Comparing lenses for full frame vs. APS-C sensors

[Manfred M]

yes, but to be fair, there are intermediate steps that are second nature to you and me but can be confusing for people who haven't done much printing--knowing how the choice of paper will affect the image, dealing with ICCs, softproofing, making sure that ambient light is right when you're preparing to print, dealing with colors that are out of gamut for a particular combination of printer and paper, making sure the media type is right (not always obvious if you aren't using the printer manufacturer's paper), output sharpening, making sure that you set the software and firmware to avoid double profiling and to make sure the color management is left on for the correct one, and probably half a dozen other things that I am not thinking of.

Everything your have written is correct, Dan. But I still feel that the main prerequisite is to start with a strong, well prepared image, otherwise you are wasting your time. The other steps are important as well, but getting them right without having a strong image will not get you a great print.

You and I know the other steps and we handle them automatically (other than perhaps the paper choice, which is often related to personal preference / taste).

[pschlute]

My big objections to Adobe Software is neither the price nor the capability but rather their decision to move to the cloud. I don't like the idea of depending on a network connection to do this kind of work. I especially don't like the idea of sharing my data/pictures with a company like Adobe. I do prefer to store everything myself.

I use LR and Photoshop.

I do not use the cloud, it is optional.

Adobe has no access to any of my images at all. I think you have been spending too much time listening to nonsense on other forums.

[DanK]

the paper choice, which is often related to personal preference / taste

Indeed, as you and I found when we both looked for replacements for the original Canson Baryta Photographique, which was a standard paper for both of us. Even with that common starting point, we ended up with different choices.

[Cantab]

David,

I use Adobe CC and none of my photos are on the cloud. The cloud is an option if you want to use it but it is definitely not a requirement.

The same is true for me. I use Photoshop and Lightroom but I have nothing in the cloud. My photos reside on my primary hard drive and an external backup hard drive.

[DanK]

I should have written: none of my photos are in the cloud with Adobe. My second back up is to the cloud, on BackBlaze. And of course I have items posted on my website.


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[ajax]

I stand corrected. Given that I haven't used the Adobe products I clearly lack authority. I'm guilty of presuming that what came with the cloud computing pricing model was cloud computing. Knowledge I've gained herein definitely makes my view of Adobe more favorable. It also sounds like we are all of the same mind when it comes to maintaining the data we've invested a lot into producing.

Sorry about slipping into making an assertion about something I know nothing about.

[DanK]

No problem. Just don't want incorrect information to make things harder for you.

While I'm really not trying to pitch Adobe products, I just had an incident that shows how good the Lightroom print module is. I recently did senior photos for someone. The yearbook is digital, so I just posted half a dozen images for the student to chose from and upload to their site. The mother asked me for an 8 x 10 of one of them, which I printed. She then apologized, saying that she had given me the wrong photo to print--she had given me one that the student uploaded instead. She thought this was an inconvenience. In fact, it will take me only minutes because it's a paper and size I've often used, so all of the settings are stored. All I have to do is:
1. call up the image and crop it to 8 x 10.
2. Soft proof. Not really necessary because this particular paper needs very little adjustment. I just increase midtone contrast slightly, and my guess is most people wouldn't notice.
3. Move to the print module and click on the relevant user template.
4. Load the paper and hit print.

Being compulsive, I usually do a check of the LR and Canon settings before printing--not because LR screws up, but because I sometimes do, e.g., forgetting to store a setting in the template. However, after the first few times, this is literally a matter of seconds.

The whole process--not counting the time the printer works--will probably take me 2 or 3 minutes.

BTW, I forgot one part of an answer to an earlier question. If you install the Canon XPS driver, it will then show up (at least in Windows) as a different printer. With my printer, the regular driver shows up in the printer drop-down as "Canon pro-1000 series", and the XPS driver shows up as "Canon Pro-1000 series XPS".

[Round Tuit]

BTW, I forgot one part of an answer to an earlier question. If you install the Canon XPS driver, it will then show up (at least in Windows) as a different printer. With my printer, the regular driver shows up in the printer drop-down as "Canon pro-1000 series", and the XPS driver shows up as "Canon Pro-1000 series XPS".

