the digital monochrome worker september 09 issue

The Digital-monochrome worker

By Martin Henson www.digital-monochrome.com

September 2009 issue

Printing a joy or headache

This months issue is devoted mainly to printing. Printing can be a danger to your health, cause hair to fall out, ruin your married life [late nights] and make you bankrupt all within one month of trying to get the ultimate work of art in print form. Well I have been through all this, I still have some hair, the bank manager is my mate and the wife is still with me, just :-). There are books and billions of written text on the subject are out there, you need a degree in science to understand some of it, they often conflict with differing views, lets face it, some people love to delve so deep into one subject they bury themselves and get carried away with mind blowing numbers that totally confuse, Well I am here to help, I will try not to blow your mind, keep the process explained as simple as possible based on my own experience, I hated and dreaded printing out files knowing that the output would be awfu. I have learnt a lot about it over the years and of all the digital process, printing is my favourite pastime.

View images @ www.digital-monochrome.com

Making the choicePrinting your images is the penultimate way of showing your work, nothing looks better than the finished print framed and hung for all to see, after all looking on screen is great, superb contrast and dynamics there, but you can’t hang a computer screen on the wall, yes I hear you say, I can, digital frames, OK , I coincide, but its still not the real thing, switch the electric of and its gone. My point is this, we all love to see items of quality and beauty, images correctly printed on fine art paper show, in real life, the texture and subtle tonal range that cannot be substituted by screen viewing. When I show people my unframed prints, there first reaction is to look and feel the texture, a quick slap on the hand stops that, don’t want sweaty hands ruining things do we. So what stops some photographers from outputting there files to print, I think it is the shear complexity that's written about it that confuses. It has got easier today than say three years ago, printers are better at de-coding the info sent from the computer, better canned profiles and also inks. Sending your BW images to the commercial printer is the easy way but can be very disappointing when you get the prints back, most don’t print on rag papers so quality is gone straight away, and there are always colour casts, you get what you pay for, a large A3 mono print will cost you around a couple of pounds, but ohhhhhhhh dear, enough said.

The only way to get what you see on screen and be 99% happy with your print is to do it yourself, be in control of the whole process from start to finish, unless you send them to me for printing ;-) But before you rush out and buy all the equipment to become a master printer there are certain important things to think about.

Some sort of screen calibration is essential, no point spending hours on a picture when all the tones are not what the camera captured, your goal is to be able to print from the screen and the output to look the same, or as near as makes no difference, screen calibration was talked about in the August issue of monochrome worker.

Good profiles are also of great importance, the canned profiles that come with your printers these days are excellent providing you use the printer manufacturers inks and papers, alter any of of these and you will run into problems of prints not looking at there best.

Printing in mono is notoriously difficult with dye based printers, the prints suffer badly from metamerism, (change in print tint under different light sources), to avoid this buy printers that use pigment inks, they stay the same tone under almost all lighting conditions.

You want your prints to be permanent with no fading, these archival properties are essential when selling images, again good choice of papers and using pigment inks will ensure maximum archival properties.

If you are looking to purchase a new printer go for the ones that have a dedicated B&W advanced driver software, these give more control and better tonal response, a more linear way of printing.

Don’t use third party inks, it never seems to give results that manufactures inks do, so buy a Canon printer and use there own inks, costs more but in the long term you will not waste as much paper and ink trying to get the prints looking right.

Remember this, if you are planning do lots of printing, don’t go for models that come with small ink carts of 10 or 13mls capacity, you will spend a fortune on replacement ink cartridges, big volume carts at say 80mls or more, last longer obviously, but work out at half the cost to the smaller ones


You can make printing easy or hard , don’t suddenly go for RIP (Raster Image Processor) you might get get better output using the RIP software, but it depends how good and experienced you are in this subject, try it straight away before using your printer as designed is a sure way of loosing hair, or maybe packing it all in and back to the labs.

Keep it simple, use manufactures inks, try there canned profiles for your colour output, there really good, and when your confident to start mono printing use the manufactures papers such as for Epson users Enhanced and Archival matt papers, cheap to buy but great results straight from the printer using the canned profiles, [canned profiles are the ones that come with the printer software].

When you are successful at printing on these papers, move up to the Fine art rag papers, there acid free, come in all types of finishes from gloss to matt finishes and are unrivaled for quality.

