it could be done.

—Peter Turnley

[We'll reprise Part II later this week —Mike the Ed.]

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

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Peter Turnley Prints

Peter Turnley, Paris 2013

It's not a TOP sale, but a lot of TOP readers will be very interested to know that as of this morning, Peter Turnley is launching his own limited sale of his prints. Here's the link. A number of our readers' favorites from our past sales are offered again, with prices not too much ($100) higher than ours—and you also have the choice of ordering your favorite in his larger standard 16x20" size if you'd like, which were never part of our offers. This is definitely the best way ever to get a large Turnley original.

This is an opportunity for people who missed our past sales, or who wish to add to their existing collections.

I started hanging framed prints in the new house recently, which (like putting pictures on the refrigerator door!) is one of the best parts of moving. In a prominent position by the eat-in counter, visible from the garage door which is naturally the main entry door, I hung my framed ID#16. Mine was a gift from Peter, but it's identical in every way to the smaller print available in this sale. It looks fantastic on the wall. I'm going to show you a few pictures of prints on my walls when I get home again (and ask to see some of yours, if you want to share. But let's leave that till later).

These are just superlative prints, of some of Peter's best-known pictures. As usual, the prints are made in Paris by Voja Mitrovic, who was Hentri-Cartier-Bresson's printer for many years. The famous Paris Rooftops picture is available again in this sale as well—as a poster, its has been one of the most popular pictures ever, selling an estimated half a million copies. But very few people own original signed silver-gelatin prints of the image. Very few people outside of TOP's readership, I should say.

If you do buy one (or two, or three, or...), please indicate that you heard about the sale here!

And of course, among the pictures offered for the first time at a reduced price, I have a new favorite (see above). You know what they say: sigh.

Mike
(Thanks to Peter)

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

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Featured Comments from:

Bob Smith: "Oh God. TOP has done it to me again.* There are seven of these I want. I can't afford any of them right now. I am going to screen cap the seven and study on them for the next few days. Then I am going to 'rob Paul to pay Peter' to flip the old bromide around. Right now ID#1 is at the top of the list but I have a feeling I'll be drawing straws for the winner in end.

"*Mike, I know it isn't you putting on this sale, but if I wasn't a religious reader of TOP I would never have owned any Turnley prints and seen how beautiful they are in person and...."

Printing with Digital Negatives

[Ed. note: This is the last post expanding on the techniques used for the prints in the current Carl Weese print offer. This one is especially for those who really might consider trying the process.

Hope you've enjoyed these support posts as much as I have. September's Print Sale closes at 7:00 p.m. tonight, U.S. Central Time. —Mike]

Carl Weese, Steep Rock, one of the two platinum prints we have
for sale until this evening.

-

By Carl Weese

I’ve been watching the progress of digital negatives for contact printing, mostly from the sidelines, since the mid-'90s. For me, the premier distinguishing characteristic of, “The Platinum Print” comes from my use of large- and ultra-large-format (ULF) camera negatives to make contact prints with a rich, smooth, subtle tonality. For years I’ve told students that if you want the eye-popping, crunchy-toned brilliance of West-Coast-style silver prints—make silver prints. Or now, monochrome inkjets on baryta-coated papers. Don’t make platinum prints for the presumed status, but for the inherent physical/visual character of the medium.

Early digital negatives had hardware, software, and media difficulties achieving this goal. As earlier mentioned, to get the platinum print’s full measure of tonal smoothness, the negative has to be muscular enough—in the UV light-blocking way—to produce a full-range print with no contrast agent added to the print sensitizer formula. You can get a full-range print (Dmax to paper white) from a weak negative, by adding lots of chemical contrast agent to the print formula, but it will end up with all the tonal allure of an '80s photocopy (that’s me: everyone is entitled to their own taste in tone so your mileage may vary).

In recent years, overhead transparency materials have improved in the amount of ink load they can support, while current generation printers and their pigment inksets can block lots of UV, and do it with smooth tonal transitions. So, game on.

Without doing a whole treatise, (and here is an excellent one generously provided on the web by Ron Reeder and Christina Andersen—my final approach is indebted to their method while drawing on half a dozen others along with notions, usually looking for something simpler, of my own) here is the problem and the solution.

Even the latest printers, inks, and substrates need to be tricked into making output for this purpose. You have to test the digital output in the platinum lab, back and forth, in a feedback loop until you get the results you want. You need to be able to make a good Pt/Pd print, or take a workshop with someone who can, to begin the process.

First step is to find out how much exposure with your UV source you need to get a good black through the transparency material, with your chosen Pt/Pd printing formula—this is the same as finding “minimum time to Dmax through filmbase plus fog” in silver printing.

My next step is to combine a step tablet file with a small file of a picture (see the first illustration below) that has been adjusted so that it makes a first rate monochrome digital print. If you flip and invert this file in Photoshop, then output on transparency material as is and print it in Pt/Pd, at the minimum time for a good black, you’ll get a dark gray mash of squashed tone. To trick the printer, you need to play games in the print driver to make it use as much as possible of the inks, along with black, that best block UV light. For Epson, that’s yellow. For HP, it’s vivid green. I’m using Epson, and the next step is to find another control fairly deep in the print driver called Color Density. Run up the slider, and you’re telling the print driver, “more ink! MORE!” Other printers and drivers will have similar but different controls.

The goal is to find settings that render the whitest patches of the step tablet and the brightest highlights of the picture file as convincing white at the basic print exposure. But at this point, all the middle tones will still be dark and muddy. The sensitometric curve of the Pt/Pd paper doesn’t at all match the linear ink laydown of the printer. You have to go back to the positive file and raise the brightness of the middle values using some form of curve. There seem to be as many ways to produce this curve as there are people trying to make these negatives. When everything comes together, you wind up with a negative that has enough range to make a full scale Pt/Pd print with no contrast agent, with a tonal distribution that moves smoothly from dark to light without breaks, jumps, or roughness. The step tablet is very helpful for quantifying these transitions in terms of % density, but I think the picture section is an invaluable reality check.

Some want to have a single Holy Grail perfect curve. This theoretically allows you to feed any well-adjusted picture file into the “black box” of a Batch Action and take the resulting negative through the platinum darkroom on autopilot. I prefer, and have ended up with, several different curves that I choose, or experiment with, for different pictures. The Church works with my standard Action, and prints in four minutes (on Arches Platine using an 85:15 Pd/Pt ratio), which is a bit of a safety factor over minimum time to black for the paper/formula used. "Steep Rock" needed a different Action that helps bring out subtle separations in all the delicate low values at the right side of the picture. It also prints at four minutes. If that special shadow-enhancing curve had been a bit strong, I might have found that an extra thirty seconds of printing exposure was needed to nail everything down. As long as the print ends up as I want, that’s fine with me. No reason to give up the subtle controls of the platinum darkroom to utilize along with the precision controls of digital imaging.

Different papers and different chemical formulas can make all sorts of changes in print color and tone, but the feedback loop of print driver controls and platinum darkroom printing times needs to be worked out for each chemical or paper variation.

