Submitted for peer review

[Abitconfused]

A page about calibration, workflow, and printing.

https://edruthphoto.com/workflow/

[DanK]

I'd give it a low grade.

The question it purports to answer is "How do I get an image to look exactly as it does on my computer monitor?". That's the right question, but he doesn't provide a good answer. Some problems:

--Much of the text is devoted to his specific software and hardware choices, which are for the most part irrelevant. It makes no difference with respect to the question he purports to answer that he uses a Nikon 14-30 lens. (And that lens isn't "quite forgiving of inattention to point of focus". As the tutorial on this site clarifies, the notion that focal length determines depth of field is for the most part wrong.)

--Some of the editing choices he mentions reflect his taste, not a way to make the print match the screen. E.g., he says he routinely adds a little saturation. Manfred, who is to my knowledge the most expert printer here, almost never does,and I rarely do. This is a matter of what one wants the image to look like, not getting the print to match the monitor.

--It's incomplete. For example, he says he has the software control colors, which is indeed the correct choice for color (but not always for B&W). However, depending on the combination of printer and OS, that's not enough--you have to go into the printer firmware and tell it not to try to control colors. With Canon printers, this is done by setting color matching to "none" in the firmware box that pops up from the Windows print command. Absent that, you will get color distortions. Perhaps he does this. He says he selects "a few" options in the printer driver, but he only mentions one (media type).

--He has this ambiguous statement:

Under Color Management (or similar) I always select Photoshop Manages Colors BUT I also list, under Printer Profile, the color profile that Spyder calibration software created.

What color profile? the color profile specified in the printer software should be an ICC profile specific to the combination of printer and paper. Is he separately creating those, or is he referring to the monitor calibration profile, which is something entirely different? In fact, it's rarely necessary to create printer-by-paper profiles because paper vendors supply them for download, and in my experience, they are usually fine.

--He wrote:

Of course, a printer (not to mention printer paper) may or may not be able to produce all the colors of the Adobe RGB color space but for many images, you probably won’t see a great deal of difference between a printed sRGB or Adobe RGB image.

This is only true if the image doesn't include colors that are outside the sRGB gamut but inside the Adobe RGB gamut. He may not see this on his monitor because it doesn't cover the entire Adobe RGB gamut. Good photo printers can handle colors outside of sRGB, which is why some of us splurged on wide-gamut monitors.

--He wrote this:

The below image was saved in the Adobe RGB color space which is, of course, within the RGB Color Mode.

I have no idea what this means. RGB is a color model, a way of representing colors, not a "mode". Most editing software allows you to work in three color spaces that are commonly represented in terms of the RGB model, sRGB, Adobe RGB, and ProPhoto RGB. All of these are simply representations of three different gamuts. You can represent them with other color models, in particular, L*a*b.

[Manfred M]

+1 to Dan's comments.

I was going to be nice and suggest that if it works for him, that is fine, but his views and methods are unorthodox.

I am not certain he understands some of the underlying principles. As an example; he uses a Brother printer; I have never seen any photo paper manufacturer put out profiles for that make, so what profiles does he use?

His test print is unhelpful as it seems mostly in gamut for even some papers that are not known for having a particularly wide gamut, so there is little to learn here. It lacks saturated colours that tend to cause problems in printing. Red, blues and greens are generally the most problematic.

I could go on…

[Abitconfused]

Thank you for the reviews. I am consistently amazed that my Brother MFC-J5845DW preforms so amazingly using the simple printing techniques I suggest. For under $300 and in ledger size (11 x 17 inches) it is a wonderful bargain. And the colors are quite accurate. Of course, it will print 8.5 x 11 as well. Additionally, the ink cartridges last quite a while. Bottom line: The proof is in the print.

[Manfred M]

Thank you for the reviews. I am consistently amazed that my Brother MFC-J5845DW preforms so amazingly using the simple printing techniques I suggest. For under $300 and in ledger size (11 x 17 inches) it is a wonderful bargain. And the colors are quite accurate. Of course, it will print 8.5 x 11 as well. Additionally, the ink cartridges last quite a while. Bottom line: The proof is in the print.

Unfortunately, we will have to take your word on this as I have never seen a print from that machine, much less a photo quality one. It is a dye based general purpose ink jet printer with large tanks. Perhaps we have a different idea of what a good print is?

[Abitconfused]

Unfortunately, we will have to take your word on this as I have never seen a print from that machine, much less a photo quality one. It is a dye based general purpose ink jet printer with large tanks. Perhaps we have a different idea of what a good print is?

