The Online Photographer

Printer Conundrum? Not So Much

Certain things are hard to buy. For instance, I brew my coffee in a Clever Dripper, essentially a paper filter holder with a valve in it that allows the coffee to steep before it drains. It works fine for one or two people. When I have guests, it would be nice to have a regular ol' coffeemaker to brew a pot for everyone and keep it warm. But I don't have one—I've had paralysis-by-analysis over which one to choose. I've identified the leading contenders, but nothing seems just right. I keep holding back. (Or is it possible I just don't really need a particular piece of gear? There's an exotic thought.)

Other times, there's just too much choice. Have you ever tried to buy a computer monitor? Criminy, it seems like there are 4,000 of them on the market, and most of them have such untrackable alphanumeric gobbledegook for names that I can't suss a single maker's lineup, much less compare between brands.

My brother added, "printers, too."

The Canon Pro-1000

For me, though, the situation with printers is more clear. I'm very torn about what to do about a new computer; not so torn about the printer. I've decided to send the P600 (currently on reviewer loan) back to Epson and get a P800. The other really strong option in the field at that level is the Canon Pro-1000. ($1,300.) (Canon makes two series of printers, Pixma [consumer] and ImagePROGRAF [professional/enthusiast].)

Having surveyed the field, my opinion is that the Epson P800 ($895 currently at B&H Photo) and Canon Pro-1000 ($1,000 at B&H Photo; ordering resumes tomorrow) will peak the "recommendable" and "desirable" graphs for most dedicated enthusiasts of the type who read TOP. If my recent experience with the P600 is any guide, inkjet printers have reached a pleasingly refined state—compact, affordable, easy to use and capable of superb results that are very gratifying. That's not to say the lesser and greater models a little ways down both slopes of the graph from those two printers aren't fine machines or that they won't be recommendable or desirable for certain individuals. Certainly they will. Really dedicated printmakers will probably want a 24-inch or larger floorstanding model, and occasional and casual printmakers will probably gravitate to lower models like the Epson P600 I'm using now and the Canon PIXMA Pro-10.

I personally feel the lower models aren't quite as desirable, what with their smaller ink cartridges and limitations on paper size. Printmaking offers great rewards but also requires considerable involvement, and if you're going to do it at all, I would be inclined to argue that it's worth it to do it right. For most of us, I think the choice is pretty clear: the mainstream 17" pigment printers from the two major makers will be the way to go. They strike the best balance of size and convenience (both are reasonably-sized desktop machines), ink efficiency (both have 80 ml cartridges), quality, flexibility, and purchase price.

If you're going to go to the bother of printmaking at home—a minority pursuit among enthusiast photographers these days, and possibly even a minority pursuit among our readers—one of these two machines is most likely to be your sweet spot. No paralysis necessary.

Mike

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

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Featured Comments from:

Chris: "As someone who does print at home using a Canon Pro 100, what are you going to do with the prints you make? Once you fill up your walls with them? I personally feel discomfort at filling my house with my own shots—smacks of Trumpian self-satisfaction. You can keep them in archival boxes, but who will be looking at them? I like printing, but this is an eternal dilemma."

Mike replies: Classical answer: albums, and gifts. Albums can go on shelves and are fun to look at with guests and family, and prints make considerate gifts. (My advice, though: small prints make better gifts than large ones. I tend to give 8x10s, because they can easily go into the recipient's albums, or into ready-made store-bought frames.

Geoff Wittig: "Inkjet printers are like a lot of other photographic gear, in that each incremental jump in price and capability adds features that are not essential, but oh-so-nice to have. Entry level desktop printers with their tiny little cartridges and flimsy construction can drive you crazy. I'd have to agree with Mike that 17" 'large desktop printers' like Epson's P800 and Canon's Pro-1000 are the sweet-spot for folks serious about making decent prints, as they're far better made and have decent sized ink cartridges, and at ~60 lbs. they're manageable by mere mortals. But the big 24" printers are awfully nice! You can print a spectacular large pano, the ink carts are huge and seem to last forever, and from paper handling to overall durability everything is first class. I've been using a Canon iPF 6300 for more than five years, and it just keeps going. Finally had to replace the maintenance tank last month; took five minutes and I was back up and running. On the other hand, the 24" printers weigh 200 lbs. or more, and I can tell you exactly how much fun they are to get up a narrow staircase.

"There's also a lot to be said for farming out the occasional large print to a good 'service bureau.' Lumiere Photo in Rochester has a bank of large Epson printers, and they do gorgeous work, for a price. They get to worry about maintaining and owning the printers, but that means they charge accordingly per print."

aaronL: "It couldn't be a bigger conundrum. Epson P800 or Canon Pro-1000? Both capable of quality output but both very different machines...."

Edward Richards: "You definitely want the service contract that extends the warranty by two years. This is cheaper for the Canon, bringing them to about the same price."

Have Faith in Practice (Epson P600)

Further report on the Epson P600: causes sleeplessness.

I've been getting to bed later than I should because in my situation it's easier to print after dark (I work on a porch, and the reflections on the computer get pretty bad in the daylight hours), and I get so charged up about making prints that I keep at it after I really should stop and go to bed. Something to watch out for.

This is the most recent one I'm trying to get right, and it's resisting me. It's easy to get it close but tough to get it just right—all the options are a matter of interpretation and I'm not completely clear yet about how I want it to look. I'll keep looking at it until I really understand how it ought to look.

I'm coming up to speed on papers, RIPs, calibration, and so forth, but I wanted to mention one other important learning tool—constant practice. I've already failed in my ambition to make at least one print every day that I'm home, but that's not a squishy ambition. It's an integral part of my conception of the learning process. Practice alone isn't enough to master any craft, but if you do something day after day—night after night in my case—and keep after it for a long time, you will probably get better at it. I know enough about myself and craft to know that if I keep trying hard and keep trying to do my best for long enough, any problems I'm having will sooner or later go away, and what was initially difficult will become much easier; what was initially confusing will become clear; what was initially flustering or frustrating will become relaxed and easygoing. Naturally, along the way, you've got to keep learning, keep reading, keep challenging yourself, keep struggling to improve. That's part of it, too. But just doing something a lot will also lead to improvement. You almost can't help it.

That faith can help you to relax about your problems and your progress, too. Trust yourself. You'll get it. If not today, tomorrow. If not tomorrow, next week. If not next week, next year. Keep practicing, and improvement is inevitable.

Mike

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

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Featured Comments from:

mike plews: "In the TV biz there is a situation I like to call the 'darkened edit room syndrome.' It comes when you spend a little too much time fine tuning an edit without coming up for air. I have seen people get badly lost and end up tweaking the life out of a story. When you find yourself beating your head against the wall on a 'close but no cigar' print you might consider setting it aside for a day or two. After a breather you may find you like the print more than you first thought. Helps hold down both ink consumption and blood pressure."

Mike replies: I agree—part of the process is always to look at it the next morning before signing off on it. I think Ansel actually advises that in The Print—he tells a story about printing a whole edition then coming back the next morning to find that the highlights had dried down just a little too much, requiring him to print the whole run over again. It's much easier to do now since nothing else changes overnight.

Del Bomberger: "I well remember my first foray into digital printing. I thought it was a fool's errand and that I had made a terrible mistake. But when I finally had it all dialed in—at considerable investment in both time and expense—it all became worth it. Now I consider preparing and printing an image one of the really enjoyable facets of photography. I don't know that anything will ever replace seeing a photo 'coming up' in a tray full of chemicals, but it really is fulfilling in a way I can't better describe."

The Best Printing Papers

Usually I'm pretty quick at Internet research, but I'm finding it difficult to come up with a list of recommendable premium inkjet printing papers. Reviewers seem to be reticent about making outright recommendations, I guess because technical reviews are difficult to do and you'd hate to recommend something that was later revealed to have problems. Plus, paper is like coffee in that it's not entirely a stable, repeatable industrial product—it can differ from year to year and batch to batch.

