Printing the Image - UK Edition
As one might expect (given the two Photographs posts), we both were anxious to see how prints of our images would turn out. There is something vastly different about looking at an image on the monitor (as impressive as that can be), and holding a print in your hands (or looking at it on a table or on a wall). This time it wasn’t a “we have to run some ink through the printer to keep it from clogging” printing session, it was an “I want to see prints of this image!” session.
I’d like to say that it was a smooth, productive printing session. It wasn’t. Actually, it was several printing sessions given the technical difficulties we experienced during the initial printing session (and the second) and the standards we were expecting from the prints given the quality of the photographs. I’ll conflate the sessions and not talk about them individually, but will instead focus on the images and the final results.
I thought I’d start out with what I thought was a simple image that would print easily. Simple forms, lovely colors, what could go wrong? It was a good lesson in how photo paper differs from a illuminated monitor and a flashback to my B&W darkroom days of realizing that shades of black (well, very dark grey) easily block up. When the print came out and we pulled it under our controlled lighting, Ann liked the image. I was horrified. The edge along the upper left corner and immediately under the branch was a dark, lifeless blob, and the upper left portion of the branch was dull. I decided to try and fix the problem then and there and headed upstairs to my office.
It really didn’t take much work, but it did require a bit of judgment and a gentle hand to get the blacks to become textures (just slightly more than what already shown on the monitor) that would show on a print, and then a bit of work to lighten the berries and leaves, so they had depth but still appeared to be in shadow (which they were). My subtle adjustments were spot on and the print has the life that the image appears to have on a monitor.
Ann had her own print developing to do with her first image. When I posted the story about Ann’s photographs, I mentioned that she had developed this image from a RAW file that failed to represent the feeling of the place into a photograph that did. While not quite back to step one, the initial print really demonstrated the adage that developing an image to look good on a monitor doesn’t guarantee a print will look good, but if a development looks good in print, it almost always looks good on a monitor. When the first print kicked out it was lifeless (almost horrible). Something was fundamentally wrong. Ann went back to basics and checked her printer settings. She discovered it was set to “standard” instead of “highest quality” print (my settings had been to highest quality), so we reset that and printed again. Better, but still short of what it should have been - the trees in the distance were pale and lifeless, the green bush to the left was an odd-colored green, and (like in my print) the shadow area under the tree to the right was blocked up - oh yeah, and the water seemed lifeless. Like with mine, Ann wanted to work with it on the fly, so she made some adjustments to each of those areas. The third print turned out better, but the background area was still lacking and now the bush to the left was a bit dull and lifeless.
Fourth time was a charm. She worked on enhancing the color of the leaves in the distance, and the exposed branches on the left and the print turned out lovely.
Over the next few days (it helps to live with a print for awhile before revisiting it), Ann decided to try and rework it from scratch. She just felt that it seemed over-worked and she thought she could do a better job of it. Knowing how to approach an image from scratch because you know what it can be and what areas to focus on makes things a whole lot easier the next time you visit the image, especially if it’s fresh in your brain. Well, that’s the theory. When Ann printed version 2 (a bit larger I might add), it seemed to lack something. We compared the old print with the new, and Ann decided to print that first version larger. Sometimes you don’t know what you really have until you try to “improve” it. Sometimes you do and sometimes you don’t.
My second print became a real oddity. At first printing, the bottom half was much darker than the top half and appeared almost smeared. It took us diving into the various settings on the printer and, finally landed on what we thought the problem was. Unlike the Canon printer we previously had, which had a setting “Raise Printer Head” in the main menu for thicker paper, Epson has buried the “Thicker Paper” setting deep down in one of the printer sub-settings. We’d wondered why we’d never seen it before, but never had any reason to think about it. I had assumed it figured out the paper thickness on its own, or through the ICC profile information sent to it. I was wrong. It hadn’t appeared in the first print because I’d used the thinner Red River Paolo Duro Soft Gloss Rag paper, but for this print I was using a thicker Hahnemühle fine art paper. Print setting adjusted, the second print looked pretty good. But again, not perfect. This time it was the other end of the tonal scale - trying to get the very bright, untextured weathered wood from the branches of the center tree to have some shape and substance to them.
I made a few quick adjustments - darkening specific branches and spots just a bit - and the print turned out fine. It helped that it seems, as with traditional silver-photography prints, prints darken ever so slightly as they dry, affecting higher values more than lower values. I think that if I am to ever print this image again, especially larger, I’ll have to work on those branches first to make sure they’re just right.