Use paper profiles from the manufactures of the paper type, or better still get someone to make you custom profiles for your paper type and printer model, it will cost a few £ $ but its worth it.

When using these papers let Photoshop manage the profiles, that way you can pick the profile in Photoshop for the type and make of paper you are using.

I have probably put you off printing by now, so to follow are pictures and text of how I print my own pictures in Photoshop using one off my Epson 3800 large format printers, you might own a HP or other type of printer but I think the fundamentals are the same, so its a guide not law.

Start by shooting you pictures in Adobe RGB colour space, you can set this in most DSLR cameras.

In Photoshop, go to the Edit menu and choose Colour Settings... I prefer to edit images using the Adobe RGB working space. I don't use sRGB because the gamuts is restricted. The Epson 3800 and other modern printers exceed the gamut of sRGB in some areas.

You will not edit in gray scale mode so set it to Gamma 2.2

Because you have chosen Adobe RGB colour spaces always edit in 16 bit you will get smoother tonal transitions in this mode.

I have ticked the warning boxes, they can be a nuisance but will tell you if a file does not match the working space and present you with options to alter this.


To get to this dialogue box in Photoshop go to file~colour settings


When the settings are made for your colour space , save them , open and edit your image, crop to size then go to print, it will look like something like this.

In this setting we are letting the printer manage the colours or shades of gray, you can see that the printer profile drop down is grayed out and cannot be set to any profile other than the working space. In other words the printer will manage the output, the next step is to open the printers dialogue box.

There all different but work the same, the screen grab is of my Epson 3800. Select your type of media, choose your output as colour or black and white, change your colour space to Adobe RGB click OK and print the picture. Now that's the easy way and you will get decent results, but there is a better way to print, where you will get, a more accurate result one that matches what you see on screen, it involves more work but in the end is quicker and saves you money in ink and paper wastage.

The above method is basic and easy to do, every stage is done automatically, lets move on to the better way of getting your pictures to look as you see them on screen.


Two very important things to remember, make sure your LCD o rCRT is calibrated correctly and always turn off colour management in the printers driver. Calibration ensures your seeing the colours and grays as they should be seen and disabling printer colour management stops double profiling you images.

Bet your sick of printing using only the paper choices that are available in your printer driver. There are some absolutely amazing choices out there from third party manufactures of fine art rag papers, they come in lots of finishes and textures. If you try to print on any of these using the easy method of printing mentioned on the previous page your going to be disappointed with the output, yes you can download the paper profiles from the paper makers but they are not that good and in any case you cannot select the profile if the printer is managing the output. Try it and waste paper and ink, its your money but you will soon come to your senses when you see the cost of Rag papers and replacing inks. I don’t do this, but you can use cheaper third party inks in the printer to keep costs even lower, be warned, the best inks are made by the printer manufacture the other types could I repeat could damage your investment.

OK where to start, first lets select a paper say German Etching by Hahnemuhle, thick and luxurious, a texture to die for. What do we need to print with this FAP, first a decent printer, which as an enthusiast I am sure you will have :-), preferably a pigment ink printer. We now have our paper, printer and ink, what's needed next, a good paper profile is essential for good output, where do we get them I hear you ask, they don’t sell them at Tesco, (wish they did) you can download the profile from the paper manufactures site, most have a page on there site for that, but in all honesty there not that good because you need to be able to profile colours and gray scales from your own system for consistent accuracy, or you can buy custom made profiles, there are people out there that do this To do this you need to print out two test sheets with colour patches from your printer, the next step is to read that info using a Spectrophotometer, this determines the total colours you printer is capable of producing, the software will print out another test sheet, again using your Spectrophotometer you read the second patches, the software will then create a paper profile for that particular paper, in our example that was German Etching, all this might sound confusing but in reality its easy to do, different profiling systems may vary but all work in the same way, one that has recently been on the market is X-rite Colormunki, its simple to follow, and makes great colour profiles and with practice you can use the profiles to print B&W images through you printers advanced B&W driver, I have done that with great success and get accurate mono printouts using the colour profiles. The profiles are automatically saved in your profile folder and are easy to find. When making paper profiles it is important to save all the same settings in the printer driver for a given type of paper, so you can select them with the click of the mouse, any deviation will change the profile. Assuming you have now rushed out and bought a profiling software and Spectrophotometer your well on the way to better prints already.