Consensus, as far as I can detect it, seems to be coalescing around the Canson brand. I have a Canson sample pack and I know exactly where it is: it's in a box in my barn! Beyond that I don't know where it is. I think I'll have to order another one if I actually want to see their papers again. Ilford used to be a big name but I can't quite tell if it still is. Then there are several higher-value brands like Moab and Red River. In November I plan to order a bunch of sample packs from any manufacturer that makes one and evaluate them by hand and eye. Which isn't everything, although it's something.

Coming at it from the LE perspective isn't a lot easier—it's easy to find data at places like Aardenburg Imaging and Wilhelm Research, but I haven't yet found anything like a list of the best or most recommended papers. Likely because careful researchers do not like to extrapolate results past the specific conditions under which they tested.

Any of you veteran inkjet printers out there have any thoughts on the subject? I'm eager to hear. Epson's RC-based Ultra Premium Luster seems great for proofs but I'd like to find a few more luxurious "standard" papers for interpretive prints. Thanks in advance!

Mike

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

Photographs on paper rock and rule.
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Dave Van de Mark: "There was a time (during the life of my first big printers—an Epson 7600 and later a Canon ipF8000—that just endlessly, it seemed, I played with different papers. The first type I quickly eliminated were the RC. Just didn't like them and they seemed less 'environmental' to me.

"Since I was making large prints and mounting them on gator board and not covering them up with anything—no sprays, no glass or acrylic—I needed to find a smooth, durable and non-reflective paper and did so with Innova FibaPrint ultra smooth white matte 280gm. I love it and stopped hunting.

"For smaller 'bin' prints—sold matted and inside a protective sleeve—I just love the Canson Baryta Photographique paper in roll and 13x19" and 17x22" sizes. Again, I have quit hunting!

"Using these papers in a well-profiled setup with my new Canon ipF6400 printer, I'm living in heaven, with what seems to be a very, very good match from what I see on monitor to a finished print. The Innova matte paper has a surprisingly high contrast and tonal range and can be 'snappy' just like glossier papers.

"I will be the first to admit that, by not looking further, I may be missing a 'gem.' But I doubt any new stuff out there is worlds better than what makes me perfectly happy right now."

Mike Leinhausr: "I've tried a few of papers and have come to really like the Canson Baryta Photographique and Platine Fibre Rag. I printed with Agfa Portriga Rapid in the darkroom for years and have looked for something digital that would cross over—not much luck—but now use the Platine for 90% of what I do. Using an Epson R3000 and seems to do a decent job with this combination."

Ken Bennett: "I mostly print on luster paper, but I've had good results with the Epson Exhibition Fiber when I want to spend the big bucks.  :-)  "

Kenneth Tanaka: "Of course there is no such thing as a 'best' printer paper. The printing world has evolved quickly to offer many excellent, and generally equivalent, inkjet/pigment papers today.

"Personally, after having spent crazy time and money experimenting with papers in years past I have settled on Ilford's Gold Fibre Silk (310 GSM) as my standard paper. Why?

• Reasonable cost for a good weight.
• Excellent availability.
• A lovely semi-gloss baryta surface that enables excellent contrast and tonal range.
• It's become somewhat of a standard in the art world for pigment prints.  Indeed, my local large-print printer (who prints for many artists) has also chosen it as his standard.

"I do not often venture into matte printing, except for certain small prints. When I do I usually use a Hahnemuhle paper such as a Photo Rag (there are several). I also like Museo stock for small matte prints and cards.

"By all means have fun exploring the possibilities with your new printer. But good printer papers are much more expensive than ink, with even a modest size sheet costing upwards of $2+.  And it takes time and much waste to learn to adapt to many papers' characteristics.

"And the fact is that despite all the noise over papers in photo enthusiast circles it really doesn't make much difference, especially if you plan to glaze the print. I have seen lovely, and very valuable, inkjet prints in museums and galleries obviously printed on Epson Premium Luster stock.

"My advice: The sooner you make a standard choice for yourself the sooner you'll learn to master it!"

Geoff Wittig: "I have two different sets of paper I like depending on what I'm printing.

"For everyday use, prints I give away, or make just to see what a photo looks like as a print, I use a lot of Canon's heavyweight satin photo paper. I'm using a Canon iPF6300; if I were using an Epson, I'd probably use Epson's equivalent Premium Luster. That's what Pete Turner used for his exhibit at George Eastman House (er, Museum) a few years back. The Canon satin paper looks great, and it's affordable. I also use it for very large prints I have laminated onto boards.

"For prints I really care about, though, I'm very fond of Hahnemühle's beautiful range of cotton rag photo papers. My current favorites are Photo Rag Pearl and Photo Rag Baryta, both of which are heavy 100% cotton rag papers with fabulous 'hand feel' and subtly differing surface gloss. The pearl surface seems more sympathetic to color photos and baryta to B&W, but it might just be me. They're very close. I also perversely like Photo Rag Satin, which has quite low contrast and poor D-max, but nonetheless provides a unique subtle surface sheen that really complements some images. I've tried some of Canson's papers along with Ilford's popular Gold Fiber Silk and Harman's gloss baryta paper, but keep finding myself going back to Hahnemühle."

Mark Bridgers: "I've always liked Red River Papers, they have all types. I like the San Gabriel baryta and their Aurora Natural for black-and-whites. But I'm just goofing around and having fun, not a serious artist."

Brian Stewart: "In your justly famous 'Letter to George,' circa 2010, in steps 7, 17, 19 and the end-point, you mentioned a closet fully of discarded and unused camera gear. As I type in my studio that closet is on my left. On my right is a matching closet of inkjet paper, accumulated in much the same way. You have been warned."

What to Do with Prints?

As far as what to do with the prints you make—several readers asked yesterday—the classic solution is boxes. (I like to put other peoples' work on my walls.)

Print boxes run all the way from custom-made solander cases made by hand bookbinders, sometimes of exotic materials, in some cases specially designed for a particular portfolio, to the classic museum case, which is a hard archival case with a drop back and metal clasps, to a "metal edge box," which is a drop-front box made of smooth-surfaced archival board with metal fasteners at the corners. Museum cases are nice for home or studio storage but they're heavy and not as easily transportable as some other types, and they tend to be made in the classic silver-photo-paper sizes (8x10", 11x14", 16x20", 20x24") rather than the common inkjet printing page sizes (U.S. letter, 11x17, 13x19", and 17x22" in the U.S., for example).

A standard classic museum case for prints

My preferred solution is generally the so-called clamshell portfolio case, which is a self-hinged box made of boards of the type used for hardcover books, but thicker, lined with archival paper and and covered with a water-resistant acrylic-impregnated buckram cloth. These are long-wearing, sturdy boxes that aren't too heavy or expensive.

For extra prints, work prints, and rejects that I don't want to throw away, I used the cheaper (but still harmless to prints) metal-edge boxes.

Another kind of box I like is the Century Box. These are neatly made boxes about halfway between a portfolio clamshell and a paper box. Although they've been getting steadily more expensive over the years, they're still about half the price of a cloth-covered portfolio case. I used to make 8x10 fiber-base silver prints, put them in 8x10 Century Boxes, and stand them in bookcases like books. It's a neat and clean way to store prints while keeping them easily accessible.

If you were creating a presentation portfolio, the classic solution is to make a window-mat from white archival mat board for each print. In practice these mats get soiled pretty easily (when dropping portfolios at museums for review, some artists used to include a pair of white cotton gloves inside the portfolio case as a not-so-subtle hint to the curators to help keep the expensive mats clean). These days, it's common even in more formal settings to show loose unmatted prints. It's certainly the easiest way to store prints for private viewing, especially now that we use papers that don't buckle and curl. Even if you work hard on your printmaking, each physical print has much less work and expense invested in it, so it's easier to sacrifice them to viewers who won't treat them so well.

If you show your prints often to others, it's sometimes a good idea to have one set for handling and a pristine extra set that you don't let anyone touch.