I suspect so. I bet your prints exceed the quality of my prints if placed side by side and examined closely. But at what cost? What printer are you using?

[William W]

Submitted for peer review

I don't do any printing of my images, except wet printing B&W negs, which I don't do very often now anyway. Not interested in the least in that aspect of Digital Photography. I am happy to pay a professional: typically I have one print per year of my own work.

Therefore, as a 'Peer Review' of the above work:
1. I don't comment on any part of the technical aspects of Digital Photo Printing.
2. I do have credentials as a technician, teacher and reviewer of texts, up to the level of work for PhD submission.

Therefore - as a Peer Review:

The work lost all credibility, as an educational technical text, (implicitly it purports to be so), with the sentence:

"The wide-angle lens is quite forgiving of inattention to point of focus, as you can see." [op cit]

This one sentence, of course, piqued one's interest to look further at the other publications on the same author's website uncovering the author's claim to be a teacher: also uncovering more sentences of misinformation and incorrect statements; which in turn added weight to the need for bluntness of comment when answering this request for a 'Peer Review'.

WW

[Manfred M]

I suspect so. I bet your prints exceed the quality of my prints if placed side by side and examined closely. But at what cost? What printer are you using?

I use the Epson P800 at home. It is getting a little long in the tooth and was replaced by the Epson P900 a couple of years ago.

For home printing, only Canon and Epson are in the business of making photo inkjet printers. For wide carriage designs, HP makes them as well. All of these photo printers use pigment based inks, which when used with archival papers (that are stored properly) will last for a very long time.

[Abitconfused]

The Epson P800 looks like a truly worthy printer. I suspect a four color printer is hard pressed to match a nine color printer except for the dullest of images.

[Abitconfused]

I don't do any printing of my images, except wet printing B&W negs, which I don't do very often now anyway. Not interested in the least in that aspect of Digital Photography. I am happy to pay a professional: typically I have one print per year of my own work.

Therefore, as a 'Peer Review' of the above work:
1. I don't comment on any part of the technical aspects of Digital Photo Printing.
2. I do have credentials as a technician, teacher and reviewer of texts, up to the level of work for PhD submission.

Therefore - as a Peer Review:

The work lost all credibility, as an educational technical text, (implicitly it purports to be so), with the sentence:

"The wide-angle lens is quite forgiving of inattention to point of focus, as you can see." [op cit]

This one sentence, of course, piqued one's interest to look further at the other publications on the same author's website uncovering the author's claim to be a teacher: also uncovering more sentences of misinformation and incorrect statements; which in turn added weight to the need for bluntness of comment when answering this request for a 'Peer Review'.

WW

I am enlightened! I had the mistaken belief that wide-angle lenses had an inherent advantage regarding DOF. Will correct. What other errors have you discovered? And thank you for the friendly demeanor. As the learning curve for photography is really lifelong, an encouraging word is welcome!

[Abitconfused]

I'd give it a low grade.

The question it purports to answer is "How do I get an image to look exactly as it does on my computer monitor?". That's the right question, but he doesn't provide a good answer. Some problems:

--Much of the text is devoted to his specific software and hardware choices, which are for the most part irrelevant. It makes no difference with respect to the question he purports to answer that he uses a Nikon 14-30 lens. (And that lens isn't "quite forgiving of inattention to point of focus". As the tutorial on this site clarifies, the notion that focal length determines depth of field is for the most part wrong.)

--Some of the editing choices he mentions reflect his taste, not a way to make the print match the screen. E.g., he says he routinely adds a little saturation. Manfred, who is to my knowledge the most expert printer here, almost never does,and I rarely do. This is a matter of what one wants the image to look like, not getting the print to match the monitor.

--It's incomplete. For example, he says he has the software control colors, which is indeed the correct choice for color (but not always for B&W). However, depending on the combination of printer and OS, that's not enough--you have to go into the printer firmware and tell it not to try to control colors. With Canon printers, this is done by setting color matching to "none" in the firmware box that pops up from the Windows print command. Absent that, you will get color distortions. Perhaps he does this. He says he selects "a few" options in the printer driver, but he only mentions one (media type).

--He has this ambiguous statement:



What color profile? the color profile specified in the printer software should be an ICC profile specific to the combination of printer and paper. Is he separately creating those, or is he referring to the monitor calibration profile, which is something entirely different? In fact, it's rarely necessary to create printer-by-paper profiles because paper vendors supply them for download, and in my experience, they are usually fine.

