Progress Report

[purplehaze]

I am thrilled! I printed this old thing



on Ilford metallic this week, put it in a spare frame, and I love it! It went a bit soft on me, so I will play with the sharpening and reprint until I get the effect I want. Or I may just reprocess the whole thing from scratch. In any case, I am no longer afraid of printing, and that is HUGE for me.

I see I am definitely going to have to find a new source of income to keep me in paper and ink.

Janis

[Shadowman]

Nice composition, did you use ICC profile, let printer manage color, or Advanced B & W; just wondering if one or the other would create a lighter or darker preview/output? Also, was the final capture viewed through your editing software acceptable visually and did it match the output of your printer?

[purplehaze]

Hi John,

The image was processed in Nik's SEP many moons ago, and I deliberately chose the colour toning you see here. I used the ICC profile, and black point compensation, which resulted in a slightly darker print. That was fine by me as I didn't want to see the bit of petal showing at the lower right. This is one of the reasons I may reprocess the whole thing from scratch. I am also interested in seeing how it prints without the black point compensation. I am delighted with the match between my printer and iMac screen. I calibrate my monitor with Spyder5. As far as colour goes, I just took delivery of a SpyderCheckr colour card this week, along with the sample packs of Moab and Hahnemühle fine art papers I had ordered.

[Shadowman]

Hi John,

The image was processed in Nik's SEP many moons ago, and I deliberately chose the colour toning you see here. I used the ICC profile, and black point compensation, which resulted in a slightly darker print. That was fine by me as I didn't want to see the bit of petal showing at the lower right. This is one of the reasons I may reprocess the whole thing from scratch. I am also interested in seeing how it prints without the black point compensation. I am delighted with the match between my printer and iMac screen. I calibrate my monitor with Spyder5. As far as colour goes, I just took delivery of a SpyderCheckr colour card this week, along with the sample packs of Moab and Hahnemühle fine art papers I had ordered.

Hi Janis,

Thanks for the response, I've printed on metallic paper before and usually reserve it for subjects with a bit extra dynamic tones, especially those with good highlights, I also tend to view the images under a brighter light source or will often backlight the image which gives a more dynamic look.

[purplehaze]

I think I understand where you are coming from, John. My uneducated impulse to print on the metallic paper was prompted by the notion that it would enhance the coldness of the blue toning.

[Manfred M]

Hi Janis - I have never used metallic papers, so cannot comment on how they perform. I would have printed this one on a baryta paper.

My usual approach in printing is to do a number of test prints (generally I'm doing up to around 6 per image) before I am totally happy with the post-processing work and the final printed image appearance.

Processes like soft proofing get me around 90% there, but the rest is really hand-tuning using small format prints and a larger format to judge my sharpening. Unfortunately with most papers, it's challenging to understand the ink bleed without doing test prints and doing output sharpening of the final print size. Undersharpening is a common problem with final prints as is insufficient dodging and burning.

A couple of good "rules of thumb" to consider when printing are:

- Your camera is likely capturing somewhere between 12 and 14 ev (stops) when you shoot at base ISO.

- Your computer screen is probably displaying around 10 ev (stops) when working in a dimly lit room.

- Prints are capable of reproducing from 7.5 ev (matte) and 8 ev (lustre) papers, so you have to manage how the highlights and shadows are turning out in the print by making adjustments to these areas.

The only accurate way of do that is multiple test prints. I generally get two or four different test prints on a 8-1/2" x 11" paper (yes, I run it through my printer up to 4 times) and will take a large sharpened, print ready image and test print a large part of the image at full size to judge the sharpening.

[Shadowman]

I think I understand where you are coming from, John. My uneducated impulse to print on the metallic paper was prompted by the notion that it would enhance the coldness of the blue toning.

Nothing wrong with experimenting, you can also experiment with how you exhibit your work; you can light from behind or below the composition.

[purplehaze]

Thanks, Manfred. That is all useful information. I will see if I have some baryta in the sample packs and give it a try for comparison. I do like this metallic paper, though. It renders vibrant colour beautifully.

Exhibiting is a whole other challenge in my house, John. I will have to find and designate a few square inches for a revolving exhibition.

[DanK]

Janice,

Manfred is a much more sophisticated printer than I am, but for your specific purposes, I'm going to contradict him.

What Manfred described is a procedure one can follow if one wants to be extremely careful with ones prints. I don't think that is particularly helpful for someone such as yourself, who is intimidated by printing, because it may seem intimidating, and one usually does not need to go to such lengths to get good prints. Many of my prints have been very well received, and yet I have never done as many as four test prints for a single one. Manfred's is better advice, IMHO, for down the road, when you are more comfortable with printing.

