Category Archives: Photography

Lightroom Classic and paper profiles

Epson ET8550

How to make sure you are using the paper/printer profile.

For an index of all articles about the Epson ET8550 printer, click here.

There’s a poor piece of interface design in the Print module of Lightroom Classic (LRc) which, if the user is not aware of it, will result in a custom paper profile NOT being used and will have LRc default to color management by the printer, which is NOT what you want. I’m on LRc 14.1.1 but would bet that earlier versions have the same bug. Easily checked if you read on.

Most quality paper manufacturers make icc profiles available for a variety of printers and for a broad selection of papers. For example, my default paper’s maker, the French Canson company, lists a host of profiles for its papers here. Dial in your printer’s make and model – the Epson ET-8550 in my case – and you can download and install the relevant profile(s) for use with LRc.

If you are using a custom icc profile matched to your printer and paper then you must not allow the printer to manage color. You want your computer to manage color which in the case of a Mac means you must use Colorsync. This will ensure that the tailored profile is applied when the print job is sent to the printer. Adobe has a somewhat cryptic italicized note to this effect in the Print Job section of the Print module, thus:


The Canson paper profile has been invoked under
‘Color Management’. Note Adobe’s italicized advisory.

The problem is that you cannot ‘turn off’ color management on purpose (meaning selecting ColorSync – see below) as LRc does that for you. But you sure as heck can accidentally turn it on, and I explain how that can happen in the details which follow.

Now click on Printer, lower right above and you get this:


The Print dialog.

Click on ‘Color Matching’ and you will see:


LRc has selected ColorSync. It’s greyed out,
so you would think it cannot be disabled. Read on.

Whatever you do, do NOT click on ‘Cancel’ to exit this dialog. If you do click on ‘Cancel’ and click on ‘Color Matching’ again guess what? Adobe switches the printer setting to ….


The Print dialog. LRc has switched
to ‘Managed by Printer’. WRONG!

The tailored custom paper and printer profile you think you are using will be bypassed and the printer will take control of color management, which is exactly what you do NOT want.

Instead, to exit the Print->Printer Options->Color Matching-> dialog (go up two images) you MUST click on ‘OK’. That will preserve the ColorSync setting and you should not have to go into that dialog box ever again. The ColorSync setting is stable and is preserved even if you exit and restart LRc.

How did I discover this? Well, print colors were off in my first run with Canson paper and only after a bit of digging did I realize that I had lost the ColorSync setting which ensures that LRc manages color using the custom paper/print profile. The Epson printer had taken over, messing things up as it does not know to apply the custom icc printer/paper profile. All the printer knows is that you are using glossy paper (if you told LRc that – in the ‘Print Settings’ drop down in three images above) and nothing else.

You can safely confirm that color management is indeed Off by clicking on Print Settings->Advanced Color Settings whereupon you should see this:


Confirmation that Color Management is Off.

Hardware changes in 2024

Photography

More of the same, really.

For my demanding Studio Dogs project big prints were de rigeur. The project took most of the year to complete, concluding with thirty-six large prints, all made on the excellent Epson ET-8550 printer, as frugal as it is reliable. After one year and over 400 13″ x 19″ prints I have had but one paper jam, probably my fault as I may have overloaded paper in the feed tray.


The Epson ET-8550 photo printer.

More software than hardware, the later images were printed on Canson paper from France and that paper is proving superior, as regards gloss retention, to the many sheets of Hewlett Packard dye ink paper which preceded it.


Canson high gloss printing paper.

Those Studio Dogs were all photographed on a Nikon D800 whose over ten year age makes it ancient in these digital times, yet there’s no improving on the images it delivers at a fraction of the cost of Nikon’s latest hardware. As for triggering the strobes, a remote strobe trigger, now almost two decades old, makes for a wireless connection.


The Nikon D800, introduced in 2012.

And if you think 2012 is old, how about the Novatron studio flash outfit I continue using, manufactured over a quarter of a century ago? Sure it has wires not rechargeable batteries (ugh!) but it’s as reliable as a hammer and puts out a lot of light.


Novatron outfit with Bert the Border Terrier.

And speaking of the Nikon D800 and its splendid 36mp sensor, another major project in 2024 was the re-digitizing of old film images at a quality level significantly superior to that obtained with dedicated Nikon film scanners. And we are not talking about a handful of scans here. How about over 2,200 in a matter of a few short weeks? This setup is not only good, it’s also spectacularly fast.


