Time seemed to be flying by after we returned from our trip, so it was quite some time before it dawned on us that it was time to print some images. As we started getting ready, I still hadn’t really gone through my Painted Hills images and Ann wasn’t happy with hers. With a bit of nudging, she found a couple she thought might be ok (that is an understatement), and I’d been thinking about a couple images from my trip with Len that I wanted to see on paper.

Since I have a new computer (necessitated by some periodic uncomfortable glitches with my older laptop) I had to calibrate my monitor(s). That’s when I discovered that the calibration software had changed entirely. So even before I could start working on images, we had to download, install (a couple of times) and troubleshoot a few software crashes before I could even work on my images. Then of course, the latest updates to Capture One didn’t like playing with my new system, which took a bit of Ann’s magic to finally get going (yet another update has led to a few more crashes). But persistence pays off and I finally had several images ready for printing.

Come printing day, we discovered that the Epson software programs we use for managing the printer also had an update. That led to yet more problems that Ann, fortunately, had the patience to work through. After about an hour (and much cursing), we were finally ready to go. Maybe we should have seen the warning signs, but we were determined to move forward.

Once printing got started, things seemed to move along smoothly. The first print I sent out was a smaller 8x10 and was just a quick image from my Painted Hills images that was intended to get the ink-jets flowing just in case there were any clogging issues. Red, green, yellow, brown, blue, black and white - the print had all the colors you might want to reproduce There were no clogged jets, so we started out with a lovely image of a portion of the Painted Hills an hour or so before the storm hit.

I’ll discuss the remainder of the images from that first day in reverse order, because Ann wasn’t happy with her results. Mine on the other hand turned out to my satisfaction. The one consistency with the main images that Ann and I selected were that they were probably best viewed as large as possible. For us, that generally means printing on 13”x19” paper.

I’d selected a couple of images from our morning at Valley of the Gods in southern Utah. The first image was one I’d discovered after standing by our campsite and looking out over the valley just admiring the view. As I stood there, I slowly realized there was an elegant drainage way that worked its way across my field of vision, but then turned downward (visually upward) leading the eye into the valley.

With that discovery, I walked over to the van (where I’d dropped my pack) and grabbed my camera and tripod to see if I could photograph what I was seeing. What you see doesn’t always translate in a photograph. The image fits within the “landscape” genre I was trying to work on during the trip, but really contains very little to work with compositionally. Still, it was an image that kept grabbing my attention every time I looked through my Capture One catalog, which means it deserved to be developed and printed.

I’m glad I did, because the print has the size and subtlety necessary to encourage the eye to roam and flow over the landscape, pausing for moments to observe visible details, and then moving on. I’m really impressed how such a simple image can print so well and, more importantly, give one the sense of vastness that one can get when in the desert.

For good reason, I had a lot more hope for the other image I’d selected to print. That image contained a good variety of land forms, vegetation and light to work with. One still has to get everything right when making the image and developing it, but the elements were plainly there to work with, unlike the previous image which came to me only after studying the landscape for an extended period.

Face it, near-by stark desert vegetation, rolling towards prominent buttes, combined with ethereal clouds are a good starting point for crafting an image.

Ann loves the print and I have to say that it exceeds what I had hoped for. Sometimes things actually works out.

Then again, sometimes they don’t.

For Ann, the first day’s printing session was, to put it mildly, frustrating. Where to begin? Let’s start with Capture One. One of the things we’ve grumbled about periodically with Capture One is that its print module is pretty bad. So bad that, for printing, we would export TIFF files and then open them up in the Epson Print Layout program to print. The main problem with the Epson program (other than it’s yet another program to have to work with) is that when it’s displaying the image to print as you’re figuring out borders and whatnot, the image is not accurate. The colors are off and it really looks as if something is horribly wrong with your print. It’s frustrating to go through that whole process with something that screams “wrong” before your eyes. My mantra has been, “Trust your calibrated system and how it looked in Capture One.”

