In The Pocket

Even if the printing tutorial didn’t introduce that much new knowledge, it still manage to push my printing up a notch or two. The thing about knowledge you accuire before you are really ready for it, is that it gets stuffed far behind and never used. Once you are reminded of it again, at a stage where your skill has reached a level where you can take advantage of it, it can make a huge difference.

Lately, for me, I have just been too sloppy. Just churning out prints on autopilot without really examining them. A comment I received on email by Doug Stockdale regarding a print I send him (first prize in the big print lottery), and now this tutorial kind of woke me up. A couple of hours spend, and a dozen of test prints wasted, the print I made today is much, much better than the print I made yesterday. But then again, the print I made yesterday was not as good as the one I made 3 months ago.

The thing with printing isn’t really with the doing part. Doing is usually not that difficult, at least not when you start to know your tools. Ok, there is a couple of black magic areas left, aspecially when it comes to B&W, but most problems are solved using ordinary photoshop magic and soft proofing. The real issue is in the seeing. It is so darn hard to actually see the shortcomings. Once spotted, it is just a matter of time spend before it is solved.

Before I upgraded my Lightroom to version 2, I bought the Luminous Landscape LR video tutorial, and I thought it was good. It helped me to utilize the tool much better, and it was well worth the money. Fueled by this I went and bought the “Camera to print” tutorial as well.

This tutorial was nowhere near as useful to me. It skipped through the subjects from capturing the image to printing explaining in depth some of the aspects, but I didn’t feel it gave me much more than what I already knew. This of course is very individual, but for my part I had already read most of this at different web sites, like Luminous Landscape, Northlight images, Outback photo, and others. Especially I think they covered the art of B&W printing very lightly. Even thought the Epson Advanced B&W module is pretty good, it is still some black magic involved. You don’t get any soft proofing, and when you use non Epson papers, you may run in to problems. The tutorial just walked briefly though the printing of one single image without mentioning the use of the different controls in the driver for adjusting the tonality. I say this because I find the ABW module extemely difficult to use well. Much more than color printing where you have profiles and soft proofing.

The ImagePrint RIP on the other hand is better on BW printing simply because of profiling, but you still lack a decent soft proofing (there is a sorry excuse in page layout view…). However, when you print through that RIP, you can be pretty sure that the 255 value will be white, the 0 value will be as black as it gets, and all the other values are mapped on the straight line between. This is also the case with ABW using Epson papers, but not with third party papers that I usually use.