As far as what size to print, well, I enjoy leafing through my boxed prints and looking at them, whether alone or in the company of friends or family. I'd suggest just printing to the size you most like to look at.

Still having trouble?
If you still find yourself overwhelmed with too many prints: get pickier. Edit more harshly, and work harder on each finished print. You should always be striving to improve your standards. One of the nice things about keeping boxes of loose prints is that they're easy to continually cull—you can remove prints that either no longer meet your printmaking quality standards or that are just pictures you've grown tired of and that you think no longer "work."

But don't cull too hard. Your work is your work, and you want to respect your older work even if you don't like it as well any more. Every now and then, especially when you feel you've reached a point of change or if you feel your photographs and your working skills have changed, start a new box...even if the old one isn't full. It's okay.

Mike

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

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David Bostedo: "Instead of a box, I prefer these (for my decidedly amateur photography): they don't allow for matting or other types of presentation, but the photos are very easily viewable and 'flip-through-able.' They're nicely made and put together, everything is archival/acid-free, and they've held up very well. I have a couple, and each can hold 48 13x19 prints (my preferred sheet size). I have only recently begun filling the second one, almost 10 years after I bought them. That's not to say that I've only printed 50 or so photos in 10 years. I've made hundreds of prints. But I've only kept about 50 for display. And not necessarily my 50 best photos (to me)... just the 50 I or others like to see.

"They come in many sizes, and also in more 'professional' versions with leather covers, etc."

I Think I'm Falling In Love...

...With a certain Epson. She is proudly black, admittedly blocky in shape, decidedly petite, expensive, and doesn't say much. But oh, my, the things she can do.

So do you remember this post? I was reviewing the Nikon D800E, a.k.a. the Big Dragoon, since replaced in the lineup by the current D810. I had ventured abroad into the night (the inky dark, I called it), where I shot that top picture of Sunset Drive just after dark. Here it is again if you have no patience for following links:

  Mike Johnston, Sunset Drive

(The reason I was thinking of the D800E is that when I rented it, the weather suddenly turned surly and sullen, spitting drizzle amid unrelenting drab and drear for four point five days. I spent the last half-day camera-pointing madly, hoping to accrue a useful mass of samples, and took pictures of things like random lampposts. Now the same thing has happened with the Nikon D7200, too—after a whole Spring and Summer with very little rain and no long cloudy spells, the weather has been remarkably uncooperative for my five-day rental period. I've concluded, primitively, that either God doesn't want me to use a Nikon, or He wants me to buy one and stop trying to rent the dang things. It brings rain. I should hire myself out to areas of the country that are experiencing drought.

Well, I guess this is a lamppost too.

It took me only four years to print this, but I made a small workprint on Saturday and it looked so lovely that I cracked open the box of 13x19-inch paper that Epson kindly provided (Papier photo ultra haute qualité LUSTRE, oui oui oui), and made a big print.

Well, big for me. Fifteen inches wide. And...

...My heart! My heart! Elizabeth, I'm coming!*

Or to quote the late, great Frank Barone, "holy crap."**

It is beautiful. Just abso-froikin'-lutly george-ee-us. It's such a simple picture it's almost not there; just dark-on-dark with a tiny little brush-swish of detail in the lower center. But the printer...can you be in love with a printer? I immediately felt my lizard mind getting sucked in. I started to forgive the little P600 its stingy money-extorting ways with ink. I started to feel the P800 that I thought was in my future begin to recede: what if it's not as good?

These are silly, superstitious thoughts, but this thing is good, this P600.

So it took me one week to go from making workprints to making a finished print. I knew I wouldn't be able to resist for very long. Sunset Drive is just how I want it, just right.

Epson Ultra Premium Photo Paper Luster (260) is beautiful, too. Or actually not beautiful...that is, it doesn't call attention to itself. Its surface is not overtly luxurious, nor is it obviously thick. But it seems to have a perfectly judged just-glossy-enough surface, enough to deepen the blacks but not so much as to cause reflections, and it apparently dries instantly. It stays nicely flat, doesn't pick up fingerprints, and seems to be robust. Lastly—this seems a nice bonus—the display rating of black-and-white prints made with 260 and the earlier K3 inkset that the P600's UltraChrome HD inkset is said to improve is given as >315 years, which, given the vagaries of such extrapolations, I would translate to "don't worry about it." Although it's undeniably reassuring. Anyway, Ultra Premium Photo Paper Luster is a very fine paper with excellent usability and image quality and absolutely no bad habits. Its character in all ways is "balanced." I'm looking forward to exploring other papers—we are awash with a wealth of them—but this one is far from pedestrian. I'm considerably impressed.

Sunset Drive was Saturday's print. Yesterday's was this one, and the lovely Epson it makes a gratifyingly glorious print too, if I do say.

In the last Featured Comment of the "Picky" post, Steve Caddy wrote that printmaking is "...satisfying as hell. Making that final object closes the creative loop." He hit that nail square. That's the best reason to print. I've had a deeply gratifying week since I set up the P600, the most photographic fun I've had in a while.

Mike
(Thanks to Epson for the printer loan)

*American '70s TV Redd Foxx reference
**American '90s TV Peter Boyle reference

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

Will work for ink.
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Featured Comments from:

Ed Hawco: "Oh, I get it. I bought an Epson 3880 almost two years ago. I had zero experience with digital printing and almost two decades under my belt since I'd been in a darkroom. I'd held off on digital printing because of all the verbiage about it online and in books; huge tomes full of graphs and diagrams, entire websites that made it seem more complicated than launching a moon shot. But I was emboldened by some posts and comments on TOP that lead me to believe that I did not require an advanced degree in digital imaging minutiae in order to get a decent print. Like you, I went from making test and work prints to finished prints in a matter of days. A year in I splurged on a pack of 17x22 paper and almost died on the spot when the first print rolled off the machine. OMG!"

MHMG [Mark of Aardenburg Imaging —Ed.]: "Not a single RC photo paper on the market today deserves such a lofty print permanence rating as '>315 years' no matter how stable the image-forming pigments are. Epson's Premium Luster is one of the worst performers with regard to light-induced low intensity staining (LILIS) and should never have been bestowed with a high print permanence rating. Testing labs are either not aware of the LILIS issue or, worse, are simply ignoring it. To pick the problem up in an accelerated light fade testing protocol, one needs to follow up with further test measurements after a dark storage period of a few months or so. Papers that exhibit the problem will show notably increased LAB b* values in media white point and highlights after just a few months in dark storage.

"Only moderate light exposure doses (10–20 Megalux hours) can cause OBAs to degrade. They initially just lose their cool white fluorescence thus causing a perceived shift towards warmer iimage highlights and midtones. But it can get worse, especially in RC media where low light intensity or dark storage allows these colorless OBA degradation by-products to further react with other components in the RC PE-TiO2 layers, and they don't remain colorless. An additional yellowish stain is formed which in some cases can be quite severe. The additional staining is, curiously enough, light bleachable with additional high intensity light levels, but there's no practical way around it.  The yellowish stain returns yet again whenever the print sample is placed under low intensity display lighting or in dark storage.

"My advice: if one does decide print permanence is important, print your important images on non-RC papers that also have little or no OBAs...papers like Hahnemuhle Museum Etching, Canson Rag Photographique, etc. for matte surfaces; or Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Pearl, Canson Platine, etc., for glossy/luster finishes."

Ger Lawlor: "When the printer is behaving, these type of prints are stunning. The main thing to watch for, in my experience with making big prints with big areas of dark continuous tones or subtle gradations, is that the slightest clog or mis-aligned nozzle will cause banding. And it always waits until the print is almost finished. My record is the day I dumped north of $200 worth of materials into the bin while printing a job for a client where the clog (a slight mis-fire on magenta) only showed up after the prints were dry, and under very bright light. (And only on certain parts of the image). Faint but there. Get yourself a good loupe for checking prints and importantly, also for examining nozzle check patterns."

Epson P800 Rebate Ends in Five Hours

No text.

