Canon 5D Processed in Nik Silver Efex
“If you want to be a better photographer, then you must become a better printer.” — Vincent Versace
I mentioned late the week of August 13th that I had ordered proof prints from Aspen Creek to begin the process of realizing one of my goals for the year, to begin seriously printing my images. Over the past year-and-a-half I have succeeded in getting out of my own way in terms of publishing my images to the web, mainly through this blog. This is my 300th post, a number I never thought I’d reach, so I think I can celebrate that a little bit. Yea!
As part of that celebration, I wanted to create an entry with some deep thought behind it, and I considered meshing my desire to generate and mount and display some prints with the opportunity to share some thoughts about that process, not just as it relates to me personally, but the concept of ‘hard copies’ of our images. So, that led me to really thinking about the creation of prints, the act of making an image ‘real.’ And the week began, and lo and behold the 2000-pound gorilla in the photo blog world, The Online Photographer, begins a two-part essay written by Peter Turnley, no less, about printing traditional silver gelatin black and white prints and stories about a particular well-known master of that craft. You should all go and read those articles.
That two-part essay, along with Mr. Johnson’s follow-up, kind of eclipsed any efforts I might make to editorialize on the process of creating prints (artifacts) of the photographic process. In that way, my timing vis-a-vis this subject could not be worse. I pretty much have to assume that any reader of this blog already knows of The Online Photographer and has read those brilliant, wonderful, humbling articles. If you haven’t, do so mow. Articles like that made me want to get my darkroom setup pronto (which I am almost done with now).
To the Point
But, on to the print (point)! First of all, circling back, I received my prints from Aspen Creek and was appalled and depressed. Not because they didn’t do their job, on the contrary, they did a great job but rather that the creator (me) didn’t do his so much. There were so many issues with the prints, and all the issues brought with them thoughts of my days in the darkroom. I’ll list the issues in bullet form and then explain:
- Sharpness: So, when I export images to the web, I use a Lightroom plug-in which allows me to just ‘sharpen for web content’ upon export. I don’t have to think about it much. This plug-in also has a setting for export for a print, and both settings are just general in their methodology. I experimented a bit when I exported, using Nik Sharpener Pro for one file, and when I looked at the images upon their return, I realized that I really need to understand this whole sharpening thing. I kinda got my first clue about that when I attended an online ‘webinar’ workshop with Vincent Versace where he described how you resurrect an image that is a bit soft through multiple layers of sharpening using multiple Nik tools (heh, he calls it the Lazarus Effect). This very educational session really opened my eyes to some of these issues (I remember him talking in the webinar about how, since the screen is only 72 or 90 DPI, you have to ‘over sharpen’ on the screen — “make it look a little crunchy” — so as to get the right sharpening in the print). Oy, this is a topic I know nothing about. I have never learned really anything about sharpening digital images, but it is obvious to get really great prints, you need to become an expert here. The screen as a delivery medium lets you be sloppy.
- Focus: As I remember all too well from my darkroom days, as you enlarge an image, any defect in the focus becomes magnified. When I printed traditionally, I rarely made prints larger than 8×10. And I didn’t make 8x10s very often. I shot mainly FP4, and so to get 5×7 prints shot on FP4 to look out-of-focus in a 5×7 print, you REALLY had to screw up the focus on the day. But my proofs from Aspen were 8x10s from which I was going to choose images to print 16×20. Well, lordy, a number of those images were not going to make that cut, even though they had looked great when I exported them and showed them on the web at 92 DPI. Of course, there is an interrelationship between the Sharpness issue above and the Focus issue here, but man, I was a bit shocked. The size of images on the web makes you sloppy.
- Color: Most of us know about color profiling your monitor and such. In fact, Aspen gives you an ICC profile for soft-proofing your color. But, of course, the feedback loop, even if you HAVE the ICC profile, is problematic, because I can use the ICC profile on my ‘profiled’ monitor, but if I am off, I won’t know until the proof comes back. In this particular area, I feel a bit at sea without using my own printer in house to close the feedback loop.
- Crop: This, of course is a small issue compared with the others, but it is an issue nonetheless. I pre-cropped all the files and then sent them off the printer, but looking at the print in a real size at 360 ppi made me re-think the crop a bit.
Putting all of these issues together reminded me of the days when I would look at a contact sheet of images, circle a few, and then head off to the darkroom, only to emerge hours later and wonder why I would have chosen those images and how I could somehow capture the look of the small contact image when I blew it up. I was always disappointed, and this experience with Aspen made me taste that bitter pill yet again. And so thus I arrived at the tag line for this post:
Images on the Web are all Illusions, shadowy representations of the REAL image
Yes, they are. Tomorrow I’ll talk about the nature of prints and what they represent, and why I believe they are even more important as we go forward with digital photography than they ever were.