Now that's out of the way, (feel a headache coming on) lets get to the practical part. One great way of checking your image using the profile you have made is to use Photoshops soft proofing. Here's how to do that or should I say how I do it, go to View~proof setup~custom, where it says device to simulate, click the drop down and select the profile we want, in our example it would be German etching, in the next drop down, because we are printing a photographic image, select Perceptual as the rendering intent,( you can alter this and see how it effects the image) but Perceptual is preferably the best choice. Make sure the box preserve RGB numbers is un ticked and black point compensation is ticked, the other two boxes under Display options I leave unchecked, click save and give it a meaningful name like German etching soft proof, close the soft proofing dialogue box. Open the image you want to print, next duplicate it, put both identical images side by side in Photoshop, now go to view~proof setup~custom, click on load, remember we saved our proof as German etching, select it. With that information loaded Photoshop will give you a very good visual reference as to what the image might look like when printed ..........


Leave your original image untouched and alter the duplicated image only to match the original with any tools in Photoshop at your disposal, a further option to view what is happening is provided by switching between views pressing Ctrl~Y (PC) activates this, once you have edited the proof image to as near as possible to the original click OK , remember you are going to print out the duplicate proofed image not the original.

Now go to File~Print, set Photoshop to manage colours, the next drop down is no longer grayed out and you can access your profile folder, in that folder you need to find the profile, in our example, German etching, click it, set rendering intent to Perceptual and tick the black point compensation box, now go to the printer properties box (Setup}, this where it gets difficult to explain as printer properties vary in there setup and structure, but they all do the same so I am sure you can work round this, in my example its the Epson 3800 box.

If you are printing a colour image its vital that you turn of colour management in the printers driver, but because this is a mono mag and using the Epson 3800 as an example printer we don’t have to do this because we are going to print through the Advanced black and white driver, (most higher end printers have this facility but might work in a different way).

I have through experiment with different settings chosen Watercolour Radiant White as my media choice, I find it lays ink down on German etching at the right amounts, for me that is :-), In the next drop down the Advanced B&W driver is selected, it produces better results than printing mono's from the colour driver, next click custom, then Advanced.

I would suggest that you turn off high speed, do not alter any sliders or have the other radio boxes ticked. Because the Colormunki created a colour profile I had to experiment with the tone drop down, I found one my system that the darkest setting works best with the Colormunki profiles, the box above is for colour tone, that is purely an artistic choice, for pure B&W leave that set at neutral, it is advisable to save the settings at this point, save it with the profile name, IE German etching mono, makes it easy to work with and keeps things constant, click OK all the way back to to Photoshop and print your master piece.


Overview of printing

Although all the mumbo jumbo I have written on the previous pages might sound intimidating and perhaps confusing, in reality its easy so don’t be put off. To condense what has been said in a simple way is as follows

View on a quality LCD or CRT that's properly calibrated

Buy the best printer you can afford

Printing is addictive, pigment ink is expensive so are FAP do it all right, bite the bullet and don’t skip corners to try and save money, it will cost you more in wastage in the long run.

Pigment inks are currently the preferred choice

If you plan on printing third party papers buy a Spectrophotometer to create your own paper profiles, you will re coupe that cost in no time.

If you do mainly B&W printing consider a meter that reads gray scales, at the moment I am using colour profiles that with a little adjustment print superb monos as good as my B&W profiles through the Advanced B&W driver.

Keep things at all times consistent, if your printing from a custom profile you have made or bought, keep to the original printer settings that crated it, any deviation will alter it.

And finally, printing your own work is the test of your editing and picture taking skills, be in total control from taking stage to hanging the the framed print. Many mono images I see on the Internet forums would not print right, I know this through printing all my own work, it becomes instinctive to see what will or wont print correctly. Printing is a great way to learn about tones and texture and extends your hobby to another level.

Sky’s the limit by Bill Allsopp

How many photographs are spoilt by bland, flat skies? Many I took suffered from this and I am certain our readers will have had this problem at some time. Over time you learn what will be acceptable and what will not and do not take photographs in unsuitable conditions.

Sometimes however there is no alternative. I was on holiday in north Cornwall and fond a wonderful tree a few miles along the coast, bent by wind and weather into a curve over the road. It was a large tree too, for the area and stood on it’s own opposite a granite barn. I went back many times but never found the light right (it was a terrible weeks weather). Finally, just before we were due to return to Leicestershire I paid another visit to this object of my desire. It was not to be. The sky was flat grey and there was a persistent flat drizzle. More in hope than expectation I got out of the car and took a few shots. Maybe I could do something with them when I got back?