Ann’s second print turned out the way one always hopes it does - develop the image, make a few minor adjustments based upon the “soft proofing” mode, and then hit print = beautiful print. It is. There are some locations that just scream “photograph me” and this boathouse with its surrounding trees and grasses, to include those on the island, are a photograph waiting to happen. It still takes a bit of work to, as Charlie Waite would say, have everything in its place, but Ann did it in this case. You can tell the care Ann took in making this image just by looking at the placement of the trees along the top and bottom edges. Everything in its place, nothing left to accident.
My next image (actually printed before the one above) was one I was looking very forward to printing. Could the mood and the light be conveyed in a print the same way it appears on a monitor? At first, I thought it was perfect - cranked the print out, was very pleased with it, and moved on to the next. Just like Ann’s image above. It wasn’t until much later when I had noticed that, despite the fact that it was on the thinner Red River PDSGR paper, there were slight traces of printer head marks etching portions of the image. That’s ok, because I decided that if I had to reprint it, I’d reprint it larger (and make sure the printer is on the thicker paper setting). Darn - I just had to print it larger!
Life, as is its tendency, did its best to quash my optimism. During my second effort, the Epson P900’s quirks reared their heads, creating all sorts of head-strikes on the print, despite using the “thick paper” setting, leading me to cancel the session (and not even try another image). Why did it not like the slightly thicker Hahnemühle paper? Lots of online research later revealed my problem to be a known issue - not well documented in the Epson literature. Basically there are thin, plastic photo papers. Then there are photo papers with a fine art paper base, that are often a little bit thicker and if you have head-strikes, you should use the “thick paper” setting. But if the paper is thicker than 1/2 mm in thickness, as are many “fine art” papers, you should feed the paper from the front instead of the top because that automatically raises the head even more. Apparently, the surface of fine art papers tends to swell a bit due to the amount of ink deposited on it, so the “extra” raising of the head for those papers is so that paper surface swelling won’t cause head strikes. But, you have to remember not to follow the instructions in the Epson P900 user manual about how to load the front paper feeder because they’re wrong - use the markings on the plastic, pull-out tray. Got that? Well, we did what folks said and . . . the printer refused to recognize the paper fed through the front feeder because . . . it was too thin (at least that’s what the subsequent research said (apparently the printer knows the difference between 0.40 mm and 0.50 mm paper thickness and you can’t front-feed paper less than 0.50 mm)). So back to square one. Ann got into researching adjusting the platen height on the file in the machine that corresponds to where the head of the printer should be in relation to the paper being used. It turned into a frustrating day. So we were at it again the next morning and I went old school with the description of the paper (saying it was a different paper than it was - one that has a similar surface but is ever so slightly thicker so the printer head would be higher (i.e., raise the platen head)) and . . . it worked. Finally a print that didn’t have surface marks on it. And yes, it was larger and yes, it looks great.
Unlike her second print, Ann’s third print left us scratching our heads again (not printer heads, we’re back to our first printing session). Basically, it was as if the color of the trees on the left half of the print decided to become unsaturated. Ann and I discussed the print a bit (after looking at her monitor settings and verifying they were identical to mine so . . .) and thought we should try a couple of things. Ann darkened the background trees in the left hand corner (which helped bring the main trees out visually), and she worked to increase the yellows and oranges in those main trees. After slightly darkening a couple of other areas in the image, Ann did another print. It was significantly better, but still well short of what it could and should be. There was no vibrancy to the fall colors. Ann decided that she was going to re-do this one from scratch as well (as much out of necessity as out of the idea she could do better the second time around).
At her next printing session Ann benefitted from our combined efforts on my image above, but she used the tweaked platen height approach (2.1mm instead of 1.6mm) instead, which worked fine. She had reworked the image based on our discussions on the original set of prints, and just before hitting print, thought it looked way too saturated. So she scaled down the saturation a bit . . . only to have a less than vibrant print. She wound up tweaking things back to where they were before she scaled it down and it worked. You aren’t supposed to have to do things like that when you’ve calibrated everything, but sometimes you can’t recreate on a monitor what you will see in a print, so you just have to tweak, print and then tweak again to get the print just right.
Ann’s image really became a lesson for both of us that it isn’t always the development of the subject that matters, but of everything else around it as well. That and the fact that for some images, color alone doesn’t always overcome the lack of tonal contrast range and that sometimes you have to exaggerate colors (or contrast) in a print to make it look “right.” As much as we try to live in a WYSIWYG world with calibrating monitors and using paper print profiles and soft proofing, it doesn’t always work out that way.
