Printing the Image - 2018-03.24 - Papers

Ann and I are thinking of heading up to Portland next weekend, so when Ann said she had some errands to run and asked if I just wanted to stay home I said, “Sure, if you don’t mind.” I immediately knew what I was going to do - PRINT!  I had been thinking of what I wanted to print next throughout the week, and decided that I really needed to check out some of the matte papers that we have.  This was the perfect opportunity!

In one final exercise of frustration (well, call it learning) I revisited yet again the morning photograph from the Alabama Hills, darkening it just a bit.  The results were a learning exercise, where the sky finally captured some of the pink hues that were there that morning, but the remaining portions of the image came out dark, too dark, and the ground lost its sense of being illuminated by the pre-dawn light.  

Earlier this week I’d watched a small video by Robert Rodriguez, a photographer who is located in the Hudson River Valley in New York (I think).  In the video he discusses how you need to understand that the print is an entirely different product from the visual image you create for the screen (or in the camera), and you’ll have the best success at making good prints when you realize that you can’t just re-create in the print what’s on your monitor.  You may even take the image in very different directions to make a print that stands on its own.  Well, my many efforts today and over the weeks past with this Alabama Hills image confirmed he’s exactly right.

I had only three sheets of my baryta paper left, so I decided to work with a very different image to see how it printed.  As you can see, a very different type of image:

The first image turned out ok, but it fell a bit flat, so I deepened the darker tones and lifted the highlights (i.e. increased the contrast), and worked a bit on the interior of the image to give the print the same punch it has on screen and in my mind.  I’m pleased with the result, and I'm hoping I'm starting to develop a feel for how to tweak images to work in print.  Still, I'm sure I have a long ways to go.

With a single sheet of baryta paper left, I converted the same image to black and white, worked with it quite a bit more to make sure that it too wasn’t flat, and gave it a one-chance shot.

I can’t say I was disappointed in the result.  The print captures the softness of the plant while retaining the striking veins that capture the eye.

Next I wanted to test two different matte papers we have to see if I have a clear preference for one over the other (winds up I do, or at least I think I do - probably more testing is in order).  The best way to do that is to print the same image on the two papers, and compare the two.  The first image I tried was one from my trip to Stone Town, Zanzibar when I was working in Africa.

With one paper I got a great result immediately.  The other paper took a couple of prints, with a bit of adjusting to the image in-between prints, to bring it alive.  In the end, both wound up being acceptable images, with one having a bit more vibrance than the other (in part I think to the fact that it uses a glossy black ink instead of a matte black ink, despite the fact it is a “matte” paper).  But both are compelling when held in the hand.

The next image, however, blew my brains - and not in a good way.  I’ll start off with the image itself.  Again, it’s an old image taken with my x100, but posed an interesting mix of light, water, plants and stones that I was hoping would tell me a lot about the papers and the ability to transform such images onto paper. 

One thing I immediately realized when I entered print mode is how many of the greens in the foreground plant are out of gamut - an actual color that the screen cannot capture.  Some of those greens also were beyond the gamut of the printer itself (yes, the printer can print more colors than my screen can show).  This would wind up being a very interesting image to work with because the software and the printer have to figure out how to make up for this difference.

I entered soft-proofing mode and made some adjustments to compensate from screen to print - basically increasing the contrast a bit, and lightening up the plants along the bottom (which helped bring some areas back into gamut), and bringing out some of the colored areas of reflection.  The first print looked a bit odd in the lower left corner.  The rocks on top turned out fine, as did the tones in the water (surprisingly), but the bottom left corner looked a bit odd.  

When I switched to soft-proofing mode for the second paper (the matte - matte paper), it took quite a bit of work to get the image to look even somewhat right, and when I checked, there was a lot of greens that were definitely out of gamut.  And when the print came out, all of the out-of-gamut colors were these really odd blue colors that clearly weren’t right.  All I could figure was that somehow the ICC profile for the paper couldn’t handle that particular shade of blue-green.  

By this point I’d learned another lesson for the day.  Working on digital printing is just as mentally taxing as working in the darkroom.  I was mentally and physically exhausted.  So the only thing you can do is stop, because all you’re going to do is waste ink and paper, which is money.  As I learned in the wet-darkroom days, darkroom work is all about decision-making and technical implementation.  Refining technique perfects the technical implementation so that you can do it, exactly the same way each time, in your sleep if need be.  But when you're mentally exhausted you start making bad decisions and one bad decision can set you on a course to disaster.  Better to stop and come back with a fresh brain - a lot easier to do in this age of digital so . . . I closed up shop.  

Still, it was a worthwhile early afternoon of printing.