That’s all there is to it.

Combination step tablet and picture-file test prints, with small (4x5) files of the print offer pictures.

Ganged output of test negatives emerging from the printer.

A pair of test negatives on OHP material, viewed on a lightbox.

A set of ganged test files on OHP material, placed on a prepared sheet of paper, in the vacuum frame, ready for exposure.

During exposure the darkest parts of the picture “print out”—begin to form image density without development.

The print appears almost immediately in the developer.

Wet processing consists of developer, water wash, two chemical clearing baths, and a final wash. Actually a simpler procedure than processing silver-gelatin prints.

Final print during exposure on my smaller (12x15) UV exposure unit.

Carl

Carl Weese has been making platinum/palladium prints for 20 years, teaching the process for 15 years, and is the co-author of the book The New Platinum Print. He lives with his wife Bettina in Woodbury, Connecticut.

©2014 by Carl Weese, all rights reserved

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Jim Hamstra: "For years I also used camera negatives from 4x5 to 11x14 to make platinum prints. When I started using digital cameras I tried several ways to make digital negatives; the best results then were with Burkholder's two negative process. It took exposure through two different negatives in a pin-registered system to get enough density. I had given up on digital negatives until a couple years ago when I saw a carbon print which was made from one of Jon Cone's Piezo negatives. Jon Cone has six or seven tone black and grey pigments that will print a continuous tone negative on an Epson printer and he has made profiles for different DR negatives. I had asked him about negatives for platinum and last fall I went to Santa Fe where he was doing a workshop as he assured me it was a simple process. I took a file that looked fine on the screen and applied a hand drawn curve to the image to adjust for how platinum shadows and highlights print. He then made a negative and a few minutes later I printed it making the best platinum print I had ever made from a digital negative. Since then I bought a new 3880 Epson and a set of Piezo inks that will print both negatives on Pictorico film and paper prints without having to change out any inks. As the process uses six shades of pigments the negatives are continuous tone not relying on dots for the shade.

"If you have never seen a Piezo negative, Carl, let me know, I will send you one of my outtakes. I have shown them to Dick Arentz and he seemed impressed with the density."

Perfect-for-a-Saturday Platinum Podcast

Looking for a great way to while away some time on a lazy Saturday? Carl did a wonderful podcast about his platinum/palladium printing with our friend and sometime contributor Roger Overall at The Documentary Photographer.

(Carl and Roger talk about the Drive-In Theaters project for about the first 18 minutes.)

Outstanding!

Mike

[Oh, and I'm naturally fond of the bit that starts at about 26:45. Thanks guys.  :-)  —Mike the Ed.]

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

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The Bright Future: Second-Generation Negatives for Pt/Pd Printing

By Carl Weese

[Carl is the Print Sale artist this month, offering two of my personal favorites from among his prints. The sale is open until Monday evening at 7:00 p.m.  —Mike]

One reason it’s been over four years since we did a TOP platinum/palladium (Pt/Pd) Print Offer is because, after managing to print the 8x10 negative of The Pike Drive-in Theater (below) well over a hundred and twenty times four years ago, I resolved never, ever, again to commit to making scores of direct contact prints on handcoated paper working from a unique, irreplaceable negative. After that, it wasn’t until late 2013 that I worked out a procedure for creating digital negatives for Pt/Pd printing that gave me fully realized, successful prints according to my sense of what platinum prints should look like.

The Pike Drive-in, Montgomery, Pennsylvania, 2001, part of
our April Print Offer four years ago

Pt/Pd materials can only be contact-printed because they are much too slow for projection enlargement. Contact exposures run to several minutes in full sunlight or the artificial equivalent. But photographers have long found ways around this. For a famous example, Paul Strand made platinum prints from some of his most iconic early pictures, like “Blind,” as little gem-like direct contacts, and also as 11x14-ish enlargements. For the larger prints, he enlarged the original negative onto a glass plate, resulting in an interpositive. Then he contacted that to a second glass plate, to create the final enlarged negative for printing.

Paul Strand, Blind, 1916

Of course, as noted, enlargement isn’t the only reason for second generation negatives. Handcoated Pt/Pd paper isn’t the smoothest stuff in the world; it needs to be exposed in carefully controlled humidity levels (which can change accidentally), and the negative has to be held against the paper under pressure, exposed to strong UV light (which heats it up), then removed and put somewhere safe...for every single print. To make a big edition of conventional enlargements, you clean the negative and get it safely ensconced in the enlarger where it’s touched by nothing but light until you are finished. Every single Pt/Pd print, on the other hand, requires lots of negative handling, and to expect permanent error-free perfection is ridiculous.

Also, The Pike negative, which began needing a 12-minute exposure, faded during the course of the printing, ending up at 6.5 minutes. Thank goodness, the contrast hardly changed, and I only really needed to keep pulling back the exposure to get consistent prints to the end—but it was nerve-wracking. Somewhere around sixty prints the negative picked up soft blotches that printed as gray blobs, and wouldn’t come off with film cleaner. A soak in wetting agent followed by water washing fixed the problem, but…never again. The other two pictures in the 2010 offer got through their 40+ printings each without a hitch, but it wasn’t relaxing.

The professional printers who make platinum editions or book insertions for celebrities or famous photographers almost always print from second-generation negatives even if the original was large format. I mean, can you imagine—"do you have another negative of that Moonrise shot, Mr. Adams?"

Another reason I put in months of effort working out a satisfactory second-generation negative printing approach is that film is going to keep getting more scarce. Even if it doesn't disappear—Ilford deserves credit for putting in great effort to keep large, ultra-large, and exotic-format films available—it's already getting expensive. Digital negatives open up the possibility of making prints in the platinum medium even when it is impossible or impractical to begin with film exposures. My tests of 8x10-ish Pt/Pd prints from digital captures show some astonishing results compared side by side with prints originating from vastly larger film negatives, so there’s a bright future on that front.

Carl

©2014 by Carl Weese, all rights reserved

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Sal Santamaura: "Carl, was that a pyro-developed stained negative that faded during the course of printing? If so and, going forward, you've any desire to make large numbers of contact prints from in-camera negatives, why not just drop the pyro? I've never heard of a conventionally-developed gelatin silver sheet film negative 'fading,' even from repeated exposure to UV. The unstained image is, after all, metallic silver."

Carl replies: Sal, it was a pyro neg, but what faded apparently was about a stop of secondary overall stain, an unnecessary but harmless artifact like fb+f. The last prints, at the shortened exposures, were if anything slightly "cleaner" in value separations. Even without silver printing, a pyro developed negative scans much better than a negative developed in HC110/D-76-type developers with sufficient contrast to make a first-rate Pt/Pd print with no contrast enhancement in the formula, so I still prefer to work with pyro both for the direct printing and for scanning—haven't printed silver from large format in quite some time now.

Joe: "Cool coincidence: After Carl's print was released here four years ago, I visited The Pike drive-in to shoot the projection booth for my series 'The Booth.' The Pike is just a few miles from my home town, Muncy, Pennsylvania, though when I was growing up we had an even closer drive-in, The Starlite, which shut down long ago.