This is the best picture I got….

When I got back home I wondered for a long while what could do. I was quite new to Photoshop CS2 and despite a lot of reading of the manual and other books and on the Internet, and hours in front of the computer experimenting, I was nearly beaten. The obvious wide-angle tilt of the barn was easy enough to fix but the sky looked like beating me. Early on I decided that the only solution was to import a different sky and I had a suitable one. I could not find a method that would work. I tried the sky above the tree and below the tree; I tried different blending modes, I tried “blend if”, though I had no real idea what I was up to, this was my first digital monochrome!

Finally the penny dropped, the flat sky that was the problem, was also the solution. Being monotonous it looked easy to use as a selection. If I applied a threshold layer and very carefully move the slider across until the sky was pure white. I could use the wand to select that!


First task was to export the file as a tiff/psd from RAW. The natural file size of a Canon 5D is 4368 pixels but I exported to 6144 px on the basis that the larger the file was I worked on the less visible any flaws would be in the final print since I would not have to ramp up the finished file when printing at A3. I then applied the threshold and selected the sky, as above, making sure neither contiguous nor sample all layers were ticked, and with a threshold of 1 chosen. Invert the selection and, moving to the background duplicate the selection. I now had a new layer with everything but the sky on it.

Next I opened a file of a dramatic sky


Copied it and pasted it into this file underneath the new layer. Still required a bit of adjustment in “Blend if” to remove a few small halos but progress at last!

Now that I had the sky on a separate layer to the rest I could relatively easily work on the layers separately, using normal editing techniques to create the final image.


Would I use this technique regularly? No! Not because I am concerned with recording reality but because it is such hard work. Use it only when you have to, for example if a revisit to the spot is a 500 mile round trip. The reason I say this is that the trick to getting this to work is very careful selection of the sky, which requires getting the threshold level and feather exactly right so that you have minimal ghosting round the twigs and leaves to cope with and even then a bit of careful adjustment in the “blend if” module is required. It took me many hours of experimentation to achieve the final result, even with the greater skill I have picked up in using Photoshop since there is a fair bit of work involved.

I may now go back and rework it to bring a back a bit more of the detail in the dark areas of the clouds which, I can now see, was lost due to my inexperienced and clumsy work three years ago. How time changes our perceptions!

Bill Allsopp15th August 2009Bagworth

http://www.britishlandscapephotographs.co.uk/


Yet Another place to visit in YorkshireSalts Mill in Shipley is a great place to visit, lots to see and photograph, I have often visited it over the years and intend on more images from there. Its now converted into galleries, shops etc but the original buildings which was based on Italian architecture are still in tact and take you back in time. Its so unusual to see with its quaint streets and houses, The mill its self is a magnificent structure with towering chimneys, the railway and canal still run through it. The last visit we talked to a gentleman that had worked and lived there most of his life, his stories where so interesting telling us of tunnels that are still there but closed for public access, but once teaming with mill workers.

Titus Salt, the son of Daniel Salt, a woolstapler, was born in Morley near Leeds on 20th September, 1803. Daniel Salt was a fairly successful businessman and was able to afford to send Titus to Heath Grammar School. After working for two years at a Wakefield woolstapler, Titus joined the family firm in 1824. Titus, who married Caroline Whitlam in 1830, became the firm's wool buyer. Daniel Salt & Son prospered and became one of the most important textile companies in Bradford.

When Daniel Salt retired in 1833, Titus took over the running of the company. Over the next twenty years Titus Salt became the largest employer in Bradford. Between 1801 and 1851 the population of Bradford grew from 13,000 to 104,000. With over 200 factory chimneys continually churning out black, sulphurous smoke, Bradford gained the reputation of being the most polluted town in England. Bradford's sewage was dumped into the River Beck. As people also obtained their drinking water from the river, this created serious health problems. There were regular


outbreaks of cholera and typhoid, and only 30% of children born to textile workers reached the age of fifteen. Life expectancy, of just over eighteen years, was one of the lowest in the country.

Titus Salt, who now owned five textile mills in Bradford, was one of the few employers in the town who showed any concern for this problem. After much experimentation, Salt discovered that the Rodda Smoke Burner produced very little pollution. In 1842 he arranged for these burners to be used in all his factories.