My last print shouldn’t surprise anyone. I really do think it’s my best image of the trip (Ann agrees). On one hand, the original print was just right. It required nothing more than minimal adjustments to compensate for the fact it’s being printed instead of being projected though a monitor. On the other hand, it shows that sometimes you see things in print that don’t really jump out on a monitor (no matter how large the monitor), but oh boy can they bug you. Once you see them, you can’t unsee them and you’ve got to deal with it. The proverbial “they” is right in this instance - you really do see every flaw in a print. Fortunately, these were fixable using Lightroom’s generative AI removal tool. When it comes to things like removing small, objectionable objects from an image, or even darkening and lightening parts of an image, I try to follow Joe Cornish’s approach that manipulations are permissible if they remain faithful to the subject. Yes, I’ve walked out into the landscape to remove a soda can before I made the photograph (don’t try that in snow though), and I’ve removed a soda can from a landscape photograph where I couldn’t walk out to remove it (see previous snow comment) or didn’t see it before looking at the image at home. I don’t see any difference in either of those actions. In this case, it was a couple of very small reflections of plainly man-made objects (evident by their shape) where one can’t see either object because they’re obscured by tree branches. And because the reflections were unnaturally bright, which caught the eye even more, they detracted from the rest of the printed image.
Always looking for the positive reframe, having to make that minor tweak meant I had to print it again. And so why not print it even bigger! As in print it on the largest paper we have! This was the other image I was going to, but didn’t, print during the frustrating second print session. Fortunately, third time was a charm, although it didn’t come without its own frustrations. The frustration was that the smaller print was on one type of paper and the larger print on a very different type of paper that, when I soft-proofed for the larger paper ICC profile, changed the image quite a bit (for some papers it seems one only needs to make minor adjustments, other papers require a lot more work to get an image to “look” the same). So I had to make a few adjustments and . . . got it a bit wrong. Things looked off color-wise on the monitor, so I made some color temperature and tint adjustments that . . were way off. What can I say, I simply do not understand color. It was a pretty expensive mistake when the paper is about 16” x 20” in size. So I went back and used (almost) the color temperature (I still insisted on a bit more yellow) and tint settings that were there for the other paper surface and, despite things looking a bit cool on my monitor, the print turned out great. As I wrote in the Photographs post, this is an image that I know is good. But I still don’t understand it enough to know why it is, but it is. It has a presence that is engaging. And sometimes, that’s all you need from a photograph. Especially if it has that character when printed large.
Ann’s last image from the printing session was her black and white image. This one threw me for a bit of a loop, because the part I was most worried about (the upper portion) turned out much better than I’d feared and the lower portion, which is mesmerizing on a monitor was . . . less in the print. Ann and I had discussed this print a lot and what might be done to improve it. Equating the digital printing process to the darkroom days, I explained to Ann that I always tried to have around a 30 second exposure for a base printing time because at 20 seconds or less, you can clearly distinguish between, let’s say a 15 second exposure and a 16 second exposure - and it may be that neither is right (one too light, one too dark). That rarely happened with a 30-40 second exposures - there, getting down to a one second difference, one of the exposures would be “right.” In the bottom half of this image, the print is just a bit off. Which means that just a minor adjustment could make a world of difference.
Which led to another point I made about the old darkroom days, making an excellent print was all about making the right judgment calls at every single decision-making point of the process. One mistake and . . . the final print just wasn’t right. Ann is pretty sure she wouldn’t like to go back to the old days. And as much as I enjoyed working in the darkroom and the beauty of a silver-based print, I too wouldn’t like to go back (at least not full time).
So we talked a bit about what the options were for tweaking the image. I threw a couple ideas out there, she added a couple more. Finally, she suggested a very subtle, but what I thought would be an effective adjustment that would work ever so slightly on just a few select branch areas of the lower section to give it some life.
It worked! She brought life and depth to the birch trees in the lower part of the print, which made a world of difference in the overall print. But Ann still wasn’t totally satisfied with the results - she thought it looked a bit overworked. So during the interim weeks between printing sessions she decided to start from scratch again and try to achieve the same feel with fewer manipulations. She used a much gentler hand this time and, while it required an ever-so slightly adjusted second print to get it right, she produced a much more natural looking, but nonetheless captivating print.
Well that’s it. Printing sessions from the end of the year to start off the new year.
By my count, I did over 60 blog posts during 2024. I doubt I’ll be able to keep that pace up this year. We did photography trips to parts of the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Ireland (ok, that one wasn’t really a photography trip), England and Scotland. We’re finally starting to travel again.
This coming year will hopefully be another busy one. In 2025 we’ll be taking a trip to the US (unsure how much “traveling” and photography we’ll be able to do, but you know us, we’re already scheming side-trips as part of our planning), have one guest reservation (Brandon and Lauren) booked at our home in Didam and . . . are planning an extended trip to Iceland with the bimobil for late summer, early fall. We’re going to have to book the ferry ride soon, but hopefully work will be plentiful the first half of the year because we’re shooting for a full two months there. So stay tuned and we hope to keep you at least somewhat entertained with our photographs and stories.
Happy New Year!