I do think that it is well worth doing a test print before printing large because, as Manfred pointed out, the medium is very different from a computer screen. If I am printing small, say, 8.5 x 11, I generally don't bother, instead treating the first one as a test print and reprinting if need be. However, with larger prints, the cost of good paper and ink is such that a test print is prudent. However, the fact is that most of the time, if I softproof on my calibrated monitor, the print comes out looking much as I anticipate, and further editing is not needed.

However, for this to be true, one has to pay attention during editing to one of the issues Manfred pointed out, which is that one is likely to loose shadow and highlight detail when printing because of the smaller dynamic range of a print. If differences are barely discernible on screen, they may well not be in a print.

I strongly recommend printing the test image that you can download from here, for two reasons. First, it is a very good way to see the differences among papers. Second, if you pay attention to the bands at the bottom of the print, you will see what Manfred is referring to. I recently tested a large number of different types of papers, and not a single one was able to differentiate the tones at the extremes.

Dan

[purplehaze]

Thanks so much for the link to the test image, Dan! I was actually thinking of assembling a collage of my own to test the various papers, so you have saved me an enormous amount of time. Being somewhat perfectionist by nature, I am liable to have a high ratio of test prints to finished images, but I am daunted by the cost. Received my last paycheque on Friday, but am having to delay drawing my pension for reasons I won’t go into here, because it will just make me mad, and it is too beautiful a day to waste on anger.

[Manfred M]

Janis - much like Dan, I also do a calibration print whenever I get a new paper. I make two different ones; one using the Relative Colorimetric rendering intent and the other with the Perceptual rendering intent. I generally use Relative Colorimetric, but occasionally, especially with people shots (and even more so in monochrome), I find I prefer Perceptual.

I suspect the reason I am more of a test printer than Dan is that I learned to make colour prints in the darkroom and back then test prints were the only way to judge what I was doing. That practice followed me into the digital world. Having studied under a couple of "master printers", they also follow the test print route, but again, as they are primarily working in the "fine art" world, their small prints are the same size as my large prints.

Another reason is that I tend to do large prints (17" x 22" / A2 size) so any processing flaws are quite obvious to the observer.

[purplehaze]

Manfred, you never fail to remind me how much more I have to learn. I in fact accidentally printed the above image in relative colorimetric and the colour was . One day, I will have to learn the difference between the two, but for now, I am sticking to perceptual .

[DanK]

Manfred, you never fail to remind me how much more I have to learn. I in fact accidentally printed the above image in relative colorimetric and the colour was . One day, I will have to learn the difference between the two, but for now, I am sticking to perceptual .

Look at "relative and perceptual colorimetric intent" at the relevant tutorial on this site. There is a chart that shows it clearly. In a nutshell, if you have colors that go outside of the gamut of your device, relative colorometric does two things:

1. It leaves the in-gamut colors alone.
2. It "censors" the out-of-gamut colors--that is, it converts them to the nearest in-gamut color.

In contrast, perceptual rendering squishes the entire distribution of color values to fit them all within the range of your device. This keeps the relationships among colors the same, other than making differences among them smaller.

This only matters if you have out-of-gamut colors.

[purplehaze]

Well, thank you, Dan. That is a wonderfully succinct explanation that I think I might actually retain. (You can test me tomorrow.)

[purplehaze]

This is proving to be a most useful exercise, Dan. I have been printing the test page you pointed me to and already I see that the Ilford Metallic Gloss is giving me much more nuance in the blacks than the Ilford Smooth Pearl, and the Smooth Pearl is slightly better at rendering the highlights. In fact, the Metallic Gloss is so good at rendering the blacks, I can see a difference all the way down to 2. I am not seeing a difference between perceptual and relative colorimetric so far, but thank you both so much. This is all very timely, and I am going to be able to make the best possible use of those sample packs.

[DanK]

The lack of a difference between perceptual and relative is expected of nothing is out of gamut.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[purplehaze]

Correction: The difference that I see in the highlights and shadows is in fact a difference between the relative colorimetric and perceptual intent renderings. Guess I'm going to have to print some more test pages with black point compensation on. Light is dawning. I am learning something.

[purplehaze]

The lack of a difference between perceptual and relative is expected of nothing is out of gamut.

Yes, I get that, but the test print is in the ProPhoto colour space, so I figured something might be out-of-gamut for my printer.

[Manfred M]

You should always work with black point compensation turned on. Never turn on " Preserve RGB Numbers".

Working in ProPhoto is not an issue (that's the colour space I normally use; just make sure you are using 16-bit colour if you use ProPhoto) but the printer driver has to use the paper ICC profile, so what does matter is whether or not some of the colours in the output are out of gamut for your printer / paper combination are all in gamut.

[purplehaze]

So interesting! Looking at my test prints with fresh eyes today, I see that the greens are kind of smooshed together in the perceptual intent renderings, whereas they are more distinct in the relative colorimetric. The metallic paper separates them more than the pearl, but there are still clear differences in hue and lightness. Guess I'll be printing anything with a lot of greens in it in relative colorimetric.