"The last I heard of The Pike, the owner was struggling to raise money for a digital projector. Almost all the studios no longer ship 35mm prints, so it's go digital or shut down if you want to show current movies."

Carl replies: Joe, I've seen your "Booth" series online and like it. The digital conversion is a problem that all drive-in theaters face, and was a spur to pushing to complete as much coverage as I could back in 2012, but since then I've been happily surprised, almost amazed, how many theaters, even quite small ones, have been managing to make the costly upgrade. One of my favorites, the Mt. Zion in West Virginia, is still struggling but I have my fingers crossed for them.

Ed Richards: "Given that the hand-coated media is not very smooth, it is not going to capture much detail from the large format negative. Seems a perfect case for digital negatives. Maybe even from one of those small, convenient cameras you have started to carry.  :-) "

Carl replies: Ed, there are some mysterious things that happen with contact printing. A specialty material I use for some pictures is a Japanese tissue called Masa. One side is super smooth and hard as steel, the other side is more like a highly refined blotter paper. You can print on either side, making it really two papers in one. The thing is, if you print on the rough side using a vacuum frame the neg is mashed into perfect contact with the compressed paper fiber. The rough texture returns when the print is fully processed and dried, but when you look at the print you clearly see picture details finer than the texture of the paper, a stunning effect. Don't know if it's an optical illusion or what.

In working out my digital negative approach I consistently used both scans from 8x10 film and RAW captures in 4/3s format. It's amazing how well the captures hold up technically.  Aside from technical tests though, I've done hardly any digital capture work intended for Pt/Pd printing, though that surely will change in the future.

cfw: "Many years ago I attended a (very) brief introductory, hands-on session about Pt/Pd printing. The digital negative I used for my assignment was not 'dense' enough (for lack of a better term), and my print came out barely visible. I also did not have the right pressure on the negative/paper. Since then I've been meaning to invest in the basic equipment (not cheap) to do this type of printing, but always find some excuse to not get it together. The digital negative I used was produced from a conversion process in Photoshop, directly from the digital file (not a scanned negative), and I remember that getting the digital negative right in the beginning is a make or break deal for the final print. It was a lengthy process of trial and error, using different curves, getting the gradations and shadows just right. Just making one print come out right is a Herculean task. I can't phantom doing 100+ prints at a time."

Will Your Photos Outlast You?

Words and photographs by Gordon Lewis

One of my ongoing interests—I won’t use the word concerns because that could imply worry or anxiety—is how long my images will last. Given my own impermanence, I lack the hubris to expect that any photographs I’ve produced will last forever. I’d certainly love for later generations to consider my work good enough to be worth maintaining, but that’s up to them to decide, not me. In any event, I won’t be around to enjoy it.

All I’d really like at this point is that my images last at least as long as I do. I’m 61 years old and have been practicing photography for over 45 years. I’m happy to report that most of my photos are in remarkably good health. (So am I, by the way.) I still have negatives and prints from the late '60s that I developed when I was in high school. These are all black-and-white; I wasn’t shooting in color then. Although I’ve been reasonably careful about proper processing and storage, I haven’t been fanatical, so the fact that these images have lasted as long as they have is a testament to the fundamental stability of B&W film and print media. Although it’s more difficult to produce prints or JPEGs from my old film images than from files shot with a digital camera, it’s still possible. If I reproduce my film images digitally, the results can be significantly better than what I was able to achieve in the darkroom. (And I was a pretty damned good B&W printer, thank you very much.)

I shot this photo of the legendary bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins, at the Ash Grove, a folk and blues club in Los Angeles. The Ash Grove burned to the ground in 1973. Hopkins died in 1982. This image is scanned
from the original Tri-X negative.

There are exceptions of course. Prints I made on resin-coated papers are much more prone to bronzing and other discolorations than my fiber prints, especially when mounted under glass. Color transparencies have been more stable than color negatives and prints, though some of my oldest color prints have that authentically “aged” look that digital filters try to mimic.

Ironically, some of my early attempts at digital archiving have been the least stable of all. Images I once copied onto Zip Drives and Kodak Photo CDs are now irretrievable. I’m still able to read my Kodak Picture Disks on 3.5" floppy media, but the resolution and image quality are only slightly better than what you’d expect with a decent camera phone. That said, my more recent digital archives on external hard drives are doing fine so far.

Another exception to digital decay is my digital prints. Inkjet pigment prints of mine have been framed and exposed to indirect sunlight for at least ten years and still look as good as the day I printed them. I also have images that have been digitally printed onto silver-based color paper. These have been stored in boxes, folders, or albums and still look fine, which is to say they generally don’t look as good as the prints I made myself, but they are more than good enough for family archiving purposes.

This, in my opinion, is one of the strongest arguments for making any prints you produce as archival as possible: Why go through the time and expense of printing if fading may cause you to have to reprint years later, with no guarantee that you’ll be able to find the original negative or file, or duplicate your original printer profile, paper, and settings? It’s far more efficient to get it right the first time. Also, should I—or you—drop dead tomorrow, prints in clearly labeled boxes, envelopes, or folders are a lot easier for your survivors to find and share than raw files on one of your backup drives.

If there’s any drawback to being consistent and well organized in the way you maintain your images over time, it’s that word will begin to spread among your friends, acquaintances, and relatives whose own photo filing methods are, shall we say, lacking. You’d be surprised how often I get calls or emails from people I photographed years ago and barely remember, asking if I still have the prints or negatives and, if so, whether I can send them a copy. More often than not, I can. I don’t mind either; after all, it’s flattering that my photographs would be important enough to someone else that they would seek me out for copies years later.

This is one of my first successful attempts at shooting and processing my own film. It’s of my dog Prince and was most likely shot in the summer
of 1967, on the front porch of my home.

The person you don’t want to be is the one who can’t find a photo you shot three months ago, has no backup copies of his image files, either no prints or prints and negs stored in a damp basement, or has all of his images stored on a hard drive that has started making “funny noises.”

Laugh if you’d like, but for those of you who have been active photographers for at least a decade or two, can you locate your earliest images and, if so, what condition are they in? I’d really be curious to know.

Gordon

©2014 by Gordon Lewis, all rights reserved

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Jordi P: "As a 19-year-old it is a question I sometimes ponder. I am thinking about my own lifetime posterity rather than poshumously. Still have the original files of my first pictures I took in 2004 as a kid.

"(Cringed a bit on the decade mentioned on the last paragraph.) Took up film shooting for learning and all the negs, prints and slides shot I have in a drawer. Should get around classifying them one day. On the external HDD's I got I finally got sround to sorting the photos by year and month subfolders last christmas. Should do a backup soon again.

"The after I die question is one I don'think about! Despite growing in the digital age, I mistrust digital media for unassisted archiving. Given the nature nowadays of this medium, I expect a 'digital dark age' of some sort. Causalities: In 2009 and 2011 I misplaced (lost) a couple of folders. Sadly the former contained photos of a family friend that passed away. Resalised its value late. Nowadays I do a lot of casual photography around my college life and for sure I am going to be the one who keeps photos of things. A quote that has been etched in my mind, by Mr John Free, is: 'It's not about you, it's about them.' So I hope to not be the guy with lost files as it isn't only me the one affected."