Mike

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

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Jon Peterson: "A similar rebate is also expiring on the Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1000."

Mike replies: Argh, I wish I'd known that, I would have linked that too. At least there are still 27 minutes left!

SA: "No, that is a trick. Epson printer rebates are always on. Just wait a few days for the new one."

[UPDATE Saturday morning: SA is right! The Epson P800 rebate has been extended to October 31st. The rebate on the Canon PRO-1000 has also been extended till the end of October.]

Printmaking, If You're Picky

Here's the disadvantage of sending your prints out for printing.

Imagine you work on your image file, get it just right on the monitor, and send it off to wherever to be printed. A day or three later the print comes in the mail, and you look at it and think, hey, looks great. Then you look at it some more, and you think, you know, if would look better if it were just a little less yellow.

Or: I should have opened up that shadow just a tad.

Or: I didn't realize the color noise was going to be quite that obvious. Should have hit that slider just a little harder.

Or, darn, forgot to remove that whatever-it-is in the distance that you can't tell what it is...meant to do that.

Obviously there are different standards for different people and different uses, and hey, it might even be the case that the professional printmaker can do a better job than you could ever do, so his/her/their expertise and equipment is pure bonus. And maybe the print you'll be happy with is a McDonalds meal as opposed to a gourmet experience at a fancy restaurant—if it looks halfway decent you'll be happy. Not everything has to be a connoisseur's idea of just-so.

But at the other end of that spectrum, printing is a means of "signing off" on exactly how you, as the artist/"creative," want the print to look—precisely. To set it in stone, so to speak—or rather, set it in unchanging pigment ink on archival paper. Printing to that higher standard is a servo-mechanism kind of activity. You prepare the file, print it, look at it, appraise how it looks and feels; make changes; print again; look, appraise, make changes, print again; look, appraise, make changes, print again...and so forth until it looks just exactly the way you want it to.

Just one of those re-do cycles becomes pretty onerous when you're sending the file out for printing...even if the shop you use does the re-do for free. It's still a hassle.

Print at home, and the process might end at one print, or three, or seven. And it could take 45 minutes or five days—you can do it in your own time. You can keep going and stop as soon as you are satisfied and not one iteration sooner. It's really a far better way to work, if you're [an artist / picky].

Mike

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

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Larry Gebhardt: "Well said, and it's why I own printers instead of sending out for prints. I've tried both ways of working and I wouldn't go back to not owning a quality inkjet, though I might someday let a shop make large prints for me after proofing at home."

MHMG: "And once you have the printed image exactly the way you want it, you can now make a few perfect replicates for family and friends...no need to re-order from the photo lab and cross your fingers that the reprints will match the first print!"

PhotoDes: "I did some prints earlier this week and your portrayal of the process was spot on. For me, it took three prints and I got just what I wanted. I've always known I'm 'picky.'"

Steve Caddy: "And it's satisfying as hell. Making that final object closes the creative loop."

Mike replies: That's the real bottom line.

'Horrific' Ink Prices?

Wayne asked: "Thanks for taking the time to relate your experience with the Epson printer. I am always interested in such things as I have yet to take the dive into high quality inkjet printing. The obstruction is the horrific, or at least seemingly horrific, prices associated with ink. There are two areas of printer evaluation that seem always to be difficult to determine: 1.) on average, how many 8x10 color prints can one expect to glean from a new set of ink tanks? and 2.) are the various refillable ink tank options a viable option to control expense related to ink? On the first question, I realize much will depend on the type of prints produced; but some indication of what a print will cost would be helpful. On the second question, without information from someone who has taken this route, it has the taint of being one of those episodes of throwing good money after bad. At 56, I have had experience with that type of episode and am anxious to curtail them in future."

Mike replies: I can only speak to your question no. 1, as I haven't tried any refillable cartridges. The problem there is that most of the available archival testing information available for print life expectancy (called print LE) is for manufacturer inksets. While it's possible that third party inks might be as good, there's little scientific corroboration available. Getting a print right is exacting enough work that I want to be reasonably assured that I don't have to do it all over again sometime.

As to how many 8x10 prints you can make from a set of inks, I suspect the only way to get good data would be to keep careful records of the number of prints you make—probably by square inches—and the amount of ink you use over a long period of usage. I mean hundreds of prints or even into four figures. The problem is that not all pictures are the same, and different pictures can use varying amounts of ink; plus, the cartridges don't deplete all at the same rate. Sooner or later, if you keep careful records, all the variables will even out and you'll have a pretty good answer for yourself.

For instance, look at my current ink usage on the P600:

(The grayed-out bar on the right is for matt black ink or MK—"K" being an old printer's term for black). What would you say—about a third used up? Be aware that the bars are probably not precise readings, either. And the machines leave ink left over even in fully depleted cartridges.

[Correction: I forgot to mention that new printers need to have the lines charged which uses up some ink. Ken Tanaka reminded me—thanks Ken. I did at least call Epson to confirm that the carts that come with the P600 are full ones, not partially filled starter cartridges. —Mike]

At the moment I've made 24 prints on letter sized paper. That's three on Epson Hot Press Bright and 21 on Epson Ultra Premium Photo Paper Luster. Most of them are 7" wide and of varying heights. Five are B&W. Several are 9" wide and three (one dark) fill up the entire 8.5x11" sheet.

See what I mean? At this rate my VLM and PK will exhaust first, and I'll replace those before the others run dry. By that time I'll have an even less precise idea of exactly how much I've printed.

Finally, what do you consider "an 8x10 print"? Any 8x10 print, or just the final, finished, successful one? Because it might take you a few passes to get to that. If you make four prints to get to the one that's just right, does that count as four or one? I'd call it "one print." Not four.

This—ink use as part of the creative process along the way toward a final print—is in part a technical and workflow issue, in part a matter of your skillset and experience as the printmaker, and in part it is purely a matter of aesthetic process. That is, you sometimes need to take some steps toward deciding what you want the final print to look like. The technical part (equipment calibration, color management, paper profiles) can presumably be mastered, and your use of ink might get more efficient. The aesthetic part of the process might be another matter. Your process might demand first a workprint, then a good trial print, then some time for reflection, then finally the finished print. You might improve your efficiency there over time, too: I knew a National Geographic printmaker in the days of RA-4 and JOBOs who could look at a proof sheet of color neg, set the color pack on the enlarger, and get a pretty good print at the first go. She had a great eye for color and density.

How few or how many trial prints you have to make toward a finished print is not entirely a technical matter, is what I'm saying.

So your question seems straightforward and easily quantified, but I wonder if it's not, in the end, almost unanswerable!

But at least I've described for you the P600's ink use as accurately as I can thus far.

Mike

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

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bandbox: "Yes, the OEM inks are expensive, but for me the expense of printing on my 3880 is certainly less than my costs of printing paper and chemicals when I was into silver based photography and using my own darkroom. There was much more testing and waste involved before getting to a final print, to say nothing of the time setting up, printing and processing, and cleaning up. After many years of doing that, and watching the rise of digital and decline of silver, in 2005 I threw in the towel: got rid of the darkroom equipment, switched from enlargers to an etching press, and converted the darkroom into a studio for painting and printmaking.

"And then I watched as digital imaging got better and better, eventually bought a digital camera, started using Lightroom, bought the 3880.... All of this fits into a corner of the studio and I can do everything in full daylight. The finished print quality is better than my old silver prints and there's much less waste of materials and time.

"Really, it's orders of magnitude better. Yes, I thought about the price of the inks and realized that it's insignificant compared to the old darkroom costs. So just suck it up and use that new printer."

Andre Y: "Charging the lines with ink only happens for printers where the ink doesn't sit on the printhead. Generally, lower-end printers have cartridges on the printhead, while higher-end printers have their cartridges sitting separate from the head, with hoses to bring the ink to the head.