Inexpensive and outstanding film scanning setup.

The biggest hardware change in 2024 involved migration from the behemoth 2010 Mac Pro with its seven cooling fans and vast bulk to a minuscule single fan Mac Mini M4 which is a fraction of the cost of the oldie, confers the latest security updates via the Mac OS and delivers performance which is …. identical! Sadly the old Mac Pro will have to go to the recyclers as selling it with attendant shipping costs and transit risk is not a viable proposition. It is, in other words, worthless and I hate Apple for forcing me to upgrade from a bulletproof machine by obsoleting it with its truly useless annual OS upgrades.

And the Mini ‘upgrade’ with its Apple Silicon CPU/GPU meant that my old non-subscription Lightroom and Photoshop processing applications would no longer work and I am now on the hook for $10 monthly to Adobe for Lightroom Classic until I croak, and even my heirs will likely see these greedy bastards continue to make money off my estate. As for Photoshop, fughedaboutit. I bought Affinity Photo 2 which does every thing I need for a one-off payment.

On the movie display front I added a second ancient Intel Mac Mini to the living room TV to permit routing of movies, stored on hard drives in the remote home theater, to that TV. You would think the existing AppleTV 4K attached to the TV would suffice to do this but Greedy Timmy in Cupertino sees to it that routing of content from hard drives attached to remote Macs is impossible with the AppleTV puck. He wants you to buy more hardware and a sub-$150 ancient Intel Mac Mini is more than up to the task.

As for the Home Theater with its 120″ screen and LG UST projector, allied to a fine Sonos sound system, all is sweetness and light. The Theater continues to show a movie every night, the hardware has proved to be robust and fault free and the recent addition of a magnificent 1955 Rolleiflex 2.8D to the display of photo hardware adds that special touch.


The Rolleiflex 2.8D, manufactured
between Aug 1955 and Sep 1956.


The Home Theater with the LG Ultra Short Throw projector.

So 2024 paid homage to the old belief that buying the best is consonant with a long life, along with some ingenious gadgets which cost little but truly deliver. I only regret being forced to remainder that great Mac Pro and having to give Adobe more of my hard earned money.

Mac Mini M4 after one month – Part VI

Mac Mini M4, Macintosh

It will do, and is fine with LRc.

In Part III I set forth some technical measurements which indicated that the performance of the 2024 Mac Mini M4 was pretty much on a par with that of the 2010 Mac Pro fitted with dual 3.46gHz 6-core Intel CPUs, 80gb of memory and a speedy Nvidia GTX980 GPU. By contrast the M4 Mini has a single 10 core CPU and just 16gb of very fast memory. This testifies not only to the great performance gains realized by Apple with its in house Apple Silicon M4 CPU with its integrated GPU, but also shows just how awfully good that old behemoth, the Mac Pro tower was almost 15 years ago. Sadly, Apple’s planned obsolescence strategy, which saw to it that the Mac Pro was now six generations of MacOS behind, forced the upgrade. Well, that and the aggressive pricing of the new Mini, and my electricity bills will fall!

I now have a month of heavy daily use with the M4 Mini under my belt, much of that with the Apple Silicon optimized Lightroom Classic (LRc – v14.1.1), an upgrade from the prior Lightroom v6.4), so the following observations are mostly subjective.

Start up is much faster at 4-6 seconds compared with 20 for the older version, if I get a beachball it’s maybe once or twice a week, and with previews enabled image-to-image flipping is instantaneous. There’s the very occasional delay of 3-4 seconds for the image to render in full definition but that was also much the case with the Mac Pro.

More significantly, the latest version of LRc adds significant functionality in terms of localized image adjustments with both the Remove and Masking tools well implemented and easy to use, largely obsoleting the more complex variants in Photoshop. Indeed as I hate paying rent I dropped PS all together and made a one-off purchase of Affinity Photo 2 which does all I need on those rare occasions where LRc cannot do the trick.