Dan,

Do you use the XPS driver and if so does it create better prints?

[DanK]

Dan,

Do you use the XPS driver and if so does it create better prints?

I always use it. There’s no reason not to. Once the XPS driver is installed, it’s as easy to use as the regular 8-bit driver.

Because the XPS driver is no harder to use, I haven’t bothered doing A/B comparisons. My guess is that it rarely matters appreciably, but given that it’s no more work to use the 16-bit, I play it safe.


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[Round Tuit]

I always use it. There’s no reason not to. Once the XPS driver is installed, it’s as easy to use as the regular 8-bit driver.

Because the XPS driver is no harder to use, I haven’t bothered doing A/B comparisons. My guess is that it rarely matters appreciably, but given that it’s no more work to use the 16-bit, I play it safe.


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Thanks Dan.

I did an A/B comparison several years ago when I first got my pro-100. At the time I could not tell the difference so I stuck with the standards driver. I might try again to see if I have developed more discriminating taste since

[DanK]

My thinking is that there is no benefit from using the 8-bit driver and no cost or burden from using the 16-bit, so why not use the 16-bit?

[Manfred M]

My thinking is that there is no benefit from using the 8-bit driver and no cost or burden from using the 16-bit, so why not use the 16-bit?

Actually Dan, technically it is the other way around. There is no advantage to using the 16-bit driver as a colour printer is only capable of delivering hundreds of thousands of individual shades, depending on the talent of the printer model (number of inks used and number of dot sizes used). Many commercial printers only accept 8-bit data.

[DanK]

Actually Dan, technically it is the other way around. There is no advantage to using the 16-bit driver as a colour printer is only capable of delivering hundreds of thousands of individual shades, depending on the talent of the printer model (number of inks used and number of dot sizes used). Many commercial printers only accept 8-bit data.

Manfred,

Canon disagrees with you. They have stated in numerous places that the 16-bit driver provides smoother gradations and suggest switching to it if you see banding in the print.

Dan

[Manfred M]

Manfred,

Canon disagrees with you. They have stated in numerous places that the 16-bit driver provides smoother gradations and suggest switching to it if you see banding in the print.

Dan

Interesting, I'll have to let the various print shops know... That being said, these businesses tend to use chromogenic paper and processes.

There are only so many ways of laying down 8 different inks. Higher end printers also support up to 3 different dot sizes; I understand that the newest Epson photo printers can deliver 1.5 pl, 3 pl and 5 pl dots. For the folks that don't know, a pl = picoliter - 1/1trillionth liter. I believe my printer does 1.5 pl and 3 pl.

I have certainly seen banding when pushing 8-bit hard on the screen, but have not seen any noticeable difference between 8-bit and 16-bit output on the print. I generally stick with 16-bit just because I see no disadvantages going that route, but have gone both ways.

[xpatUSA]

Manfred,

Canon disagrees with you. They have stated in numerous places that the 16-bit driver provides smoother gradations and suggest switching to it if you see banding in the print.

Dan

Interesting, I'll have to let the various print shops know...

Any links or references, Dan?

[DanK]

Any links or references, Dan?

I didn't keep them, but I found several searching online with something like <Canon xps driver print>. E.g., https://th.canon/en/support/0100454701

I generally stick with 16-bit just because I see no disadvantages going that route

Exactly my point above. I see no downside at all to using the XPS driver, so if Canon says it is sometimes better, I just use it routinely and forget about it. I just posted about Lightroom templates, and all of my templates call that printer/driver combination.

[xpatUSA]

Originally Posted by xpatUSA Any links or references, Dan?

I didn't keep them, but I found several searching online with something like <Canon xps driver print>. E.g., https://th.canon/en/support/0100454701

Thanks!

[LenR]

See the attached short video from Canon USA re 8bit vs 16 bit.

https://www.shutterbug.com/content/w...g-prints-video

[Manfred M]

See the attached short video from Canon USA re 8bit vs 16 bit.

https://www.shutterbug.com/content/w...g-prints-video

Len - good video, but not exactly on topic. The video is about processing in 8-bit versus 16-bit and the issues you can get if the image is pushed too hard. I have seen exactly the same effect when working with a wide-gamut colour space (ProPhoto RGB) and pushing it too hard.