Stephen Cowdery: "I have tens of thousands of images going back to the mid-'60s, negatives and slides, all in pages in three ring binders by year. I can find any image in a couple of minutes. B&W negs are all perfect, color negs have shifted but are usually restorable, Kodachromes, Anscochromes (GAF) 3M slides are very good, but Ektachromes are all over the place—some from the '70s have faded to red quite badly, others are OK.

"I worked many years in a lab specializing in printing from old media. The only B&W negs which were a problem were very old nitrate-based ones which had started to dissolve(100+ years old.) Color negs from the '50s were usually very bad, old slides from that era usually had some fading (except Kodachromes) and often had fungus spots.  Prints were all over the place—the old prints in the best condition had all been toned."

Wolfgang Lonien: "Gordon! So good to hear/read from you. Though it's only since December, I miss your 'Shutterfinger' blog—but I also understand the perfectly good reasons to stop you listed there. Wishing you and yours well from Germany—and thanks for this article as well!"

Speed: "My prints, negatives and slides are like Schrödinger's cat—they are both there and not there. In my mind all are well preserved in sleeves, envelopes and folders in a box in the basement. In reality they may be lost. As long as I don't open the box...."

Joseph Brunjes: "shoot most of my serious work on 8x10 tintype. I like tintypes because you get a 'print' minutes after the exposure. (I procrastinate with printing my B&W negatives.) We still have tintypes from the 1860s that were not stored in climate controled spaces or behind glass. My varnished plates should easily last hundreds of years."

Are They Or Aren't They?

(Are inkjet prints really superior to traditional color printing methods? Ctein and I weigh in. See the last Featured Comment just added to the "Big Mystery" post.)

Mike
(Thanks to Ed)

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MHMG: "The fascinating thing about inkjet prints is that they aren't as homogeneous or consistent in appearance as more traditional photographic processes. Folks still call color choromogenic prints 'C-prints' as a holdover from a very early Kodak color paper that wasn't even on an RC base. The look just hasn't really changed all that much over the years. Ditto for Ilfochrome (a.k.a. Cibachrome) or Kodak dye transfer prints. They are all quite easy to recognize due to the unique constraints of the chemical and material processes involved. In contrast, Inkjet prints have an enormous degree of freedom with respect to both image-forming colorants and media. An inkjet print can be made to mimic many historic processes or it can be made to look like no other process that has ever come before it. So, it's all up to the printmaker what kind of aesthetic is going to be achieved with inkjet printing.

"Like many other reflection print processes, when made well, inkjet prints are amazing and when made poorly they are an embarrassment to be called photographs. That said,  on technical merits we can break the arguments about print quality down further:

1) As for sharpness and grain structure, even the best multi-channel inkjet printer screening patterns cannot match the super high resolution of a light sensitized analog print paper, but most optically enlarged negatives and slides could never make use of this exceptional print resolution unless the film was contact printed. This practical limitation gives today's digital image files and sharpening/noise reduction algorithms a chance to compete very well in terms of human perceived print sharpness and grain structure in the final print. This perceptual reality is especially true when making very large scale prints.

2) Color gamut of inkjet exceeds most traditional color processes with the possible exception of dye transfer (although dye transfer had a less than optimal cyan dye in particular), but even with as much control as the printmaker had over color and tone in a dye transfer print, the total color and tone control in digital imaging and inkjet printing far surpasses the control we had with analog processes.

3). With respect to overall print durability (which helps prints last longer) one has to be careful when debating inkjet versus traditional color processes. Uncoated inkjet prints do tend to be much more abrasion and scratch sensitive, but coatings can be used to create inkjet prints with as much or more physical durability as traditional silver gelation prints when the application requires it. As for light fastness, humidity resistance, gas fade resistance, and thermal stability, inkjet prints range from extremely fragile to far more stable than any other traditional color photographic processes depending on choice of colorant and media. In this regard, the printmaker must choose wisely...

"...Which brings the whole debate back to P+I+P+C!"

On Vintage Prints (A Last Word)

Before we leave the topic, I'd just like to quietly point out that all the objections to inkjet prints within the photography market are very reminiscent of the objections to photography itself, back in earlier days. Not creative enough, too mechanical and thus insufficiently expressive, too automatic, too easily duplicable (and thus not unique or limited), too common and accessible to everyone without discrimination, and so on*.

Of course none of that is actually true. Try getting a print today to look just like a particular photographer's print from an era past and gone—and you don't have to pick someone like Robert Demachy as an example, either; the films change, the papers change, the methods and even the visual taste involved is peculiar to each particular maker.

Ken Tanaka mentioned this the other day: when Walter Rosenblum made his own prints from Lewis Hine's original negatives and then used his status as a Hine expert to certify them as genuine, eventually people realized that the "fake" (modern) prints looked too much like Walter Rosenblum prints. In other cases where modern prints are made from historical negatives, too, experts (and sometimes even ordinary folks) can tell the difference. I saw some modern prints made from Lartigue negatives, and while I thought they were beautiful (I tend to like replicas), there was no mistaking them for vintage prints.

Another example. When Ctein and I were going through the back-and-forth process of printing my "Wisconsin #7" (the streetlight in the snow) for my last sale, we couldn't get it to look like my original prints of the picture—partly because I stupidly didn't keep a print for myself from the earlier sale, leaving Ctein without a guide print, but also partly because I was then using a paper that's no longer available and a printer that I no longer have.

At some point—with the accelerated pace of progress, probably sooner than we can guess—inkjet printers themselves will be replaced by a newer and more efficient technology—prints from which will look somewhat different. At that time, the prestige of "vintage" inkjet prints from the era when inkjet printers were ubiquitous will begin inexorably to rise—and thousands of photographers will wish they had made more inkjet prints of their old digital files when the process was still current and it was still easy to do so**.

Mike

[CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post said that Jim Hughes had mentioned the Hine/Rosenblum controversy. It was actually Ken Tanaka, who mentioned it in a comment to the "And the Winner Is" post. Apologies to both for the mistake. —Ed.]

*And thus, they're slow to be accepted as valid and valuable art...just as photography itself was slow to be accepted.

**I've been impressed by a certain development that I've seen in my own life and work. I was mostly a "darkroom nomad" during my heavy film-shooting years (from 1980 to 2000). I had my own darkroom a couple of times—never for very long—and otherwise I used darkrooms at schools where I was a student or schools where I taught. (Or just didn't have access to a darkroom at all.) I also was often short of having enough money for paper, too. Consequently I was always "putting off" making prints of negatives I liked; either I'd stop at the workprint stage and put off making the finished print, or I'd make one finished print and assume I could make more whenever I needed to.