Well, Ann saw that one of the recent Capture One updates included changes to the print module so . . . she tried printing from Capture One. The best one can say is that it’s better than it was before (though that’s not saying much). Much of the module makes absolutely no sense in how it works, it does not show you what you’re actually going to get (verified by prints not being printed the way they’re presented in the Capture One print module) and . . . in the end was a total pain in the ass. I said, “Screw this, I’m going back to the Epson software.” (see - ease of printing above). Eventually, Ann did too.

While Ann was messing with prints through the Capture One software, her prints did not look quite right. By “right,” I mean the print did not look like it was presented on her monitor. As I’ve noted before, it’s easy to get a photograph to look good on a computer screen, and to have it look good on other computer, iPad and phone screens even if (and most are) those screens are not calibrated. Prints are not the same. They have a much smaller dynamic range, and good prints really need the right amount of light to look good. With everything calibrated and working the way they should, the prints should look good given decent lighting. For example, my prints above came out of the printer looking dark (Ann’s office where the printer is isn’t very well lit). But when I brought them into the print room (where my temporary summer office is located) and especially when held near the large glass exterior doors, the prints look lovely. Almost exactly the way they look on my monitor (by “almost,” I mean I can’t tell the difference). Anyway, I suggested to Ann that her prints might not look right because of the CO module and suggested that they might look right if printed the old way through the Epson software. I was wrong.

Her prints continued to come out dark, dark enough to have lost all of the subtle richness of an amazing (and subtle) image. She made a virtual copy of it and we tried to develop it a bit lighter, to make the print lighter. It didn’t work. Well, it worked a little bit, but not enough. The whole purpose of calibrating is to not have to do that go-back-and-forth process of guessing what it will look like printed.

Frustrated, we moved onto her second image. Same thing; same reworking; same disappointment. Ann decided to call it quits for the weekend.

Here’s the first image she printed as it looked on her monitor. The slight darkening of the print made everything go flat and the detail on the hill to the right and foreground to the left turned to mush. And the separation between the hills in the distance seemed to disappear. The print was nothing like the image below.

Fortunately, Ann is stubborn. Even though she was disappointed with the images, she wanted to figure out what was wrong, both in how she developed the images and how they printed. The intervening week and second print session is a wonderful example of how Ann’s determination worked through both issues.

Ann decided to rework both of the images from scratch, which is often a good thing when you’re just generally unsatisfied with the results of a print and can’t pin down precisely the one or two things that aren’t right. From the get go, Ann made a simple change that affects everything about the image - she changed the crop. She wanted to keep the same aspect ratio, but she simply moved the frame down lower on the image. That did two things. First, it introduced the green leading line that starts in the lower left corner (with lovely white flowers in the green - plainly visible in the print) and draws the eye into and through the scene, giving a sense of depth and flow to the image. Second, the adjusted crop eliminated most of the bright rose colored cloud in the upper right of the image that drew the eye away from the landscape. Beautiful as that cloud is, it was a distraction. Compare the crop for the two images and you’ll see what I’m talking about. Such a simple edit, but massive in its effect.

The rest of the new development emphasized the same parts of the image that the first version did, except through using fewer techniques and giving a better overall feel (I think).

However, the trials and tribulations were not over. The first print still turned out dark, which affected the appearance of the darker areas of the print more than the lighter areas, again making them dull and muddy, not vibrant and alive like on the monitor. Ann was terribly frustrated; the “I suck” type of frustration. I knew better and was not deterred. The image on her monitor was amazing (I think the best image of our Painted Hills trip). The image wasn’t the problem, nor the processing. The problem was a technical one, going from her monitor to the printer.

Not to get too technical about things, but there are a variety of different settings we use in the calibration process. One of them is a luminance level and Ann and I use different levels from the 80-120 luminance range recommended. Ann tends to set hers at 90 and I use 100. That’s not surprising because we have different monitors both physically (her 32” monitor versus my 27” monitor) and model numbers even though they’re from the same company. Based on the luminance values we used, if anything, her prints should have been brighter than mine given her settings. They were not. The instruction manual (and the tech sites we rely upon) say if the print is too dark, lower the luminance value. So Ann recalibrated her monitor and dropped her luminance to 80 and reprinted. The print looks good, particularly when held near a bright light source. To get it to look precisely like her monitor in normal light, she’s considering recalibrating again and setting the luminance value to 75. I think she’s right Still, Ann finally a result she was happy with. The print is amazing.

