Category Archives: Printing

Printing with an emphasis on the HP DesignJet dye printer

HP Designjet 90 still available!

Printing

A great bargain.

Click on ‘Printing’ in the left hand column and you will see that I am a huge fan of HP’s previous generation DesignJet 90 18″ wide printer. A small footprint, fade free inks, great reliability and …. cheap for what you get. HP’s current large format printers start well north of $2,000.

I thought that the HP DJ90 was no longer available, but a quick spot of Googling and it seems they are still available new.

The print quality is beyond reproach, not least owing to the use of dye inks which results in a really deep black. As for the fade free claim, I can attest to one print I have at a friend’s home, under plain glass, which is in bright sun 8 hours a day and has been for two years. It’s as good as new.

So if large prints are your thing, check out the HP DJ90 or 130 (which will print up to 24″ wide).

Update: Check the Comments to this piece for a discussion of paper and supplies availability. I have also added extensive details about HP’s newly released (2008) profiles for many non-HP papers.

Large prints on canvas

Printing

Up to 86″ a side!

I came across this site while looking for a large print service.

They certainly use the right printers and fade free inks as this excerpt from their FAQ states:

“What kind of equipment are you using to print on canvas?

Photogonia uses state of the art printers like HP DESIGNJET 5500 series and EPSON STYLUS PRO 9800. These large format printers deliver high quality print jobs that fit the high standards that Photogonia sets for our products.

What kind of Ink are you using?

PhotoGonia uses ONLY original factory Inks like HP 83 UV Ink Cartridges for our HP printers and 8-color Epson Ultra Chrome K3â„¢ Ink For our Epson printers. PhotoGonia doesn’t use refills, third party Ink or generic Ink. ”

A 40″ x 30″ ‘gallery wrap’ canvas (the printed edges are stretched over the frame) is $322.50, shipped. Not cheap, but the alternative of buying an ultra-wide carriage printer for one or two prints a year is hardly a viable choice. For that matter, unless you regularly make large prints, this sort of service makes sense for any photographer limited by the 13″ carriage width common on home ink jet printers.

Ink and paper supplies

Printing

For heavy users.

I have made, and continue to make, many large prints on the Hewlett Packard HP90 Designjet printer. While it’s being phased out it remains broadly available if you do a Google search, typically selling for under $900. If you have priced other fade-free ink jet wide carriage printers, then you will know this is a superb bargain. Add a small desktop footprint and print quality to die for – and it works perfectly with Mac’s Tiger and Leopard OS – and you have a tremendous bargain. After some thirty months of use I would buy another at the drop of a hat if needs dictated.

Printers, however, are increasingly marketed using the Gillette razor model – give away the printer and clean up on the supplies. While HP has no need to give away a non-mass market device like the DJ90, ink and paper still take their toll on the budget if you make a lot of prints.

When it comes to consumables I have long been a believer in using the manufacturer’s recommended products. There’s little point in saving a dollar or two on refilled ink cartridges if the risk is that your printer heads clog up or the inks fade with age. With paper, I have found that HP’s Premium Plus photo satin is superb and maintains its surface sheen when the print is dry mounted at ~190F (88C) in a press. Much warmer than that and the surface looks less pleasant. While rumor has it that HP’s paper is made by Hahnemuhle in Germany, there’s little incentive to use aftermarket papers when each involves a tedious profiling and test session. So I stick with what works for me and now that I have digital’s dynamic range limitations under control, why bother with anything else? One more example where consistency takes out a complex set of variables from the equation. A good thing.

Given the need to have a spare cartridge of each of the six colors used in the HP (the printer uses ink frugally but you can bet you will run out when you least expect it), I found myself about to place an order at my photo retailer of choice, B&H in NYC, the other day. Then, what with the newly found need for frugality dictated by America’s total absence of an energy policy, I recalled that someone had mentioned a Florida vendor named Atlex. A quick click and comparison (3 ink cartridges and 40 sheets of 18″ x 24″ paper – $252 delivered to CA) disclosed that Atlex’s price was some 18% less than B&H’s. Now I like B&H and they have never let me down but 18% is non trivial. Loyalty to my pocket book wins every time. Atlex – their site claims they have been at it for over 25 years – also stocks Epson and Canon printer supplies, all original maker labelled, so what’s not to like? And, unless you live in Florida, you will be doing your bit by starving the beast that is government as you no longer pay sales taxes to the organized crime bosses masquerading as state government.