"Why would anyone use a lower-end printer, especially your august readership? Well, if you're into B&W printing with dedicated B&W inks (Jon Cone's Piezography as mentioned already, as well as Paul Roark's more DIY approach), the Epson Artisan 1430 is a fantastic printer to modify with B&W inks because it's cheap, well-supported, and can lay down very small dots (1.5 pL in the highlights). If you're worried about the waste ink pad, you should install a waste ink receptacle. I use Octoinkjet's Printer Potty. Installation varies by printer model, but it's not too bad if you go slowly. Shipping to the US is very fast too."

Ken James (partial comment): "I cannot imagine taking pictures if I could not print them."

[Note: When I "feature" entire comments, they do not appear in the Comments Section, but when I feature only part of someone's comment, the full text of their comment always appears in the Comments Section.  —Ed.]

Michael Perini: "In answer to Wayne, there are people who have done the kind of analysis you ask about, but it is usually done with some sort of test print, which, as Mike points out, will never match your experience. You are also correct, there are huge markups on ink, which seems difficult to take, but ink is just a charging mechanism for all the R&D and incredibly complex technology that ink jet printers represent. They are also selling us the printers for a fraction of the cost of manufacture.

"I am not an apologist for the printer companies. I would like ink to be cheaper too. But they are providing the ability to make better color prints than we ever made in the smelly expensive darkroom, in two square feet of desk space. I really believe the answer is to look less at what you give and more at what you get, which is the ability to make the finest color prints ever possible, for under $10 bucks apiece.

"But it has to be worth it to you. there are many Internet services who make perfectly nice prints cheaper than you can make them yourself. Printing inkjet prints yourself is not cheap, and not for everyone. It doesn't lend itself to the kind of analysis you would like. The printer manufacturers know that, and are aggressive in their pricing, but, given the results possible, I still think it's a bargain. If you worry about the cost every time you print, you probably won't enjoy the experience. There are many folks who rarely print anything. And that's OK too."

Wayne: "Thanks for the comprehensive response to my question. I see what you mean regarding the definition of 'print.'"

Steve Rosenblum (partial comment): "This discussion reminds me of the ones my father (may he rest in peace) and I used to have when we went on our fishing trips. At the end of each trip (usually a week) he would ask what the cost per fish caught worked out to. It's true that if you are a local who lives near a great river, tie your own flies, use the same gear for years, and go wade fishing on your own, it's a pretty economical pastime. However, we would fly out to Montana (or another fishing Mecca), fish with guides (to be sure we caught some fish and so he could do it despite his elderly frailty), and stay at a motel or lodge. Even if we caught a hundred or so fish each, the cost per fish was quite substantial.

"But, then again, we weren't spending the week together to catch a certain number of fish—we did it for the experience fishing provided for us. I think that doing your own printing is the same kind of thing...so long as you can afford it."

Winwalloe: "Mike, could you please mention how you set for picture to have a white margin in the printer? Do you specify it at the printing step? Do you have the margin prior in Photoshop for instance?

"I wish I could 'automate' the addition of margins to my prints, depending on the paper size and the image ratio, but I've no idea how (except by using the same ratios most of the time, and have a script to add margins based on that, but it's a bit of a pain)."

Mike replies: Sure. In Photoshop it's in the Print Settings dialog box that comes up when you hit "Print." I assume it's the same or very similar in Lightroom.

You'll find it under "Position and Size." Clicking on "Scale to Fit Media" makes the picture as large as possible on the sheet you're using; if you unclick that, you can set image size based on Height or Width or Scale (percentage). As long as "Center" is clicked under "Position," the image will be exactly centered. While it's centered, you can read the exact measurements of the borders. The you can unclick Center and set one of the values to move the image up or down (or sideways) on the sheet. With this image (I sneaked in another image of Butters, which I enjoy doing—this one taken on Wednesday with the Nikon D7200 and Sigma 17–70mm, by the way), when it was centered it was 1.834 inches from the top. I changed that value to 1.5 inches to move the image up on the sheet a little, which is called "bottom weighting."

Notice at the top of this dialog box that you can also choose between portrait (vertical) and landscape (horizontal) paper orientation.

This will be somewhat different in different programs, but I think most will have easy-to-understand controls for positioning the image on the sheet.

Alan Carmody: "I have a far more humble model of Epson photo printer. I've reduced ink usage greatly ever since I learned not to turn it off—at all. Apparently, turning the printer off and on causes the printer to go through at least one cleaning cycle, in which it uses ink to clean the pipes. Turning the printer off nightly, in the false belief that one is saving the world by doing so, merely causes most of the ink to be used up cleaning the print head nozzles. I'd say I've reduced ink consumption by at least half, if not two thirds."

William: "The business models for printers and ink is a significant factor in my decision to send files to a very good lab and let them do the printing."

Chris Kern: I think concern about the cost of ink is misplaced. Since I bought an Epson P800 about a year ago, I've been spending more on ink and paper than I did when I was ordering prints from a custom lab, but I'm printing a lot more of my images than I ever thought of doing when I was paying someone else to print them. 

"In other words, I enjoy the process of printing—of soft-proofing to get the colors just right and tweaking the tone curve in an attempt to replicate as closely as possible the high dynamic range of a transmission display (my monitor) on a much lower dynamic range reflective medium (photo paper). I'm not sure my results are any better than what the lab tech would have produced, but I'm learning a new craft (my previous experience printing was many years ago in a black-and-white wet darkroom) and producing a physical artifact I can hang on a wall or use as a gift.

"I'm assuming anyone selling prints in volume would be better off turning over the production to someone else. It seems to me that photographers should print their own work for two reasons: 1.) they want to control the result as precisely as possible in order to preserve their brand or 2.) they're amateurs, like me, and printing is a part of the craft they enjoy practicing. In either case, the cost of materials shouldn't produce a lot of angst."

P600 vs. P800: The Epson Value Equation

It's early days yet, but my experience with the Epson P600 printer is going well. I'm trying to make at least one print every night; so far I haven't been able to stick to anything near that few. I've been making mostly small, 7-inch-wide workprints to conserve ink (even though Epson provided the ink! Still)—

Wee print, because I'm cheap

Remember the french fries
However, before we go much further here I need to say a word about the value equation. The P600 costs $750 at the moment, vs. $1,195 list* for the P800, its little-bit-bigger brother (LBBB)—a difference of $445. However, as you might know, printer manufacturers basically pass along the printer units for free or even below cost, and then make it up on materials. (McDonalds fast-food restuarants do the same thing—everything they serve is priced at cost except fries and soda, both of which have tremendous markups—500% or more in the case of fries. Not for nothing are counterpeople taught to say "Would you like fries with that?") The T760 ink cartridges for the P600 hold 25.9 milliliters of ink, and a full set costs $288. The T850 ink cartridges for the P800 hold 80 ml. of ink, and a full set costs $495.

P600 ink: $1.24 per ml.

P800 ink: 69¢ per ml.

Not only would the difference of 55¢ per ml. pay for the cost differential between the two printers after purchasing only 809 ml. of ink—that's 31 cartridges for the P600 or just over ten cartridges for the LBBB—but, since the P800 comes bundled with more ink to begin with, the price differential is already offset quite a bit just by the ink that comes in the box! (I haven't figured that out exactly, but I'm sure someone, somewhere, has.) That's a huge operational price advantage for the P800 LBBB that will only grow more lopsided the more prints you make.

Not only that, but Epson considers the P800 a professional product and the P600 a consumer product, and it doesn't provide programming documentation for the P600 to third-party software and peripherals providers. For instance, ColorByte Software is still working on ImagePrint 10 for the P600, because they had to reverse-engineer it. (They'll be sending it to me when they finish up.)

Further, a friend points out that "beyond the ink cost, the P600 doesn't have the maintenance cartridge feature of the 3800/3880/P800 and so has its own characteristic failure mode: it will eventually die a messy death by drowning in its own ink when its excess-ink-trapping sponge, or whatever they call it, gets saturated. Already had that experience with my first inkjet, which had the same 'feature'—don't want to go there again if I can help it."