In the meantime, the world changed. Even now I don't have time to make new wet prints from old negatives, and most of the papers available now don't fit the old negatives as well as they fit the papers they were made for. (See here if you don't know what I mean by "fit." Be warned, though, it's complicated.) Suddenly those old prints made when the negatives were made are indeed "vintage prints"—and I wish I'd made more of them when it was natural to do so.

Meanwhile, I'm doing the same damned thing now—I've got a collection of files awaiting printing, and I'm making the assumption in my head that I'll have time in the future to catch up. I guess I never learn.

P.S. That ghost story this morning? Completely made up.  :-)

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Bob Gary: "Absolutely the truth, I'm sure, for a lot of us. So, we all have generations of "vintage" print projects waiting to be done, and quite possibly may just skip the unprinted ones slated for the darkroom and print them out in inkjet. I've gone back to early 1912 negatives and had to scan and print for the present time, not bothering to "match" the end result with a corresponding original print. It's always going to be different. There always seems to be more old negatives than actual surviving prints that need to be done. And, there's as much fiddling with scanning parameters as there was with darkroom exposures and chemicals. Toss in the Photoshop techniques in lieu of the enlarger printing skills, and the current printing processes are just as intensive, yet different."

xtian: "I think you are absolutely & totally 'spot on' with your point. I would only add that this whole thing not only applies to inkjet prints but also to digital photography in general. I have said from the beginning that this bickering is a total rehash of went went on between painters and photographers beginning around 1848."

Richard Newman: "I think that part of the problem is that some people tend to consider the difficulty of the technique, time required to learn the technique, and the time required to create the image, as significant value factors in judging the quality of the image. Therefore, a photograph, which can be exposed, 'Photoshopped' and printed in a day cannot be as valuable as a sculpture, oil painting, or etching—even if the images are essentially identical. This was a factor in accepting photography as an art form (how could a Kodak 'point and shoot' print be valuable? Not much skill, or years to learn how to work the shutter). And it applies to print evaluation. They further justify it by pointing at the large percentage of prints that are mediocre at best, ignoring the fact that the vast majority of painters, sculptors and such were (and are) mediocre. If digital printing could be made more mysterious it might get better reviews."

Mike replies: Ansel Adams foresaw "electronic photography" (what we call digital), but if I remember correctly, he also said on a few occasions that he wished photography weren't so easy.  :-)

P+I+P Standards: A Proposal for Future Printmaking Standardization

The following idea comes from Bruno Masset—it's his idea, not mine. (I just like it.)

He suggests that for high-end inkjet prints (distinguished from the kind of thing that gets spit out on bond paper by four-color dye printers all over the world) that "something technically correct (and therefore defensible) and bland (and therefore without any undesirable connotations)" is needed.

His suggestion is "IHD print," for "Incremental Halftone Deposition."

I looked it up, and "IHD" is also largely available—Microsoft now calls its the Advanced Content interactivity layer in HD DVD "HDi," and apart from that there are only four other entries for the acronym on Wikipedia's disambiguation page, none of them pertaining to imagemaking.

Bruno continues:

Incremental: Microscopically (at the dot level) and macroscopically (at the picture level), the inks are indeed deposited sequentially and incrementally by the print head(s).

Halftone: Just like halftones, inkjet printing is, at a fundamental level, a discrete, non-continuous, dot-based printing system.

Deposition: Self-explanatory.

Bruno adds: "one could also, if necessary, distinguish between 'Organic IHD process' (dye-based inks) and 'Inorganic IHD process' (pigment-based inks)."

•     •     •

Bruno didn't mention this, but I think that we also need a certification process for specific combinations of materials—a basic suite of test procedures that the community can agree on for determining a reasonable expectation of print life expectancy (LE) and decent handling properties.

I'm on thin ice here, because a number of organizations work in the field of materials testing and conservation and no doubt are much further along in their science and their procedures than I'm even aware of. And I don't have time to do original research into existing published International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standards that relate to image permanence and life expectancy and durability. But what I would suggest is a new standard for Paper + Inkset + Printer (P+I+P) combinations that would "approve" a set of P+I+P materials and equipment as being a known quantity that come up to a baseline standard for quality, permanence, and handling properties.

Bruno's naming suggestion would distance premium inkjet prints from the (deserved) perjorative connotations of the worst practices of the medium, and an ISO standard approving specific P+I+P combinations would enable photographers to easily ensure that their choices of P+I+P combinations are acceptable to the collector and exhibition market, and it would create an objective standard so that galleries, museums and collectors didn't have to just take photographers' words that the work they're buying is "archival."

And of course an ISO certification for a paper-inkset-printer combination doesn't in the least limit the freedom of manufacturers or print creators. Manufacturers can make whatever they please and photographers can use whatever they please. This idea would just give a further option for those on the creation side who want assurance that they're working with the best materials, and those on the market side who want assurance that the prints they're trading and collecting were responsibly made and won't self-destruct.

If in the future you were to visit museums and see prints on the wall identified as a "Certified Inorganic IHD Print (2014)," it would be much more useful than just the words "inkjet print" or any of the random replacement desciptions that are now used haphazrdly. Like for instance "archival pigment print.*"

Bruno's original comment appears in its entirely in the Comments to the "Big Mystery" post.

Mike
(Thanks to Bruno)

*Because, really, anybody can slap the word "archival" on anything—especially if there's a financial inducement to do so—and no one can reasonably contradict the claim. Even the word "pigment" is suspect—were the inks pure pigment or simply a dye ink with some pigment added? And how can a dealer or museum reasonably stand by a claim of "archival pigment print" when the terms aren't defined and they're taking the artist's word for it anyway? And anyway nowhere in that casual description is the paper taken into account. It's all very suspect—and that must be hindering the acceptance of premium inkjet prints in the marketplace. When, really, the very best inkjet materials and the very worst inkjet materials are simply worlds apart.

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Jeff: "Wilhelm Imaging Research (WIR) has long made attempts to achieve some degree of standardization…but that's a long topic. Even with such tests, real world print display conditions involve numerous other variables, e.g., lighting, glass, etc.

"And beyond that, there are other print techniques that likely help or hinder print longevity, and that's been true long before the advent of digital printing. How, for instance, are Paul Strand's silver prints affected by his sometimes use of varnish spray? Should he have been required to disclose that to print buyers? There are certainly modern day inkjet equivalents involving toning, etc.

"This is not a new issue and, as far as I know, there have never been agreed-upon standards, even for 'silver prints.' Why should this be any different? I think change (real and perceptual) will come based on the market, not based on some required standards. I don't collect vintage silver, or platinum, prints any differently."

Mike replies: You're kind of talking past me here, for which I might be to blame. I'm not talking about a standard for actual LE. I'm talking about a certification procedure for various specific combinations of materials and equipment, so that printing services, photographers, professionals, and other printmakers could easily determine whether their materials and equipment were considered "safe to use" or "acceptable to buyers" or "of known high quality" or whatever words you want to use.

I didn't even mention what the criteria for certification might be.

Thus, Brand E Model X printer might be certified to use with Y inkset but not with other inks; and Brand E Model Y printer with Y inkset might be certified if used with papers A, B, C, D, E, F, N, P, and Q but not with any other papers.