This is an opportune time to remind users not to mess with roll paper. Even if you have a proper roll paper holder and built-in cutting knife like in the HP DesignJet, life is simply too short to mess with severely rolled up paper supplies – just try to dry mount a print which prefers to roll up. I have tried. It was hell. Use cut sheets.

Shutterfly

Printing

You can’t beat a print.

My first computer, bought in 1981, came with a 3 inch monochrome cathode ray tube screen which was nearly impossible to read. Not that it mattered as you couldn’t display pictures on it in any case. After many unhappy years with PCs, with screens growing to 15 inch (and still huge CRT boxes) 2000 saw the first of many Macs join the household. The screen was 17 inch, crystal clear and made for a photographer. Currently, my MacBook uses a Samsung 21.6 inch screen when at home and it’s the best photo processing hardware I have used so far.

One day I would love to make that screen into a 30 inch Apple Cinema Display (there are only so many trendy movies to watch and each just raises desire with all those huge screens on show) but the ridiculous cost lets “I should” wait upon “Don’t be silly”. It also amuses me no end how the happening set always use Apples on the big screen while the losers in government stick with PCs. That’s a good thing. A cheap government computer beats a costly one and any government that locks up daily is doing its job in this voter’s eyes, regardless of party. Ironman anyone?

Yet now that my screen is larger than any of the many photography books in my library, I still prefer to luxuriate in the pages of a book to looking at the screen, no matter its size. Maybe having grown up without computers, and with lots of books, has prevented me from fully accepting a screen as the display medium of choice; what’s more, I like the look and feel of a book when it comes to looking at pictures. Plus you can read when you shave – try that with a computer!

All of which reminds me why I so much like Shutterfly and what it does for my snaps. Every now and then I put out a calendar showing our son’s growth and interests. It goes to relatives and invariably ends up on a wall somewhere.


The bald one’s the surgeon, if you must know

Having used the service since it started a few years ago, I can only sing its praises. An intuitive user interface, easy upload and arrangement of your snaps and a beautifully printed calendar in your hands in a few days, all at reasonable cost. What’s not to like?

And a printed picture beats a screen anyday.

Lightroom soft proofing and printing

Lightroom, Printing, Software

Soft proofing in Lightroom is easy.

I do not propose to address image cataloging and developing in Lightroom at any length in this journal as there are lots of tutorials and blogs out there that know a thousand times more than I ever will. Adobe even has a couple of video tutorials out there though they are really poor compared to Aperture’s slick offerings. While presented by real photographers, rather than blackshirts, Adobe opts for a folksy, joking style. The last thing I need in technical instruction materials, Adobe, is someone’s idea of what passes for humor. Just the facts, ma’am. You want humor, you read my blog, OK?

What I want to address here is soft proofing of your Developed Lightroom picture.

You do not need Photoshop for soft proofing if you use a Mac.

‘Experts’ will tell you that Lightroom does not offer soft proofing of the image, meaning the ability to preview the photograph on the screen with the relevant printer drivers invoked to show how the printed picture will look. (Aperture has soft-proofing built in, as does Photoshop).

A soft proof can look quite a bit different from the regular screen image as a print has a much narrower dynamic range than the regular screen image and also has its own color characteristics conferred by your printer and paper of choice.

If you are taking studio portraits then you really must use soft proofing as the eye is especially critical of accurate skin tones. The color differences are significant and easily noticed when switching between regular and soft-proofs.

Profiling your monitor:

The first problem is that monitors are rarely properly profiled – do this right and what you see in Lightroom is what the printer will print, allowing for the lower dynamic range of a print compared to a monitor.

Here’s how to properly profile your monitor:

1. If you can afford one, get a really good colorimeter like the Eye-One Display 2. If not, go to Apple System Preferences->Displays->Color->Calibrate. You must profile the monitor in the same light as you use to compare it to the print. Use daylight – artificial light will give erroneous results as it is missing many colors in the natural light spectrum.

