Printing Fine Art Photography Digitally

This weekend I was fortunate enough to attend a three day digital photography printing workshop taught by Charles Cramer and Bill Atkinson at Calypso Imaging here in Silicon Valley. Charlie and Bill are both professional nature photographers who exhibit at the Ansel Adams gallery in Yosemite among others, and are both incredible photographers, print makers and all around nice guys.

Attending a workshop taught by Bill Atkinson provided this geek with the added benefit of meeting the guy that designed a lot of the Macintosh’s user interface including widgets like the “pull-down” menu.

Charlie and Bill have taught this workshop to over 200 photographers who were looking to really learn how to make professional digital prints of fine art photography. The workshop is a split between learning photoshop/workflow technique and Bill and Charlie working with you to apply the techniques to your own prints. Each photographer worked up a series of 8 x 10 proof prints of their own photos which were then critiqued by the class before moving on to printing two final 20 x 24 prints on Calypso’s Light-jet printer.

Charlie’s instruction of color/tonal correction and masking was absolutely invaluable. I knew how to do most this in the darkroom but lost it when I moved to Photoshop because I didn’t really understand the core concepts behind the software. Charlie walked us through how to correct for common (and not so common) scenarios using his photos so you were actually able to see how he made some of his best shots.

Bill spent a lot of time really explaining exactly how color works on the computer. Color and color management has always been a mystery to me and one of the reasons I’ve had so many problems with my digital prints. Bill really knows color. I mean really knows it. This is a guy that makes his own printer profiles and actually has written software to develop accurate color profiles for Epson’s entire line of professional ink jet printers (which he then licensed to Epson). Listening to Bill break down color and color management was incredible. A lot of what Bill has learned (including his Epson profiles) he makes available for free on his web site.

Here are just a few of the notable things from my notes that I learned about digital printing/capture:

1. There are no consumer ink jet printers that are repeatable. What this means is that my Epson 2200 ink jet printer is different from your Epson 2200 and that its color will differ from print to print. This is because the nozzles that spray the ink (there are 6 or 7 I think) each clog at different rates. This was a huge learning for me. I actually moved to digital printing for its repeatably because every time i came out of the darkroom with a print and someone asked me for a copy I knew that I could not reproduce it exactly. Bill claims that Epson is the “only game in town” when it comes to repeatable ink jet prints. The catch is that you have to buy their professional 4800, 7800, or 9800 printers. These printers actually measure the how clogged each of the printer’s nozzles are and have the ability to adjust the intensity of each nozzle differently to maintain consistent printing. Charlie and Bill both print with the Epson 9800 (retails for ~$5,000) and the prints they showed had really deep blacks that looked as good as the traditional silver prints that I made in the darkroom – except these were reproducible on-demand. Looks like a new Epson printer is in my future….

2. Monitor calibration is essential. This is so obvious to me now after listening to Bill break it down, but I never calibrated my monitor before – which means that I had no way to control the color on the printer. What you see is NOT what you get printed without calibration. I’ve already ordered my Eye One monitor calibration system as you are dead in the water without it.

3. Drum scans are not worth it for 35mm or medium format transparencies/negatives. Bill and Charlie showed an example calibration print made from a Tango drum scan versus Nikon’s 4000/8000 scanners and there was basically no difference. Looks like I’ll be buying a Nikon 8000 (or the new 9000) after all.

4. Sharpening is printer specific. Each printer needs a different amount of sharpening and not all parts of your photo needs equal sharpening (think sky versus trees). Bill and Charlie showed a very cool way to sharpen an image more where it needs it and less where it’s not necessary. I never ever would have figured this one out.

5. Bill uses Weibtech sata docks to attach bare 3.5 inch hard drives to his Mac with no enclosure (very Google of you Bill….) and keeps the hard drives unplugged and on the shelf when they are not in use.

6. Printer profiles are driver and paper specific. This means that you need to change your printer profile when you change the type of paper that you use as well as when you change the settings on your print driver.

7. Pros cut their own mats using a Speed-mat cutter. I watched this desk sized device cut a perfect mat in less than one minute. For anyone who has cut their own mats by hand before this is worth its weight in gold.

8. Top of the line digital cameras from Nikon and Canon do not really capture full pixels. Instead each pixel on the CCD sensor captures EITHER red OR green OR blue values. The camera “estimates” the missing two values for each pixel. This is used to cut down on amount of data captured. It also means that we are really only getting one third of the mega-pixels being advertised by our camera manufacturer. The only sensor on the market that really captures all three values for each pixel is made by Foveon. Canon is rumored to be coming out with a 22 mega-pixel “foveon type” camera real soon now. Once this happens, Bill predicts that film will quickly die off for good.

9. Adobe Lightroom does better RAW file developing than Adobe’s Camera Raw (ACR) converter that is built into Photoshop. Not a huge surprise as Lightroom is the most recent work of Thomas Knoll who wrote ACR and most of Photoshop’s core algorithms. Lightroom is still beta, but it kicks iPhoto’s butt when it comes to pre Photoshop workflow.

That’s all for now. I’ll keep you posted as I put more of what I’ve learned into practice.

Special Thanks to Bill and Charlie for hosting such an incredible workshop.