The downside? The P800 is bigger and heavier, harder to site in your home or office, and takes a bigger up-front outlay to buy. Ink carts cost more in absolute dollars, too.

Additional upside of the P80o LBBB is the immediately obvious one, which is that it handles 17-inch-wide paper instead of 13-inch like the P600.

LBBB gets nod
But as you can see from all this, you might need to think beyond the obvious here. The P800 is a more sensible investment for anyone who intends to do any significant amount of printing. Certainly if you were going to embark on an OCOLOY project making one print a day, the P800 is pretty much a no-brainer. It would be much cheaper in the long run.

...I kind of have to wonder, in fact, exactly who the P600 is aimed at. Obviously, not a casual printmaker, or one with low standards, because it's a very high-quality 9-ink printer that uses Epson's latest UltraChrome HD inkset. I've only been using it for three days but it's so much fun, and the prints look so nice, that I stayed up way past my bedtime last night making prints, including, um, several big ones. My ink is never gonna last at this rate.

I guess the P600 is for anyone who is decisively swayed by the smaller physical size and lower up-front cost, or for someone who wants to make top-quality prints but only in small quantities or occasionally—perhaps only two or three prints every two or three weeks, say. Anyone, that is, who would have trouble using up 31 ink carts over the course of several years or, especially, over the 5–8 year life expectancy of the printer. (That's really ballpark, as I have nothing but a rough monkey-butt idea of how long people typically keep their inkjet printers, or how long the printers themselves typically keep on truckin'.) That would also minimize the lack of that maintenance cart.

Anyway. Something to think about. As far as I can tell so far, the P600 is a wonderful printer that gives outstanding results—and it's quite possible you shouldn't buy it! In fact, I'm mulling over sticking this P600 right back in its box and sending it back to Epson...it's that good.  :-)

As always, I shall keep you posted.

Mike
(Thanks to John P. and Oren)

A counterpoint view from Mark McCormick-Goodhart of Aardenburg Imaging: The lower ink costs of the P800 versus the P600 only begin to bear economic fruit after you've printed several hundred 8x10 equivalent size prints or more, and can do so in a couple of years or so. I could be wrong, but I suspect many advanced amateur photographers just won't print all that frequently or in enough high-volume sessions to justify the higher capacity ink cartridges. To make a point, consider your first print on the rebated P800. It just cost you about $800. Make two prints. They are $400 apiece...make 800 prints and now the amortized equipment cost per print has achieved parity with the cost of the inks, and the total cost of each 8x10 equivalent print has dropped below $5 even when using expensive fine art papers. Hence, this simple amortization model justifies the higher capacity lower cost/ml ink cartridges only if you think you will print perhaps a few hundred enlarged prints or more per year.

Also, one probably doesn't want to keep two-plus-year-old inks in the printer (pigment particles can settle and/or aggregate, and thus cause color unwanted color shifts and increased clogging issues), so unless you can get through 720 ml of ink in two years (i.e 80ml x 9 cartridges which likewise yields about 700 8x10 equivalent prints), you are better off with the P600's smaller capacity cartridges. The smaller P600 also has a subtle but real quality edge which is noticeable especially in smaller-sized photos owing to its 5760 dpi highest-quality mode setting versus 2880 dpi on the P800.

Bottom line: The shock and awe factor of high priced inks is real but the true ramifications are greatly exaggerated. Home printing, all cost factors considered, will never compete with bargain basement photo finishing of 4x6 photos, but it wins by leaps and bounds over custom lab print prices after you've printed only a few dozen 13x19 or 17x22 enlargements on fine art media! It's the personal control over your print quality and the decision to print on high-quality non RC media where home printing really comes into its own.

*There's a $300 rebate at the moment. Thanks to iran ramirez and several other readers for pointing that out.

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

Print, print, print and then it's another day
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Dogman: "In my experience, ink cost eventually becomes a non-issue. In a time when most people never see a photograph anywhere but on a computer monitor or the small screen on their smart phone, your prints will amaze your friends, family and neighbors as you show them around. Having someone validate your art is priceless."

Keith B.: "Mike, I wish you had been there, back in 2007, to lay out the economics of the P800-sized printer vs. almost any smaller printer as clearly as you just have done. I, and many, many others over these last few years, went through the naive 'The small one will be fine...' self-con.

"If you are intelligent, hate wasting money, and love to make prints, the self-con will likely end the same way for you as it ended for me: Within a year or less, you'll no longer be able to tolerate the private embarrassment that you have chosen a clear path toward wasting money. Then, you'll buy the P800 you would have been wiser to purchase initially."

iran ramirez: "The P800 is $895 after rebate, just FYI."

Jeff: " The P800 really isn't much bigger or heavier than the P600: about 2.5 inches wider, less than a half inch deeper, an inch taller and 8 pounds heavier (without any additional roll paper option). The size differences are minimal compared to moving up to the 4900 (two more inks), which is the only Epson series that has not (yet) received a P-series replacement. The 4900 has had some serious clogging problems."

Steve Belanger: "I bought the P600 nearly one year ago and took advantage of the $250 rebate. I thought it was a great deal, especially considering that the P800 had no rebate offer at the time. Given it is my first experience with printing my own photos, I'm quite happy with the results, although I'm now annoyed to find out about the maintenance cartridge issue. I should also mention that I don't print daily or even weekly. I've not had a problem with clogging, as far as I can tell. I've been printing a handful of prints about once every six weeks. The experience of doing my own prints was been great. Better results and much more gratifying than relying on a photo lab!"

New Equipment Arrivals

I finally got this beautiful thing (it's an Epson P600) unboxed after an embarrassingly long delay, and what would you know, the very first print I made turned out pretty well. On Day Two (yesterday, that would be) I made my first good print. Been doing a lot of reading and a little printing (printer ink triggers my cheap gene and I get stingy with it. I need to work on getting over that). I plan to make at least one print a day for a while, and I'll let you know how that goes.

Arriving on Wednesday: a Nikon D7200 and a Sigma 17–70mm ƒ/2.8–4 DC Macro OS HSM lens. The rig will just be here for a five-day rental, but I'll give you my impressions. I figured we needed a break from all the mirrorless around here. My interest is twofold: longer lens, and the D7200 ranks highly (3rd) at DxOMark for dynamic range ("Landscape," they call it), and I wanted to do a few tests and comparisons. It's been a very long time since I used an APS-C Nikon DSLR. So long I can't remember the previous time. Was it really a 6-MP D100?!? That can't be right.

More to come,

Mike

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MHMG: "The P600 is a great little printer, very reliable over the year and a half I've been using it. It may scare you in the first few weeks of using it with frequent 'stealth' cleaning cycles (noted by significantly extended times before the media starts feeding after hitting the 'print' button), but I concluded it's just purging out the micro air bubbles in the new lines. After a few weeks, it settles right down and runs remarkably 'clog-free.'  I rarely do nozzle checks unless I've left it unused for a few weeks, and even then, it usually passes that nozzle check just fine.

"Also, Epson has significantly improved the yellow pigment light fastness in the HD ink set compared to the previous Epson K3 ink generation, an important consideration for anyone who cares about accurate color balance over time, especially skin tone color accuracy in portraits where the magenta/yellow and to lesser extent cyan ink fade rates need to maintain parity over time. K3 skin tones end up going much more purplish-blue due to preferential loss of the more fade-prone K3 yellow ink."

Pt/Pd Tech Part II: A Little Help From Your Friends

By Carl Weese

[Part I is here]

Some people claim platinum printing involves black magic. I won’t go that far, but it’s certainly as much art as science. That’s partly because it’s just plain complicated. The ideal of testing one variable at a time is nice, but it just doesn’t happen in the platinum darkroom. You’re always juggling multiple factors.

This past March, Hahnemühle sent me some sample packs of its not-yet-released Platinum Rag paper (HPR). I did a couple quick tests and liked it so much I requested more for my “Digital Platinum” workshop at CAP/Penumbra in New York. (Disclosure: Hahnemühle is now a partial sponsor—donated paper—for my CAP workshop, which is entirely appropriate because CAP is a non-profit educational institution. For my current print offer I’m buying my paper from B&H, just like anybody else.)