The advantage of this is that when subsequent buyers, exhibitors, and owners want to know if the materials used were of a certain quality, they'd have an objective measure for confirmation of that.

The certification might even use one of a number of actual independent standards as a qualification. For instance, certification might stipulate that the print meet either "Wilhelm Imaging Research Test L" or "Aardenburg Imaging Light Fade Test Z" as part of the criteria.

Get the distinction?

Trecento: "I have only one problem with your proposal: you want an ISO certification. I hate paying ANSI for the privilege of reading supposedly public standards. For instance, ISO 18915, "Methods for the evaluation of the effectiveness of chemical conversion of silver images against oxidation" (i.e. silver print permanence!) costs $114 USD. Erecting a paywall would significantly reduce the effectiveness of your proposal. As an alternative model, I would suggest something similar the different Open Source licensing models, like the LPGL. A nonprofit entity is created to hold the trademark for IHD, and creates a set of standards for how/whether prints can be marked as IHD."

Hugh Crawford: "I'm pretty sure that no one uses halftone screening which is an amplitude modulation technique. Everything I have seen uses stochastic screening.

"I'm not so sure about the incremental part either. Canon printers for instance seem to put down the different inks all at once, i.e., any one color drop of ink can have any of 10 other colors deposited over it.

"Deposition has a nice ring to it however.

"So: Variable Stochastic Deposition print?

"VSD also stands for the Swiss printers trade group, Variable Sized Dots, and Voltage Sensitive Dyes, which might confuse someone, but I wouldn't worry too much. And the Swiss printers trade group is probably too freaked out about inkjet technology in general to care.

"As an aside, I wouldn't want to get the whole organic vs. inorganic and dye vs. pigment terminology baked into the name. The average consumer has no idea what organic means. Gasoline is organic, water isn't. Lake pigments have pretty much the same performance as dyes. Some azo dye (see Cibachrome) is a lot more archival than some nonorganic pigments. Carbon and bone black is about as archival and organic as you can get, yet it gets listed as a non-organic pigment in some listings. Quinacridone seems to be a leading high-performance archival pigment, and it's organic.

"If the ink manufacturers would just tell what was in the ink rather than keeping it a secret, that would go a long way towards legitimizing inkjet printing. No artist paint manufacturer would try to sell ink or paint that didn't say what the pigment was.

"Painters used stuff like Alizarin Crimson, a.k.a. Turkey red or Mordant red 11, that faded away to nothing. Now painters are much more careful, yet I have never heard of anyone asking what pigments were used in a million dollar painting, and I doubt most artists would say. Most painters I know are more than a little proprietary about some of their pigments.

Crabby Umbo: "Regarding the word 'archival,' I remember calling the rep of a slipcase portfolio company because I found out the item wasn't made out of inert and safe material, and it it was labeled 'archival.' When I told them of my concerns they said: '...Well, we think it's made pretty well....' Didn't get it at all...."

Tuomas: "I understand the need to raise the status of 'archival inkjet prints,' but how about just calling them 'prints'? You know, like cellular phones are increasingly just phones and digital cameras are cameras."

Joe Holmes: "Wait a minute. Are we brainstorming a solution without a problem? Who's being duped by this 'dye ink with some pigment added'? Where are the collectors demanding refunds for fake archival prints? Where's the outcry that's being addressed? In my walk through this year's AIPAD show in NYC I saw plenty of inkjet prints selling for high prices."

Bron: "In my painter's hat, I own books on materials and methods dating back almost three-quarters of a century. Even the oldest offers advice on permanent pigments, fugitive pigments, and advice on admixtures that may cause problems.Pigments now all have color index numbers, as well as ASTM International permanency numbers, and most mixed artists paints have the index numbers. I can put together a palette that is completely permanent, based on permanent pigments. Doing that for inkjet inks would be a step in the direction you're advocating, and might lead to different palette choices of inksets, so an artist could choose certain colors balanced against permanence."

Michael Bearman: "I disagree. Standardization will create a race to the bottom, as everything at or above the minimum standard will be necessarily be equal (whether or not that is so); hence, it will be in manufacturers' interests only to build to the cheapest minimum. In any event, when has the longevity of art ever had anything to do with its value? Van Gogh's colours today are more than a bit different than when freshly painted. And Museums and galleries are stuffed to the gills with paintings, prints, etc. that cannot be removed from controlled environments."

Robert P: "I went to an opening of a photography exhibition where the prints were selling (and they did) for thousands. The photographer would not admit that they were inkjets, even though I knew that he had printed them himself on an Epson or an HP (I forget which). He was very insistent that they were not ink, but pigment, and he seemed to think I was trying to catch him out whereas I simply wanted to know what he had printed with, as they were stunning. One of the only times that I have seen a gallery be totally open about it was an Eggleston show in London a few years back when I was told they were Epson prints. I guess Eggleston was big enough for it not to matter."

Pete: "Think I'll just stick with Pigment on Paper. It doesn't sound like something someone in a lab came up with."

MHMG [Mark from Aardenburg Imaging —Ed.]: "I'm no stranger to certifications and the like. But honestly, artists will not and should not be subject to certifications. They should use whatever materials they wish to when creating their work. Likewise, museums and archives should never impose a litmus test of any kind for what is deemed worth collecting (and to my knowledge, with the exception of the personal tastes of individual curators, they don't).

"What is needed is a central database of P+I+P (actually P+I+P+C, where C is any possible further treatment like a coating) that informs both artist and collector of the fragility (or lack thereof) of the final work, and gives insight into what kind of optimal care is needed to care for that historic and/or artistic work over time.

"Consider the seminal work The Pencil of Nature by Henry Fox Talbot. If I were to run Talbot's 'Calotype' process through the Aardenburg light fade testing protocol it would probably receive a shockingly low rating of less than 1 megalux hour (six months or so at the industry-standard assumption of 450 lux for 12 hours per day) because the salted paper prints tipped into Talbot's book were all made before Sir John Hershel suggested sodium thiosulfate ('hypo' or 'fixer' to those of you old timers who remember spending time in a photographic darkroom) as a means to remove the residual silver halide crystals from the print. Competent museum curators understand that this early historic print process is light sensitive and have implemented strict policies to ensure that it's inherent fragility is 'rationed' for future viewing audiences wisely. As such, The Pencil of Nature, a work of art that we might 'certify' to last only six months in these modern times is still with us (albeit only about a dozen copies remain) after more than 175 years. I hope folks can now understand why Aardenburg Imaging and Archives doesn't try to reduce light fastness testing to a simple 'years on display' rating. The end-user or collector has a huge role in creating appropriate storage and display environments, and thus has a major say in how long a print will last."

Big Mystery

I was having a conversation with a representative of Canson yesterday, and the subject turned to something I still consider a significant mystery. Why, when "Archival Pigment Prints" (read, inkjet done right) is by a comfortable margin the best color printing method in the history of photography, does inkjet printing continue to suffer from the persistent stigma of such low prestige?

