Printing the Image - Test Printing from Capture One
It was about time to run prints through the printer again . . . while it sometimes interrupts with other plans, needing to print to keep the printer operational at top efficiency has its advantages - it gets me up off my butt to think about printing. There is something lovely about having a tangible print in your hands that gives me a very different feeling about my images. And since we’ve been making the effort to become familiar with Capture One, it was time to go through the printing settings and variables with a bit of forethought to see if they all make sense (not totally). To do that I chose a couple of images to first develop them from scratch in Capture One, and then to print them.
The first image was taken from one of our 2017 trips to the Painted Hills. I must admit that there were multiple reasons for selecting this image, not the least was it has very fine and delicate details in it that, if the sharpening is off or over done (one of the reasons we transitioned away from Lightroom to Capture One), they would be evident in the print. And since I was printing on 13” x 19” paper, the print itself would be fairly large and any flaws would be readily apparent.
While not a total success, the print did its job. On the plus side, the very fine strands at the center of the image are beautifully sharp, but in a very natural way. It looks as it did in real life, which is what you want sharpening to look like. The print makes both Ann and me pleased that we’ve jumped ship.
On the negative side . . . well, there were several. First off, it really helps if you enter 13’” x 19” paper into the appropriate size settings instead of 13” x 17”. Let’s just say that the image itself is shifted to one side by a full two inches. Oops. Second, at one point there were checkboxes to show margin lines, which I checked. Suddenly there were margin lines on my monitor to show the size of the frame cell within the page size. Since you want to give a bit more border on the bottom than the top to have an image “sit” right on the page, they were helpful in visualizing how that looked. Problem is, checking the box not only showed the lines on-screen, it also printed the lines on the print. Oops. Third, I think the paper was not the best type of paper for this type of image. It’s a matte art paper that, while lovely, has less contrast than some of the other papers. Also, it absorbs more ink than some of the other papers we’ve used. That means that not only are the colors and contrast muted somewhat, but for this image in particular, there is no sense of lightness to the subject of the image that I know is and should be there. Light does not emanate from it like I think a good print of this image should.
I’ve read (and watched on YouTube) photographers talk about how different subjects are rendered better on different types of papers. It’s one thing to hear about it and assume that to be the case, but something altogether different when you experience it. And the only way to learn it is through experience (at the cost of a few dollars a print). Over time, as we become more familiar with printing and we settle on one or two papers (likely one baryta paper, one glossier non-baryta paper, and one matte paper), we’ll come to know precisely which images are rendered best on what papers. So from that perspective, it was a good learning experience printing an image on a paper for which it is not suited.
Given that I wasn’t planning on printing on different papers that day, and since I learned what I wanted to from the test, I called it good for this image.
The next image you’re somewhat familiar with and I picked this image out of sheer personal motivation. As you recall, there was a dunes image that I wanted to print bigger, and since I was working with larger paper, it was an opportunity to print bigger. Except this time I decided to develop and print the color version of the image I printed in the last printing the image segment.
The image is simply lovely. It’s as elegant in color as it is in black and white.
This time there was nothing wrong with the paper. Yes, the slight texture shows, but really, any texture in the paper would show in an image like this (which means I may have to experiment with the smoothest paper I can find). The image definitely works in color!
Still, the print is not perfect and I have some thinking to do about the image. There are some grasses by the left hand bottom edge that I may need to crop out or touch out - I have concerns what additional cropping will do to the relationship of the edge and bottom to the right side of the frame. And there’s another “spot of grass” to the right of the curve, near the upper middle part of the frame. These are more evident in the print than on a screen, and I suspect the larger I print the image, the more obvious these objects on top of the sand will become. I have to decide whether to leave it in a totally found state, or to clean it up a bit. My guess is I’ll crop out the bottom part, and leave everything else as it is. Mother nature is rarely tidy.
Overall, I’m tremendously pleased with this image in color. It still has a three dimensional quality to it that mesmerizes the eye. It’s stunning how such a simple image can seem to move before your eyes, with that line rising from the surface. And the subtle undulations in the image appear on the print, which gives a complexity to the image that one doesn’t see at first glance. I doubt I’m done studying this image.
Again, the print in color made me think about the paper surface and texture. I concluded that I’d be better off with a brighter paper for the black and white image. I think with the right paper surface, the black and white image could glow. So I decided to bypass printing that version larger and stopped for the day.
Not much more you can ask for from a printing session - a lovely print to hold in your hands, and lots of learning!