The paper behaved about as you’d expect if one of the oldest and most respected paper makers in the world put their mind to the task of creating a paper from scratch for the process. The surface is so easy to work with that students, absolute beginners, were getting nice smooth coatings right away when we opened the samples on the second day of the workshop.

HPR and humidity
A sheet coated with Pt/Pd solution needs to be carefully prepared for printing. You have to dry it off, but you need to leave enough moisture in the paper to support the exposure process. Just how much humidity you need depends on the particular paper. I knew from beta-tester reports that the new material thrived in lower humidity environments than most other papers, which was great because the CAP workspace tends to be dryer than most papers like. The students’ prints showed that the paper is faster (shorter printing exposures) than the old standby, Platine, and had significantly more contrast. I’d need later on to do some tests to modify my negative preparation to compensate for the higher contrast. Meanwhile the workshop participants were delighted to be getting nice prints in their first experience with the process, and to see the fascinating differences between the prints on Platine and HPR.

Back in my darkroom I did precise tests with a file that combines an abstract step tablet and a small real-world picture. This let me find the shortest printing exposure that gives a maximum black, and then let me dial back one of my print driver settings (for outputting the digital negative) to keep the higher contrast from burning out the whites.

Then I did other stuff for most of the summer. When Mike and I had gotten our possible Print Offer selections down to four or five, working from on-screen files from scans, I decided it was time to test print them. As much as I like Fabriano, I didn’t want to do a volume run of printing with a paper that needs pretreatment, and anyway, I thought these pictures would look better on the brighter, cooler-toned HPR. So I got a package of 22x30 (which cuts down efficiently to 10x19.5) and immediately ran into a sticky situation. Literally. When a coated sheet that seemed to be perfectly prepared was printed with my large UV light source and vacuum frame, the edges of the coated area stuck to the negative film. This is not a complete surprise. These films are made super-absorbent so they can handle extreme ink loads, which is why we can make digital negatives for platinum with them, but absorbent is more or less a synonym for sticky. So I tried again and dried the next sheet enough that it would not be successful on Platine or Fabriano. The picture printed fine, but the edges of the coating stuck. This was strange. I’ve never before had this issue relate to scaling up the size of the print.

I coated a small sheet for my standard test negative, dried it totally with a hair dryer, and printed it right away. No sticking, but no Dmax. That’s no surprise, and most of the tones looked amazingly good for a bone-dry sheet. I coated and totally dried another one, then let it rest for ten minutes in 60% humidity, then printed it. It stuck. Just at the edges. I developed it anyway, and the print looked great, but the negative was toast from sensitizer transfer at the edges.

Community
The small community of platinum printers is very collegial and generous. I quickly found out that people working with HPR over the past few months liked to use the additive Tween20 with it. About Tween, there are people who swear by it, and people who swear at it. I’ve always been in the “at” group. I hate the way the solution “works” during the coating process with the additive, on most papers. (It’s a surfactant. For those familiar with the silver darkroom, think Photo-Flo on steroids.)

Well, if HPR came with an instruction sheet (it doesn’t) I think it would recommend the use of a surfactant. The action of coating was not badly impacted—the coating distributed and worked in more quickly. Most important, given fan-but-no-heat drying in a 45% humidity environment, it showed no sticking at all even in the hard pressure of the vac frame, and delivered a beautiful print. OK, problem solved.

That’s how you figure things out for platinum printing: experiments, limiting the variables as much as feasible, and a little help from your friends.

Carl

Carl Weese, who lives in rural Connecticut with his artist wife Tina, has been teaching the esoteric art of fine platinum printing in group workshops and private tutoring sessions since the 1990s.

©2016 by Carl Weese, all rights reserved

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Andrea B.: "Carl, can you tell me a bit about Pt/Pd archival properties? Any particular framing or hanging suggestions? Thanks!"

Carl replies: Andrea, Pt/Pd is the most archival of photographic media (well, carbon transfer may tie for that honor). The print consists of microscopic particles of non-reactive Pt/Pd metals embedded in fine, 100% cotton paper. Standard archival matting and framing materials are fine. Avoid dry-mounting; the print will lie perfectly flat positioned with corners or a paper hinge. UV-blocking glazing is a good idea to protect the paper, and avoid display where it will get direct sunlight.

Subdued or special lighting is not needed. In fact, it makes me a little crazy when I go to a museum show of wonderfully archival platinum prints and find the curators have set the lighting so low I can’t see the pictures properly!

A Note on Digital Internegatives

[Note: Mike here. I just thought I'd pluck these two comments from the mass of materials we've presented so far, to address the question of Pt/Pd printing direct from camera negatives vs. from internegs. —MJ the Ed.]

Clyde Rogers: "Platinum/palladium (Pt/Pd) printing does risk the negative if you're going for the best possible result. Pt/Pd is a contact process on hand-coated paper, and the paper needs a moderately high humidity level. If humidity is too low, you get uneven, spotty blacks. If you run the moisture too high, the best case is a muddy gray black. In the worst case some part of the negative sticks to the paper, is baked on by the UV exposure unit, and the pair is tossed in the trash.

"I have several of Carl's prints from the last sale, and they have an outstanding Pt/Pd black, so he is running at humidity levels that require a great deal of care. If his darkroom is off by 10% humidity, or he coats too heavily (or even just unevenly) one time, he very well could ruin his negative. You can put a thin sheet of acetate between the negative and the paper to protect the neg, but then you have two more dust-gathering surfaces, and have moved the neg a bit away from the paper, visibly reducing sharpness. I love the very slight softening provided by Pt/Pd interacting with a handmade paper surface, but find the additional softening of the acetate to be too much. Add to this zapping the negative with somewhere from six to 10 minutes of high-intensity UV for each print. Some folks who print one negative many times have reported some degree of either fogging or fading from all this UV. Finally, you're handling a large bare negative at least twice for each print. So, yes, Pt/Pd definitely does put the negative at greater risk than typical silver printing."

Carl replies: Clyde, thanks for that great explanation of the dangers (to the negative) of platinum printing. Watch for some interesting news about humidity issues in the next technical post [coming up next —Ed.]. I only use the term "contact print" to refer to something made directly from the in-camera negative. There are a few photographers who work this way exclusively. Kenro Izu with his 14x20 (that's not a typo) Deardorff comes to mind, and, well, me until two years ago. However, platinum prints from internegatives are more the norm than the exception. The platinum printers to the stars like Martin Axon and Sal Lopes work from internegs. Paul Strand made most of his platinum prints from enlarged negs, and so did Richard Benson when he printed for Strand at the end of his life. Most of the George Tice Pt/Pd prints I've seen at AIPAD booths were enlarged (I could only tell because they were bigger than 8x10). Expert printers using analog internegs often made multiple masks to gain extreme control of the tonal scale. Now of course we can get the same kind of control with even more precision in Photoshop.

Mike adds: When I was a student I wanted to buy examples of each of my teachers' work—a plan which faded quickly when I realized I would need stuff called "money" to carry it out—but I started by asking Frank DiPerna if I could buy a particular 8x10 platinum print from a series of portraits he made. He said I would have to make another choice. He had made one print of the picture I wanted, but, while making the second, the phone rang. When he got back to the easel, the "sun lamp" (meant for home suntanning, heavy in UV, also in heat) he was using to expose his prints had burned a hole in his negative. So the single print that existed of the picture I liked was unique and couldn't be replaced. I did buy an alternative—for $100, which was half off his regular studio-sale price, which I remember because it was a lot of money for the time—but I never liked it as much as the one I had originally chosen.

A quick snapshot of my Frank DiPerna. Sorry about the reflections. The frame is a bubinga moulding with an unusual "arrow" profile I copied from the frames at a Timothy O'Sullivan exhibit I saw in Philadelphia.

As far as internegs are concerned, Carl said "I’ll take a current state-of-the-art digital negative over a traditional internegative any day."