A good example of the use of these new to me tools is in this night snap of a retailer’s window in Carmel, CA. The host of images I took in that setting all have a common factor which is that the dynamic range is very high, necessitating exposure for the highlights, to avoid burn out, with a post processing need to bring up the shadows. In the case of these ‘before’ and ‘after’ images not only was the shadows slider used to bring up the shadows across the whole image, I then selectively masked the fountain at the lower left to bring the sparkle in the water to life. The difference is, err…., night and day:


Before.


After.

In learning some of these new features I invested in Scott Kelby’s book. It does not cover the recently added Remove/Generative Fill functions but is an excellent learning resource, greatly superior to any video I have seen.

Returning to the Mac Mini M4, it never gets more than a tad warm to the touch, is small enough to nestle at the back of the keyboard tray and performs equally to the old Mac Pro at a fraction of the cost. While there were many frustrations regarding application incompatibility when switching from Intel to Apple Silicon CPUs these are now behind me, though I still hate paying Adobe $10 monthly in rent for LRc. Otherwise, what’s not to like?

Networking Macs

Macintosh

How to do it.

While the Apple TV 4K is a very capable streaming device, Greedy Timmy in Cupertino has seen to it that you cannot make it stream content from hard drives connected to other Macs in the home. Yes, Greedy Tim wants to sell you more hardware. Imagine!

This is irksome as my home theater has some 40tb of movies stored on hard drives connected to the Mac Mini in that location but the fact that I have an Apple TV 4K connected to the OLED TV in the living room does not mean I can access those movies for display on the TV. Frustrating.

However, there is a cheap solution which takes advantage of the very low used prices on 2014 vintage Mac Minis which are renowned for one thing. They are bog slow. You would not want to have to process your photographs on one of these tortoises, let alone manipulate much larger video files. But for my purpose, the streaming of movies, these machines are ideal and typically sell used on Amazon for $135-200.

I have two of these machines. One is in the home theater upstairs and has all those hard drives connected to it, routing the video and sound signals to the large projection screen using HDMI through an UST projector. It’s controlled using a Bluetooth mouse.

The second 2014 Mac Mini is connected using an HDMI cable to the downstairs OLED TV, and has nothing else connected. It’s also controlled using a Bluetooth mouse. While this second machine is the faster of the two shown above, the slower model is perfectly adequate for these purposes.

The third Mac, my workhorse Mac Mini M4 is the current very speedy device which took the place of the behemoth Mac Pro of 2010 in the home office. In the context of movies it’s used to rip DVDs for storage on those hard drives in the home theater, with the ripped movie conveyed to its destination over wi-fi.

You can see all three computers in the sketch at the introduction to this article.

While networking computers can be a black art (I really would rather not think about doing this with Windows) with Macs it’s relatively easy. The key is to set up the Sharing settings correctly – these are in System Preferences on the older Minis and in System Settings on the current Mac Mini M4.

Again, in my configuration I have three Mac Minis:

  • The Server Mac (2014 vintage) in the home theater where all the hard disk drive boxes are connected
  • The Remote Mac Mini M4 (2024 vintage) in the home office where DVDs are ripped and sent wirelessly to the storage drives in the home theater
  • A second Remote Mac Mini (2014 vintage) connected to a TV in the living room used solely to watch movies on that TV.

There are three steps to allowing files on one Mac (the “Server Mac”) accessible by another (the “Remote Mac”).

Step 1: On the Server Mac you need to make the drives visible on the network:


This is the (Server Mac) Mini with all the attached hard
drive storage in the home theater. You must give
access to those hard drives to other Macs in the
File Sharing panel. See “Shared Folders”.

Step 2a: On the Remote Mac you need to tell that Mac to join the network:


This is the (Remote Mac) Mini attached to the TV set.
It simply needs File Sharing turned on.

Step 2b: On the second Remote Mac which is used to rip DVDs:


This is the second (Remote Mac) Mini M4 in the office
used to rip movies and send them to the hard drives
attached to the Mac mini in the home theater.
Yes, the new interface is an abomination.

Step 3: Next you need to make those drives attached to the Server Mac visible to the Remote Mac(s):

To connect to the movie hard disk drives from a Remote Mac (meaning one not connected to those hard drives), on the Remote Mac open Finder->Go->Connect to Server and choose the remote disk drive(s):


Connecting to the hard drives from
a Remote Mac using Finder.

After choosing the Server Mac and clicking Connect, you will see all the drives connected to the Server Mac (the Mini to which all the hard disk drives are connected), thus:


Shift-click to choose all or
Command-click to chose individual drives.