In 1848 Salt became mayor of Bradford. He tried hard to persuade the council to pass a by-law that would force all factory owners in the town to use these new smoke burners. The other factory owners in Bradford were opposed to the idea. Most of them refused to accept that the smoke produced by their factories was damaging people's health.

When Titus Salt realised the council was unwilling to take action, he decided to move from Bradford. In 1850, Salt announced his plans to build a new industrial community called Saltaire at a nearby beauty spot on the banks of the River Aire. Saltaire, which was three miles from Bradford, took twenty years to build. At the centre of the village was Salt's textile mill. The mill was the largest and most modern in Europe. Noise in the factory was reduced by placing underground much of the shafting which drove the machinery. Large flues removed the dust and dirt from the factory floor. To ensure that the neighbourhood did not suffer from polluted air, the mill chimney was fitted with Rodda Smoke Burners.

At first Salt's 3,500 workers traveled to Saltaire from Bradford. However, during the next few years, 850 houses were built for his workers. Saltaire also had its own park, church, school, hospital, library and a whole range of different shops. The houses in Saltaire were far superior to those available in Bradford and other industrial towns. Fresh water was piped into each home from Saltaire's own 500,000 gallon reservoir. Gas was also laid on to provide lighting and heating. Unlike the people of Bradford, every family in Saltaire had its own outside lavatory. To encourage people to keep themselves clean, Salt also arranged for public baths and wash-houses to be built in Saltaire.

Titus Salt was also active in politics. Salt supported adult suffrage and did not believe that the 1832 Reform Act went far enough. In 1835 he was a founder of the Bradford Reform Association. and publicly supported the Chartists. Disturbed by the growth of the Physical Force Chartists, Salt helped establish the United Reform Society, an attempt to unite middle and working class reformers.

Titus Salt was a severe critic of the 1834 Poor Law. He also supported the move to reduce working hours and was the first employer in the Bradford area to introduce the ten hour day. However, Salt held conservative views on some issues. He refused permission for his workers to join trade unions and disagreed with those like Richard Oastler and John Fielden who wanted Parliament to pass legislation on child labour. Salt employed young children in his factories and were totally opposed to the 1833 Factory Act that attempted to prevent children under the age of nine working in textile mills.

Salt gave his support to the Radical candidate in Bradford's parliamentary elections. However, at the request of the local Chamber of Commerce, Salt became a candidate in the 1859 General Election. Salt was elected but after two years in the House of Commons he resigned because of ill-health.

Titus Salt died on 29th December, 1876. Although he had been an extremely rich man, his family was horrified that his fortune was gone. It has been estimated that during his life he had given away over £500,000 to good causes.


This image shows part of the mill complex and the village allotment and green house.

Well worn cobbles and footpaths

Thousands of mill workers would have used these steps to go to work, nowadays its tourists that use them, the steps are a testament to the quality of this Mill, hardly worn, only the best materials where used to build the unique place of Salts mill and village. Visit it and you will not be disappointed



User reviewsBet you edit most of your work at night, if you don’t you should be editing in a room that's quite low in ambient light, that can create a problem viewing printed images, how many times have you looked at the printed image to check the tone or colour, trying to view in different tungsten or fluorescent light is near impossible, there is a great little accessory to take the hassle out of trying to view in that sort of light

Accurate colour assessment is critically important to photographers and that’s where this lamp comes in.

The Colour Confidence GrafiLite is a daylight-balanced lamp aimed at photographers and designers. It’s suitable for viewing prints, proofs and colour swatches using a mid-grey A4 viewing mat that fits at the foot of the lamp and provides a neutral area to view prints. The lamp itself has a soft neutral light around 5250K that lights product shots, macro shots and portraits perfectly, revealing impressive versatility. Its well built, and takes up little room , its one of those accessories that once used you wonder how you ever managed without it. Get one NOW, search the net for the best price, its well worth buying.

Well that's if folks for another month, sorry its late again, and if the spelling and grammar is not up to scratch, I have not had time to proof read it, I hate dead lines, sometimes there is not enough hours in a day for me , but hope you find the articles interesting, and don’t forget to email me if you want to be added to the mailing list, promise not to bombard you with mail, just once a month to let you know when the next issue is out, Also do visit the http://www.runboard.com/bthedigitalmonochromeforum its without any doubt the best place to learn the wonderful art of monochrome.

RegardsMartin

the digital monochrome worker september 09 issue

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