--He wrote:



This is only true if the image doesn't include colors that are outside the sRGB gamut but inside the Adobe RGB gamut. He may not see this on his monitor because it doesn't cover the entire Adobe RGB gamut. Good photo printers can handle colors outside of sRGB, which is why some of us splurged on wide-gamut monitors.

--He wrote this:



I have no idea what this means. RGB is a color model, a way of representing colors, not a "mode". Most editing software allows you to work in three color spaces that are commonly represented in terms of the RGB model, sRGB, Adobe RGB, and ProPhoto RGB. All of these are simply representations of three different gamuts. You can represent them with other color models, in particular, L*a*b.

Typo fixed, thank you.

[Manfred M]

The Epson P800 looks like a truly worthy printer. I suspect a four color printer is hard pressed to match a nine color printer except for the dullest of images.

What the extra inks provide is a wider gamut and that is one of the main advantage of a photo printer. The colours that can be reproduced are dependent on both the paper itself as well as the ink set the printer uses. A paper with a higher gloss tends to have a wider gamut. Prints have a lower dynamic range than even your computer screen; somewhere in the range of 7-1/2 stops for matte papers and around 8-stops for higher gloss ones.

Anyone who suggests that what we see on the computer screen looks the same on a print is being hopelessly optimistic. The basic reason is that the screen is an additive colour, projected light, RGB process and a print is a subtractive colour, reflected light, CMYK process. There are more reasons as well, but that gets a lot more complex. Every advanced printer I have ever met has suggested that they would love a screen that shows them what they will get in a print. Softproofing in Photoshop or Lightroom does give an emulation, but the results are only approximate.

Regular printers are largely designed to print on matte papers, so dedicated photo printers use two "flavours" of black ink; one that works well on matte papers and another specifically for papers with a higher gloss. I also have two different flavours of gray, a light and regular magenta, a light and regular cyan and a yellow cartridge. Given the right paper selection, I can get much of the Adobe RGB printed, with the exception of extremely saturated blues and greens, and to a lesser extent saturated reds and yellows. Sometimes, I can hit colours that are into the ProPhoto RGB colour space.

[DanK]

I am very sorry. I answered using Tapatalk, which doesn't show names or signatures. I had no idea that this was your own attempt. I thought you were asking whether to follow someone else's guidance. I certainly would have used an entirely different tone if I had known it was yours.

Following up on the 4-color vs. 8, 9, or more color question, which might also bear on the brother vs. Epson/Canon question: it all depends on what your goals are. When I started printing--and frankly had very little idea what I was doing--I got some very enjoyable prints from a simple multifunction inkjet that is long gone but which I think had 5 inks. (I also got some with color casts and other problems because I didn't know what I was doing.) If you are aiming higher, for prints you want to display, then all of this stuff matters much more.

I'll give you one example. I just changed computers, and I hooked up my photo printer just a few days ago to print for the first time with the new computer. The first print probably would have seemed fine to many people, but I thought it was way off and wondered what I had screwed up. I had screwed up, in fact--because one of my old templates hadn't transfered properly, I didn't have the ICC for that paper specified, and I had the software telling the printer to control color and the printer's firmware set to NOT control color. Needless to say, the colors were off.

So, my bottom line advice is this: separate two questions. one is what work flow gives you the results YOU want. The second is how to transfer that as faithfully as possible to paper, keeping in mind, as Manfred said, the print and the screen can't be identical. Also, since you use Lightroom as well as photoshop, I urge you to try out Lightroom's print module. It's a much simpler workflow, and once you get what you want for a given paper and size, you can store all of the settings (lightroom and printer firmware) in a template that you can apply in the future with a single click. If you decide to try it, I'd be happy to try to answer questions if you get stuck.

[Abitconfused]

All is well brother Dan.

[William W]

I am enlightened! I had the mistaken belief that wide-angle lenses had an inherent advantage regarding DOF. Will correct. What other errors have you discovered? And thank you for the friendly demeanor. As the learning curve for photography is really lifelong, an encouraging word is welcome!

Again, answering from the perspective of a Peer Review, emphasis as a technical proof read of one of the web pages, (please see Bold and Underlined) -

"I keep a 62mm skylight filter (ultraviolet filter “UV”) on my lens to protect it from unfortunate accidents such as may occur with curious but well-fed seagulls."
REF: LINK

"The Z 50 is a DX or half-frame camera with a sensor of approximately 16mm x 24mm."
[op. cit.]

"The Z 50mm lens is a FX (FX or for a full-frame, 24mm x 36mm sensor) lens but the Z 50mm lens is designed to work very well on either a DX or FX body. The Z 50mm on a DX camera has a field of view (FOV) of a 75mm lens (1.5 x 50 = 75), if there were such a thing, which there isn’t absent a zoom lens setting."
[op. cit.]
***

In the same manner as the initial post addressed the specific request for a Peer Review, the above, answers the follow up direct question.

