Printing the Image - 2018.08.05 Recent Work

It was time to print again this past weekend and for once I decided to print something from our most recent trip!

Despite my hopes to quickly print quite a few smaller images this weekend, Ann and I wound up becoming occupied with cleaning up from our recent adventure and starting preparations for the big September trip.  That left us in that all-too-familiar situation of finding ourselves at Sunday afternoon and wanting to both print images, and to wind down to ease into the work week.  So instead of multiple images, I decided to select one image from this trip and another recent image  that I’ve been wanting so see in print.

The first image was one that appeared in the “Hell ain’t so hot!” post, but printed in black and white instead of color.  Quite a few of the images I photographed were intended to be black and white images, and this was one of them.  Often when an image can make a strong black and white photograph, it can also make for a compelling color image - that’s because the composition, tones and textures that are helpful to creating a strong black and white image are just as beneficial to a color image.

I knew this image had all the elements to make a successful print, the question was how far could I carry it.  The pre-dawn sky in this image had an incredible, colorless glow to it being taken mere minutes before the sun crept over the horizon.  It retains that quality on a monitor, but I wondered if I could get it on an ink-jet print.  That required printing it with the barest hint of tones - enough to be distinguishable, but not too dark or else it would look gray and flat.  

My first print had the sky just a bit too bright, and one edge of the frame got lost in the paper (making the sky look flat).  I made a slight adjustment to the sky, and the second print came out well.  The edge of the image and the paper is almost indistinguishable, but it is there.  I’m not sure if the sky retains the quality I want (I know it would on a silver based photographic paper), but I’ll have to see how the prints hold up over multiple viewings.  Face it, I’m still in the learning phase of this printing thing.

I then decided to print one of the better images from our trip to the coast.  And since I was in a black and white mode, I quickly worked on a black and white image of my kelp on a rock image.

I was much less satisfied with this one, though I’m not sure if it’s because of the developing or the printing.  Ann thinks it’s lovely, but I find the print lacking a depth that the color image on screen has; in particular it doesn't capture a richness in the kelp buds that you see on screen.  Problem was, I didn’t know which way to go in working on the image, which means I’ll have to return to it some day and really make an effort to figure that all out.  Sometimes it’s a matter of experimentation, trying different techniques and approaches, to discover how the process really works, and then applying that knowledge to this and other images.  That takes a lot of time and experimenting, and time was not what I had.  So, that image is not quite there yet.

Unsure of how to continue in black and white, I transitioned to the print I had wanted to make from the get-go, which was the color version of the image.  There, the first crack at it wasn’t too bad, though as is often the case, it was a bit off.  

I’m still getting used to the notion that a print is not going to replicate what a monitor can do, and that it must become something altogether different, yet convey the same qualities as the projected image.  So I made some adjustments to the image on my monitor - making it appear in many ways much worse on-screen - in the knowledge that the same changes would be made to the print image to improve those areas, and hopefully get me to where I wanted to be.

The second print was better, having more depth and richness to the print than the first image.  As I explained to Ann, with soft-proofing, getting to that 80% level is pretty easy.  At that stage, the prints are so much better than what you’d get from a printing place, save for a custom print shop.  However, getting that extra 10%, 15% or more is difficult.  You have to make the right decisions about how to get there, guessing beyond what is shown on the screen to how it will render on paper.  Compounding that guessing game is the fact that the correct  decisions for how to develop an image aren’t always obvious.  

Deciding again that I’d have to study the images to see how I might approach improving the developing of the print, I called it a day. 

Looking at the images a couple of days later, they aren't too bad.  Not perfect, but not too bad.  Another worth-while day of printing!