2. In Lightroom, make your adjustments to the image and make a test print. While there are two ways to work with printer profiles – Lightroom Managed or Printer Managed – I find that Printer Managed gives marginally truer colors – there’s little in it. So when in the Print module of Lightroom, you need to set the program up for Printer Managed colors, like so:

3. When you click on Print, set up the printer to use Colorsync, Apple’s color management utility.

Make your test print (use a familiar person as a subject with flesh tones) after checking that you have chosen the printing paper you are using – this forces the application to use the relevant printer driver. The printer cannot know which paper profile to use if you do not tell it. That is what Lightroom means in the previous picture when it states “When selecting ‘Managed By Printer’ remember to turn on the printer’s color management in the Print dialog box before printing”. (Frustratingly, Lightroom defaults to ColorSmart/sRGB and I can find no way to permanently save the Colorsync choice in a Print Template – meaning you have to choose Colorsync every time you want to print).

4. Now compare your test print to the image in the Lightroom Print module. They will not match.

5. You must now fine tune your monitor color profile. The printer is doing what Lightroom is telling it, but the monitor is not properly profiled for your environment. It is still not displaying colors correctly. Go back into the Apple System Preferences->Displays->Color->Calibrate tool, making sure to choose the display profile you saved in step 1, above, while keeping the Lightroom screen display unchanged. Now work through the Apple software again until what you see on the screen matches the print you just made, wrong as it is – hold the print up to the screen. Doing this at night with incandescent lighting is a complete waste of time.

The key adjustments are Target White Point and Target Gamma. Forget everything you have read about setting your screen to a specific color temperature or to a gamma dictated by some academic. Academics do not make prints. Use your eyes to get the best color match. I ended up with a Target Gamma=1.75 and a Target White Point =6707K. Whatever. Meaningless numbers.

Save the revised profile – you have now matched the monitor profile to the test print.

6. We are done with the test print. Discard it.

Soft proofing:

a. Now go back to Lightroom, choose the Develop module, and adjust the tones to your satisfaction.

b. In the Print module choose Print->Preview. Check the Soft Proof box at the lower left of Preview. This refreshes the display in Preview, forcing the image to use the printer paper profile you elected earlier (see #3, above). To confirm you are using the right paper profile, hover the mouse cursor over the words “Soft Proof” and the driver will be disclosed as in the following screen picture.

You are previewing a soft proof of your photograph which shows what the printer will print.

c. If you don’t like what you see, re-Develop the picture and try again. Do not even think of changing your monitor profile.

d. Make the final print. No need to return to Lightroom – just click on ‘Print’ at the lower right of the picture in Preview.

* * * * *

I get a near perfect match using this technique, and have no need of a colorimeter to effect proper display profiling – my eyes and Apple’s built in tools tell me what I see. In fact, I have found this method to be so powerful that I am going back and reprinting several 18″ x 24″ prints hanging on the wall which simply were not quite right with regard to color fidelity, contrast and brightness. Spot on results every time from originals of widely differing tonal and contrast ranges.

The monitor I use with my MacBook? No, not a mega-bucks Apple Cinema Display – a dirt cheap ($235 at the time of writing) Samsung 216BW, 21.6″ diagonally and with 1680 x 1050 pixel definition. Heck, the articulated wall arm I use to mount this on the wall ran me almost half the cost of the monitor.

The print module in Lightroom is really well implemented in most other respects, not least in its ability to support multiple disparate pictures on one sheet of paper (Command-click non-contiguous images to select them in grid view, then go into Print view, electing, say, the 2×2 template).

Bear in mind that Lightroom is just one year old and is still in its first commercial iteration at v1.3.1. And it’s not as if I am the first person to note the absence of soft proofing within Lightroom, so you can bet Adobe knows of the issue. I would expect them to offer soft proofing within the application in the next major release. But it is not essential if you adopt the approach above and it’s not like it’s a big deal if you use Colorsync.

Now all I will need PS for is to correct lens distortion (Adobe may even add that in Lightroom) and for de-fishing fish eye snaps – though Comment #8 here suggests CS3 can do this. As I use the ImageAlign plug-in in CS2, I’m happy to save my money. A round trip to PS CS2 from Lightroom takes 60 seconds.

And if you think Adobe will cut the price of Lightroom by $100 to $200 like Apple did with Aperture, don’t hold your breath. Apple’s move smacks of desperation. Adobe has no need to cannibalize its pricing if it’s the only game in town and selling like hot cakes, though if they do drop the price all photographers will cheer. Investors may not.