Some Canson materials (along with a number of other selected papers you might be familiar with), are among the most beautiful materials ever made for color photographic printmaking. Surface, thickness, feel, flatness. The printing process is almost infinitely flexible and controllable, and the results quite easily possess the best archival life expectancy of any readily available, practical printmaking method. Yet inkjet is still the poor stepchild of print types.

I can think of ten ways to explain this. And yet none of them really make sense. Is it purely a matter of status and availability? Sometimes I think that if the finest inkjet methods had a distinctive name and a proprietary workflow, and an Epson Stylus Pro 3880 or a Canon Pixma Pro-1 cost $100,000 insteand of $1,000, people would be falling over themselves in their praise and covetousness.

It's just a very curious state of affairs, and one I wouldn't have thought would survive this long.

Mike

P.S. Canson sells an "Infinity Discovery Pack" that contains samples of 12 of its papers, so you can see and feel them for yourself.

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

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Bryan Geyer: "Gosh—I'd guess that the reason is because inkjet prints were all so crummy, and faded so readily, for so many years. Yes, that was before the pigment ink era, but it was inkjet, and the stigma sticks."

Richard: "Some people still feel manual stick cars are better than automatic. [Wait—you mean they aren't? —Ed.] Some like records more than CDs or MPG files or any digital file. Some still much prefer film even though digital is also 'better' in so many ways. And some people much prefer classic lenses to 'BETTER' modern lenses that are sharper, more contrasty and less prone to flare (this is a bugaboo with me: cannot stand it when someone says a lens is better simply because it's sharper—I guess, if you're trying to shoot Air Force Test Charts). Mostly in this case though I think it's because inkjet printing is seen as simply press-the-button and walk away and easily duplicated over and over vs. a hand-crafted analog print."

Geoff Wittig: "I suspect it's the result of a misconception of what's actually involved in high quality inkjet printing. Most folks have clicked the 'print' button on their laptop and 12 seconds later gotten a mediocre print on Staples™ generic paper out of their inkjet, so how hard can it be?

"Pretty darn challenging, actually. It's true that once you have your workflow nailed down, you can reliably produce beautiful prints of uniform quality. But getting to that point requires painstaking experimentation with lots of trial and error, and endless proofing. Your raw file processing and Photoshop work (including color management, contrast 'budgeting' and sharpening routines) have to dovetail perfectly with the surface quality and warm/cool white of your chosen paper. Certain images really call for specific papers to bring out their best qualities, so you actually need a range of choices at your fingertips.

"The almost limitless permutations of digital processing/inkset/profiles/papers provides a huge toolkit allows you to squeeze out that last iota of image quality. But this is also why it's so challenging. My wife laughs at me for being so persnickety, but when I put a near-miss print next to a really good one, it's screamingly obvious."

Jack Luke: "I've been lucky enough to be printing on a 7900 and Hanuman 300 gsm fibre gloss stock for the past year in uni and it matches the quality of the C-types we have coming out of the RA-4 in most regards. I will say that one thing inkjet printing can't match is the feeling of depth you get from a high, high gloss C-type. Without waxing lyrical too much, the image seems to sit inside a C-type print as opposed to on the surface with an inkjet."

Kenneth Tanaka: "The pathology of this particular disorder starts with dealers. Dealers have infected collectors and museums with this prejudice against inkjet prints in an attempt to maintain preciousness, and prices, of chemical prints and photos. Of course art students pick this up and, not wanting to grow up as inferior artists, assume the same position. It's all very absurd and more than a little nauseating.

"But I'm happy to report that the fever seems to be breaking. I'm seeing more inkjet prints in the Art world, and fewer nonsense names for the method. Mercifully I think 'giclée,' the poster child for 'nonsense name,' is finally disappearing. 'Pigment print' seems to be the descriptive title being commonly adopted by major museums. Meanwhile, I've been experimenting with digital C-printing and have been finding it a very interesting printing technique. But that's a subject for another article."

Judith Wallerius: "I think the root of that low prestige lies in the impression of familiarity. The process of inkjet-printing is not different enough to commandeer the kind of respect the other photo processing procedures do. And it's difficult to truly appreciate archival vs. not archival quality unless you are years or even decades down the road and of one print is only a faded greenish impression left, while the other is still as vibrant as on the first day.

"People look at darkrooms full of chemicals and enlargers and it's an alien thing to most, full of steps in a process they don't comprehend. And they know that. They used to send off little metal containers that they knew they weren't to open themselves lest they'd destroy the content irretrieveably, and after a mysterious interlude they would receive envelopes with finished prints. There was a mystery to it, and an artist who was able to create and put to use all that themselves was a bit of a magician.

"That the quality of the modern inkjet printers is comparable to or can even surpass those processes doesn't matter so much when the printer looks just like a bigger version of the thing that's plodding along in the office or that they swear at when it gives mysterious error codes instead of printing. And even the size of the printer doesn't matter much, we've all seen huge printers or plotters in copy-shops for years. They look like the same thing that's now putting out those archival prints; there simply is nothing to be in awe of. With an inkjet-printer instead of darkroom work, the difference to the thing they already know has been reduced to a matter of degrees instead of being something completely other. That those degrees still make all the difference doesn't matter. It's not different enough to feel 'special,' and I don't see that changing anytime soon (or maybe even ever). I also doubt that a higher price point or proprietary work flow would change that, since people would still know what the process is—and even their office printer uses proprietary cartridges, so there's nothing impressive there.

"A distinctive name would help (hence the 'giclée print' cop-out that masks the archival inkjet print's true identity), but the process would still need to be sufficiently removed from being seen as inkjet-printing to eventually garner the same kind of respect / awe that traditional printing methods receive.

"Silly as it is, human nature demands something to have at least a bit of an air of 'I can't do that' for it to be seen as truly impressive (and, in turn, very simple things can impress people when they just think they're special and out of their range of ability or reach). Inkjet printing just doesn't fit that bill—no mystery, no magic to be found."

David Miller: "I can think of a couple of factors that are at play here. First, you cannot easily see the hand of the master in an inkjet print. Someone with a lot of digital processing and printing experience may appreciate the work that went into a superb print, but for most people it will be devalued by the conviction that 'anybody could do that.' What makes an Ansel Adams print more valued than one made by a highly skilled assistant? We intuit the hand of the master in the final product. (I've seen a number of stringed instruments built by Stradavari and other Italian masters of his time. There are elements in the workmanship that seem crude compared to a first-class factory-built 'replica.' But as a former luthier myself, I can see exactly how the maker held his knife, how he shaped a soundhole with a single powerful cut where a lesser mortal would have used five. The beauty and humanity of those old instruments is breathtaking.) Secondly, an inkjet print is devalued for the collector by the knowledge that it could be reproduced exactly by the pressing of a button—hence the inflated price for a 'limited edition' print. (As Mark Twain said, 'Buy land; they're not making it any more.')"