Besides being too dark the first week, Ann felt her second print really didn’t convey the feeling she had when she made the image. It was a black and white image of one of the painted hills taken before our big storm at a time when the sun would periodically pop through the clouds, but when the skies and landscape otherwise seemed threatening. In some ways, all the pieces were there, but not the effect she wanted. In particular Ann felt that the foreground grasses were muddy and didn’t show the definition they should. Ann just wan’t happy with the print.

So during the week, Ann re-developed her second image as well. She again lowered the crop frame a bit, though I don’t think it had the dramatic effect that it had with the first image. What I think made a big difference is that instead of significantly lightening the hill as she had done originally so she could see more detail in it, she largely left it as ominous as it had recorded on the sensor, working only to bring out the lighter stripes so typical of the Painted Hills. When the hills get wet, they deepen in color and really darken when clouds roll through.

Ann also worked the sky less, leaving the textures, but not emphasizing them so much as to distract from the image below. They are less “dramatic” and therefore do not draw the eye to them as much as the first printing. And last, although there is less contrast in the foreground grasses and are printed darker, in this print they are more visually separated than the previous print and, significantly, the white flowers pop out from the print.

Now, it’s a foreboding image, warning of the storm to come. And a tremendously lovely black and white print.

Since Ann decided to rework her images in the intervening week and knowing that we’d be doing a second print session, I returned to a couple more images from the Terrell Brothers Road Trip. The immediate one that came to mind is a striking image taken from the plateau by Factory Butte. This was another one of those images I knew I wanted to print as big as I could. The size of the print plainly demonstrates the advantages of moving to the X-T5 (40mp instead of 24mp) and for purchasing the new 33mm lens, designed to take full advantage of those 40mp.

On the monitor you can zoom in and see details on the valley floor and imagine walking among the rocks visible from so far away. And the print, which takes advantage of 12 of the 13-inch width of the paper, allows you to examine that detail from inches away to get the same sense. Even the distant bentonite hills read as a maze to be wandered through on foot. Equally impressive are the color transformations, from the blue to brown of the valley floor through to the blue to pink transition in the sky that documents the earth’s shadow creeping upwards. It was an image definitely worth printing.

For my last image I decided to work on one from Singing Canyon I’ve shown previously as a color image, but to develop it as a black and white. I can’t take full credit for thinking of doing so, though. One evening that week Ann and I watched a YouTube segment by a photographer we occasionally watch where he discussed some of Ansel Adams’ photographs. One photograph, of a backlit tree in Yosemite Valley, made me think of this image. So when I found out Ann was working to improve her images, I thought of doing this one as well.

For the most part, the black and white version turned out well, though I’m more satisfied with it on screen than in the print. Certainly the shimmering of the sunlit leaves and the wonderful structure of the tree trunk of the lit tree printed exactly as I’d hoped. The subtle detail in the canyon wall to the right, and the shadows of the leaves projected onto the ground turned out well too. I’m less satisfied by the sun-lit sand - it looks a bit muddy and lifeless (I think I burned it in just a bit too much) - and with the sky. I did nothing with the cloudless sky, but it reads just a bit too dark. It was something I struggled with in the old darkroom days - broad areas of minimally texted mid-tones have to be printed at just the right tone or else they become . . . for lack of a better word, lifeless. I guess the same holds true for ink-jet printing.

Perhaps I’ll refine the image a bit to see if I can improve a print of it. I think the image is worth it, and it may not really need to be printed as large as it was. Perhaps a smaller print size will make it feel as intimate as being there was.

Well that’s it. One of the most difficult, yet rewarding, printing sessions we’ve had.

And by the way, the other day Ann and I were in a camera shop and walked out with a box of A2 paper for her Painted Hills color image. For those unfamiliar with European paper sizes, that’s 16.5” x 23.4”. I’m looking forward to that session and seeing the image even larger!

Printing the Image - The If At First You Don't Succeed . . . Edition

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Printing the Image - The If At First You Don't Succeed . . . Edition

Good Photo - Great Photo

Our Not-Forgotten Painted Hills Trip

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