The conversation the Dan and I were discussing is whether or not this applies to the printing process, and its inherent limits. Let me go back to the beginning of the photographic work flow.

1. Camera capture - most modern cameras, when using raw data, are 14-bit devices. A few high end medium format cameras (Phase One, Hasselblad and FujiFilm) some or all models have native 16-bit resolution, according the the manufacturer's spec sheets. The 14-bit recorded data is converted to 16-bit so that our computers can handle the data.

In theory, these cameras can capture every shade that the human visual system can see. The CIELAB 1976 colour space corresponds to all of the hues that we humans can see. The RGB colour spaces we use in photography can only represent a fraction of what the CIELAB 1976 colour space covers. sRGB can reproduce about 35% of the colours, Adobe RGB about 50% and ProPhoto RGB about 80%. We have to assign a colour space to our raw data as we convert it to an image file that we can work on in post-processing.

2. Computer screens have two limitations. The least expensive ones cannot even reproduce all the colours of the sRGB colour space. Some good mid-range ones cam reproduce 100% of the sRGB colour space. The very high end ones can reproduce 100% of the Adobe RGB colour space. I am not aware of any screens that can reproduce anything beyond that.

To complicate things even more, most computer screens are at best 8-bit per channel compliant, i.e.they are not capable of reproducing more than 16.8 million individual hues. Some higher ones can handle 10-bits per channel, so they are still a long way off from being able to display even the 14-bit data that our cameras can record.

Our screens are RGB devices and work by adjusting the brightness of individual red, green and blue pixels. An 8-bit display can adjust the brightness of each pixel from a range of 0 (pure black) to 255 (pure r, b or g ). A 10 bit display can display 1024 discrete brightness values. The RGB colours are transmitted light, additive colour.

3. Printers - things get very complicated here because all printers are CMYK, reflected light, subtractive processes. It takes a minimum of cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks to reproduce all colours. In general, white ink is not used, so the lightest colour that can be reproduced is the substrate being printed on, whether that is paper, cloth, plastic or metal. A small amount of colour is applied or not. Unlike the hundreds of individual brightness levels in our computer screens per pixel, the printer either applies some ink or it does not, so far fewer colours can be reproduced in printing.

To get around this limitation, high quality printers use more shades of ink. My Epson P800 printer uses 8 different inks; black, gray, light gray, cyan, light cyan, magenta, light magenta and yellow to create a wider colour space. So far as I know, some of the large, high end ink jet printers (digital presses can do the same thing) use up to 12 different ink colours.

Some of the higher end ink jet photo printers have another trick; they can deposit different sizes of dots of ink. Some have a single droplet size, others can deposit two different droplet sizes and some of the newest printers can handled three different droplet sizes.

The paper type used is another variable; photo papers have different bases and different coatings that vary from matte to glossy. As a general rule, glossier papers can reproduce a wider range of colours and in fact, a high quality ink jet printer can produce hues well beyond what our screens can display and can handle reproduce into the ProPhoto RGB colours.

So while we get a wider range of hues than our computer screens can reproduce, the way the colours are made, far fewer individual hues can be reproduced. When I first started using photo quality inkjet printers about 12 years ago, I seem to recall that the printers could only handle 8-bit input and the early 16-bit drivers did not reproduce colours as well as the 8-bit ones. The last time I did a test on 8-bit versus 16-bit was about 5 years ago with my Epson 3880 printer and I could see no difference between 8-bit and 16-bit output print quality.

If you go to most commercial printers, they will use a standard four colour CYMK process. They generally use a chromogenic paper (effectively the same type of colour photo paper used in the wet darkrooms). There are some processes that use dye sublimation and a lot of the lower end digital press processes are also a 4-ink process (digital presses are nothing more than fancy colour laser printers). These processes tend to be served well by 8-bit input and the ones that I have looked at will only use 8-bit sRGB images for input.

I hope I haven't muddied the waters too much. This is a complex field and there is a lot of proprietary equipment out there and the manufacturers do not share the details with us mere users...

[DanK]

Just a a factoid: my prograf 1000 has 11 color inks, as well as a 12th cartridge which is a transparent surface coating.


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