Rodger Kingston: "I printed Cibachromes for myself and clients for nearly 30 years, and I agree, by any comparison inkjet printing is an absolute breeze, and well-made inkjet prints can be as beautiful and permanent as any process, including my long-lost and oh-so-permanent Cibachromes. I suspect that the Rodney Dangerfield problem here may be that inkjet printing, itself, requires no hand work by the photographer or printer. All the work is done beforehand, in Photoshop or whatever, and when the image is 'ready,' all one has to do is to push the Print button of the ink jet printer. No artistry or craftsmanship involved; could that be why they don't get no respect?"

Ed: "You are working from a flawed premise. Inkjet prints are simply not the best color printing method in the history of photography. Any pure optical analog process eclipses them: dye transfer, Ciba, RA-4, etc."

Mike replies: I think they are, with the exception that most past techniques had distinctive "looks" that specific individuals might have liked and preferred. In terms of controllability, color purity, sharpness, lightfastness, enlargeability, and permanence, the best 2014 inkjet technology surpasses any and all "readily available, practical" traditional color techniques. I'm not sure about color gamut, and surfaces are a matter of taste. But even if you prefer the specific look of RA-4 prints, say, I can't see how you can make a defensible case that they are technically superior. They really just aren't.

Tech. Ed. Ctein adds: Speaking to the point that Mike didn't—color gamut—inkjet printing is vastly superior to any chromogenic or dye-bleach process. This isn't debatable.

Dye transfer is something of a red herring, as it isn't accessable to 99.9% of the photographers out there. But if it must be discussed, one must consider the substantial number of consummate dye transfer printers who chose* to switch to a digital printer. Any assertion that dye transfer prints are objectively superior has to be questioned closely.

As Mike said, we're talking about broadly objective qualities, here, not what someone personally likes or doesn't.

(*Yeah, it was a choice—dye transfer supplies are still available to the very few that are dedicated to the process.)

How to Sign Photographs Part 4: Expert Opinion

Here is Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3

Introduction: Okay, so I've heard back from three individuals: a senior museum curator (well known, with many fine books to his credit); a very distinguished gallery owner (photography art dealer) with four decades in the business and an impressive list of credentials and lifetime accomplishments; and a serious photography collector who invests substantially in fine art photographs and occasionally advises galleries and museums on emerging trends. Since two of the three prefer to remain anonymous, I'll present them all that way. You'll have to take my word for it that they are among the top people in the field, but they are.

Note however that these individuals do not speak monolithically for their entire professions or categories; they're individuals, and speak for themselves, and this short post should be considered a sampling of opinion rather than a survey of opinion. Note also that our dealer tends to concentrate a bit more than the other two on the work of living artists who are still working and creating new work (that is my notion, and I'll let you know if any of the three wish to contradict that).

Here are their answers to my short questionnaire.

•

Mike Johnston: Do museums generally prefer signed prints over unsigned ones?

Museum curator: Yes, certainly, but the actual history of the makers and objects always needs to be taken into account. A signature is a clear indication of both authorship and of quality (that is, a fine print rather than a work print, press print, etc.), so it's obviously necessary to have a signature in all cases in which one is to be expected. Historically, of course, we know that there are many bodies of work that were routinely not signed—in the 20th century, important figures like Eugene Atget basically never signed his prints and Stieglitz did so rather rarely. In those cases, we go by other criteria to be assured that the authorship and originality of the print are what we want. With 19th century work, a handful of artists either signed their prints or affixed facsimile signature ink-stamps...but many more did not. With contemporary work, it is natural for collectors to expect that all works would be signed—there is, after all, very little good reason for not doing so.

Collector/investor: Marginally, but for vintage prints it would be rare. Instead, verso stamps are common* and would be fine for contemporary prints as well.

Photography art dealer: Yes, collectors want signed photographic prints. The only exception would be estate prints with some form of documentation from the estate representative, with documentation.

•

MJ: Is there a generally accepted preference for prints signed on the front or the back?  

Museum curator: There is no strong preference here from collectors—it's more the preference of the artist. My personal preference is for signatures on the back, leaving the front "clean."

Collector/investor: Absolutely, back.

Photography dealer: Personally,  I prefer to see prints signed on both the front and back. Do not know how others dealers feel about this issue.

•

MJ: If there is a recto signature, should it remain displayed when the print is framed?

Museum curator: My preference is no; this strikes me all too often as a kind of affectation, adding little or nothing to our appreciation of the image itself.

Collector/investor: Hell no.

Photography dealer: It would be optimal if the signature is visible on the recto when matted, but [it is] not always possible.

•

MJ: Does the presence of a signature make any difference to the value of a piece, or is that too dependent on related issues and specific cases to make a general statement about? 

Museum curator: See my answer to [the first question] above. In the cases in which we would expect a signature as a sign of authenticity and print quality, the lack of a signature would pretty consistently have some impact on the value/desirability of the work. In the cases in which a signature isn't expected in the first place, it would obviously make no difference.

Collector/investor: Very rarely.

Photography dealer: The photographer's signature is always important. Hard to offer a first class vintage photograph to a serious collector without a signature or substantial attribution.

•

If I receive any more answers to my queries I'll add them to this post and alert you to the edit.

My thanks to all concerned!

Mike

*In a follow-up email, our collector/investor added the following: "[Where stamps are concerned] a lot depends on the facts and circumstances. I suppose we can also add blind stamps to the list, although that is hardly common anymore. I think a rubber stamp is more common and more archival. But to address one example of variability, for iconic photojournalistic images it is more desirable to have all sorts of press information stamped and pasted to the back than it is to have modern print with a big signature.

"I suppose that for modern prints, if [the print] has any value whatsoever—which, let's face it, is a one in a billion proposition—it is usually clear what a finished print is and what it isn't.

"Another issue is editions, a modern phenomenon. That is usually in light pencil on recto."

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

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Jim Hughes: "Regarding the signing of prints: I have a large 'Tomoko in Her Bath' print that Gene Smith gave me as a birthday present (long story—he wanted to give me a watch, but Evelyn convinced him I'd rather have the actual and spectacular, if a bit dinged, print which I'd reproduced in the 1974 Minamata essay in Camera 35). He inscribed the print, almost invisibly, in a dark area in the lower left with a black ball-point pen, probably a cheap Bic. Lee Witkin, who matted and framed it for us (reluctantly, it seemed, since he'd always had a tough time getting prints from Gene to sell in the gallery), had taken to calling this, Gene's final signing practice, 'Signed in the image with Stylus.'

"Subsequently, this print hung in my office on a wall that backed my computer desk; the searing image of suffering and love is the one I looked at every day as I sat down to write another chapter for my biography of Smith, a process that took many years.

"Witkin's book The Photograph Collector's Guide, done with Barbara London, is an excellent source by the way. It includes examples of many photographers' signatures. A couple years back, ICP attributed on its blog a note to Helen Gee at Limelight Gallery in the 1950s as having been written by Gene Smith when, in fact, it had been written by Minor White. When I saw it online, I suspected the language did not sound like Gene's and checked the Witkin book for other possibilities. White's reproduced signature was clearly an exact match while Smith's, of course, was nothing like the signature at the bottom of this note. So rather than admitting the mistake, ICP just removed the document from the blog without a word of explanation."