Once you click OK all those drives will be accessible on your Remote Mac. This setting is non-volatile. Restart any of the Macs involved and the setting is preserved. Nice.

As having the home theater (Server Mac) Mini go down through a power cut risks corruption to the hard drives, that computer and all the hard drive boxes are connected to an APC UPS.

All the Minis and the Apple TV 4K streamers use either RF or Bluetooth for communications with peripherals like remotes, mice and keyboards so they can be hidden out of sight, so long as they are afforded adequate ventilation. In the case of the TV devices they nestle comfortably under the TV screen.


The Mac Mini and Apple TV 4K under the TV screen.

Those old Minis may not be speed demons but for routing video they are excellent and reliability is high. And if you power them through an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) they rarely go down.

The DVDpedia application used to catalog and run all those saved movies was profiled here. While Conor, the developer, has taken a hiatus he has nonetheless updated the application to run on Apple Silicon and you can download it here. I can confirm it runs fine on my Mac Mini M4 though the movie count flags are incorrect. Not a big deal. When first starting DVDpedia on a Remote Mac be sure to hold the Option key down before double clicking on the local (meaning on the remote Mac) DVDpedia application. When DVDpedia starts you will be asked for the location of the DVDpedia database and you should point to the database on the Mini which has all those hard drives connected. It’s under Library-> Application Support->DVDpedia->Database.DVDpd. That way any changes you make to the database either on a Remote Mac or on the Server Mac will be applied in the correct place. You only have to do this once.

Canson Infinity ink jet paper

Printing

French and best.

The French company Canson claims it has been making paper for artists for over 450 years, so you would think they have got it down by now. And my experience with Canson Infinity Photogloss Premium RC paper suggests they have.

Long time readers will know that I used an HP DesignJet 90 printer for many years. The long lived dyes in that paper mean I have prints made 20 years ago, hanging in bright sun, which remain fade free. When HP discontinued their DesignJet printers many years ago they remaindered supplies of their branded swellable paper (meaning the surface swells to absorb ink dye) and I bought some 600 sheets at a few cents a sheet. That supply lasted me for the best part of a decade until my studio dog project which between free prints to owners and further prints for local display used up some 150 sheets and printing of archival images for placement in large format albums accounted for 250 more, and counting. My dirt cheap supply of HP Premium glossy was done.

There’s a lot of clap trap surrounding fancy printing papers. Some of the worst, as my extensive tests disclosed, come from the vaunted Hahnemüle every one of which was marginal to very poor. This only went to prove just how good the HP branded product was, though I never did discover who actually made it. Most certainly it was not Hahnemüle.

I only print on high gloss paper as anything else destroys definition and dynamic range. Glossy also produces the deepest blacks. You pay thousands for your gear and then destroy definition by printing on fancy schmantzy matte paper? No thank you. Sure, matte will hide blemishes and mounting errors the answer to which is that you need to fix your technique and use glossy.

If I had a complaint about HP glossy it was that heavier areas of ink would reduce gloss locally and overall gloss would drop a tad once the print/mounting tissue/board went through the Seal dry mounting press. Also, the print needed a good 24 hours for the ink dyes to dry thoroughly.

Well, I’m happy to report that none of these issues plague the Canson paper. The gloss is very high, is not remotely reduced after laying down ink (I am using an Epson ET8550 dye printer) and, better still, is full preserved after dry mounting at 190F for 75 seconds under pressure. (Interestingly, Canson makes specific reference on its site to the surface maintaining its high gloss even after being subjected to heat). Whereas HP paper would emerge tacky from the printer the Canson product comes out dry. Obviously I cannot speak to longevity – which is largely attributable to the ink not the paper, but Epson has been in the printing business a long time so there’s reason to think they have got the ink design right.

Based on my experience Canson Infinity Photogloss Premium RC paper is strongly recommended. It weighs 270g, just a tad less than HP’s 280g, no that any of that matters if you end up mounting the print on mounting board. It costs around $2 a 13″x19″ sheet and B&H has it.


Gorgeous Hazel in the studio, my first Canson candidate.

Canson makes a broad variety of icc paper profiles including one for the Epson ET8550, and it’s what I use with Lightroom Classic.


The cryptically named
Canson icc profile in LRc.