Both responses are in accord with the ethos of CiC.

Please note it is not the intention to progress this conversation, neither as a technical proof reading of all the web pages, nor the Kindle Books.

WW

[pschlute]

I am enlightened! I had the mistaken belief that wide-angle lenses had an inherent advantage regarding DOF. Will correct.

Up to a point Lord Copper !

The wider the lens you use, the greater the DOF will be in your image for any given f-stop, when the camera to subject distance remains the same. Of course you will two completely different images, so comparing DOF between the two is not particularly helpful.

Now if you use a wide angle lens, say a 24mm instead of a 50mm, but move closer to the subject, so that it is the same size in the viewfinder, your image will generally appear to have a very similar DOF to the image taken with the 50mm lens from further away. The total DOF will increase, any DOF calculator will tell you that, but the acceptable sharpness in front of the subject will be reduced slightly, and all of the increase in DOF is behind the subject where it is hard to notice. This is why in practical terms you will notice very little difference.

The most noticeable thing when using a wider lens and getting closer to the subject is the change in perspective between the subject and the background. Whilst you will have kept the subject the same size, the background will appear both smaller and further away.

[Abitconfused]

An interesting perspective on the DX FX perspective! https://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/half-frame.htm

[DanK]

Up to a point Lord Copper !

The wider the lens you use, the greater the DOF will be in your image for any given f-stop, when the camera to subject distance remains the same. Of course you will two completely different images, so comparing DOF between the two is not particularly helpful.

Now if you use a wide angle lens, say a 24mm instead of a 50mm, but move closer to the subject, so that it is the same size in the viewfinder, your image will generally appear to have a very similar DOF to the image taken with the 50mm lens from further away. The total DOF will increase, any DOF calculator will tell you that, but the acceptable sharpness in front of the subject will be reduced slightly, and all of the increase in DOF is behind the subject where it is hard to notice. This is why in practical terms you will notice very little difference.

The most noticeable thing when using a wider lens and getting closer to the subject is the change in perspective between the subject and the background. Whilst you will have kept the subject the same size, the background will appear both smaller and further away.

Right. The issue is same distance vs. same size in the frame. This is how it is put in the tutorial on this site:

If the subject occupies the same fraction of the image (constant magnification) for both a telephoto and a wide angle lens, the total depth of field is virtually* constant with focal length!

What further confuses this is that background blur, which is a distinct phenomenon, does depend on focal length: the longer the focal length, the greater the background blur. DOF references the distance at which lack of focus becomes apparent. Background blur references how blurry out of focus areas appear. The greater background blur with longer lenses is just a matter of the narrower angle of view: a longer lens results in a smaller bacground area being spread over the frame, hence blurred more. People often misinterpret this as a narrower DOF.

There used to be a wonderful site online that explained and showed all this with sample photos, but the site went dead a number of years ago.

[DanK]

In an earlier post, I explained that the monitor profile is not the same as the ICC profile for any given combination of printer and paper. The latter is what has to be selected when one gives control of color the software rather than the printer. I mentioned that paper vendors generally provide these for free.

I just checked the ICC profile pages of the three paper companies whose papers I use most: Moab, Breathing Color, and Canson. None of these provides profiles for Brother printers. Canson and Moab provide them for Epson, Canon, and HP printers. Breathing Color provides them only for Epson and Canon.

So to print with precise control of color with a Brother printer, you would have to pay for custom profiles. The alternative is to printing without this degree of control.

Manfred noted that professional photo printers use pigment ink. However, there is at least one printer that will give you professional level results with dye ink, the Canon Pixma Pro 200. The prints will be nearly indistinguishable from those from a more expensive printer, but they will fade sooner. I personally think this is a very good option for many people. Unfortunately, these have gotten expensive. In the US, they cost $600 when not on sale, compared with $900 for a comparable pigment-ink printer. Because Canon occasionally bundles these with cameras, one can occasionally find new ones, still in the box, sold as used for much less.

[Abitconfused]

It is truly amazing how many photo and business printers are available in a wide assortment of price ranges. User expectations, understanding of ICC, and skill in using post-production software must span quite a wide spectrum as well. The bottom line is how well the finished print meets user expectations. And, quite likely, our own expectations increase along with our experience. I truly appreciated my D200 back when 10MB was blissful. Today, not so much. Do we strain at gnats? I confess I do.