Mike
(Thanks to Clyde, Carl, and Frank)

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Carl Weese Platinum / Palladium Prints

My friends Carl Weese and his wife Tina are visiting TOP Rural Headquarters from their home in Connecticut. They're out today on a sortie in the direction of Rochester, scouting a drive-in theater for Carl and farm landscapes for Tina's paintings, hoping they have enough time to fit in a visit to George Eastman Museum. I stayed behind to work and mind the dogs.

I got to see a whole lot of Carl's gorgeous platinum/palladium prints last night, and you know it always makes me happy to look at prints. He's now doing Pt/Pd prints from digital internegatives of film originals, from digital negatives of digital originals, and from in-camera film negatives—from Pt/Pd renderings of some very early 35mm work to 7x17" contact prints. Lovely.

Although he has taught the art of platinum printing for many years (and is available for private workshops, by the way, in case you want to learn), he continues to refine and improve his superlative craftsmanship, exploring the nuances and shadings of formulas and papers. Some of his extremely delicate, quiet landscapes and nature photographs almost dissolve in low contrast, collapsing into the middle of the tonal scale, while at the same time managing to render fine detail that almost descends into the microscopic. The effect is both soothing and revelatory, and I got kind of fascinated.

One thing he said last night that I thought I'd pass on was, "If you can print, you can print." Paraphrasing, he said it doesn't really matter if your medium is platinum, conventional silver, or Canson paper in an Epson—the techniques can be mastered; the real skill is having good judgment and knowing what you want the print to look like.

Carl Weese. Photo by Bill Mitchell.

This is on another topic altogether—food—but I learned something else about Carl I thought was interesting. He's a lifelong vegetarian, but only because he doesn't like the taste of meat and never has. Even as a kid, he says, he hated meat and fish of all kinds and went to great lengths to avoid having to eat it—he only wanted the veggies, fruits and starches.

I just thought that was interesting because it seems to me that all the vegetarians and vegans I've known have been motivated at least in part by some mix of humanitarian/ethical concerns, or personal health concerns, or because the efficiency of production (global health concerns?) appeals to them. There's usually some amount of virtuousness in the mix. Carl says he doesn't mind those aspects of it but he can't take any credit for being virtuous in any way. With him it's just what does and doesn't appeal to his tastebuds, and that's it.

I fixed a lentil curry over rice, which cleared the bar and was pretty tasty, to boot.

Mike
(Thanks to Bill)

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JG: "I have a couple of Carl's platinum prints from an earlier TOP sale and agree they are gorgeous, both technically and artistically. The inkjet prints of his that I have (and have seen) are quite nice, too. And of course, he's also a nice guy! I had the pleasure of his company for a few days when he stayed with me and my family during his Drive-In Theater roadtrip back in 2012 and he's welcome back any time."

That's a Big Printer

This is a real thing...in case you thought it was tough fitting a printer in your office. (I've been feeling guilty about not having enough room for a P800.)

It's the new Epson SureColor S60600. Epson's new large printers are on sale right now, in case you need an extra one of these for your bedroom. The price of this model is reduced by roughly the cost of two P800's. (Also on sale, for $250 off.) Final price after rebate $18,995. (The S60600, not the P800.)

I'm just happy I'm not tasked with keeping one of these on song. When I remember how hard it was to keep my B9180 going....

Mike

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Brian Woolf: "I recently purchased an Epson P6000 24"-wide printer from B&H, they had a special that I could not believe—free shipping. Since shipping that monster was about $500, couldn't pass it up. It is less wide than your illustration photo but it is still large for only a 24" wide printer. It's a beautiful machine and, so far, looks after itself, doing nozzle checks randomly. I print every other day to keep it going."

Geoff Wittig: "For what it's worth, large format inkjets are generally a lot more trouble-free than their smaller desktop cousins. I presume that's a consequence of the quality engineering and better parts you get for the higher price of entry. I've been using a Canon iPF6300 for years, and it's been a paragon of reliability. If I leave it idle for a few weeks it has to run a cleaning cycle, but it then resumes cranking out prints without complaint. I find myself trying to resist the siren's song of deeper blacks from the latest generation of printers; I simply can't justify it when this printer just keeps going and going."

Ned Bunnell: "We're renovating our new house, and I'm adding a fourth bedroom/office to accommodate the P800. Can't imagine the space I'd need for this beast."

Keith B.: "It would be wise to find space for a P800, since the gouge-factor of the ink costs for any of the smaller units will eat away at your soul. Ask me how I know."

Learning to Print: Solid Advice

These were both comments to the "Open Mike" post on Sunday about learning how to print. I thought they deserved their own post. Bob recently retired from a career making beautiful high-end studio portraits of dogs (how can you not like that?), and Geoff is a small-town medical doctor in Western New York with a longtime passion for photography and a huge book collection. He has written many (more formal) book reviews for TOP.

Geoff Wittig: "Totally agree with the recommendation above for Jeff Schewe's books. The Digital Negative (second edition) was just published in September 2015, so it's pretty much up to date in terms of current versions of Photoshop/ACR and Lightroom. Schewe's approach to image processing is pretty much style-agnostic, giving you access to all of Photoshop/ACR and Lightroom's tools without dictating what your images should look like. Schewe gets right to the point and doesn't waste your time. The Digital Print dates to 2013, but that's fine because printer technology isn't changing as fast as software versions. It's excellent on how to translate the image on-screen to a physical print that reflects what you're trying to do artistically. The two books together pretty much give you all the information you need in a very approachable format.

"As of seven or eight years ago there were a goodly number of books on the subject. But it's a moving target, and print books are basically a perishable commodity as software versions and printer technology advance. Harald Johnson's Mastering Digital Printing was a good overview, but the latest (second) edition dates to 2004, so it's no longer very useful. Uwe Steinmueller's Fine Art Printing for Photographers: Exhibition Quality Prints with Inkjet Printers (third edition) is pretty current as it was published in late 2013, and has some good information, but it's also packed with lots of redundant stuff about specific printer models and the writing style confirms that English is not his first language.

"George DeWolfe's B&W Printing: Creating the Digital Master Print dates to 2009; so it's a bit old, but he is a very skilled printer. Be forewarned that he's a bit dogmatic and is also trying to sell some software tools. Finally, David Taylor's Photographic Digital Printing is current (April 2015), but it's too elementary to recommended, and Rob Sheppard's New Epson Complete Guide to Digital Printing is both too simplified and entirely Epson-based."

Bob Rosinsky: "The best way to learn how to print is to purchase a decent 'budget' inkjet printer [such as the Epson P600  —Ed.]. Avoid printers that use small ink cartridges. Start out using one type of paper—one that is RC and relatively inexpensive—Epson Ultra Premium Luster or similar. At the very least, start with a monitor that is 'okay.' I recommend purchasing a simple device for calibrating the screen. Start out with a photo editing program that allows for 'soft proofing.'

"Spend some time reading about printing. I think The Luminous-Landscape is a great site. I've gotten a lot of useful tips from well-known gurus who are willing to share hard-earned knowledge. The more you read and learn through practice, the more skillful you will become. If all of this sounds intimidating, try hooking up with someone who understands color management and has been printing for awhile. To become facile (meaning you hit it right on the first or second print) requires technical skill and artistic vision.

"Please bear in mind, I am a fastidious printer. I am 57 years old. I've been printing since the age of 14. A lot of the skills I acquired in the darkroom are relevant in the lightroom.

"As for casual printing, it is possible to achieve pretty good results. Like anything, the more you learn the more you'll become aware how much you do not know about what you do not know. It is highly rewarding to 'see' the final print prior to pressing the shutter button. It takes a lot of practice to achieve that."

And there you have it: study and practice.

Mike
(Thanks to Geoff and Bob)

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Photoshop vs. Printer-Managed Color Printing

Written by Ctein, TOP Technical Editor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I get asked three big questions about this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ctein

©2015 by Ctein, all rights reserved

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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)

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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