Category Archives: Technique

The StackShot

Technique

Stepper for macros.

It’s a little strange to be writing a column about macro photography when I just sold my Canon 5D and 100mm Canon Macro to a good home. Still, I found myself sharing some details about Helicon Focus with the new owner and notice that Helicon’s web site now refers to a device named the StackShot. This is a focus rail with a built in stepper motor which allows movement of the camera toward the subject in predetermined steps, all set on a small LCD controller.

I have not used the StackShot so cannot comment but what little there is from users on the web it seems to be a solid device. The value of such a device is with very small subjects – bugs say – where the camera movement between snaps has to be extremely small, owing to the high magnification and small size of the subject. The StackShot’s inter-photo interval can also be varied to permit proper recycling of a flash tube if you use one. The resulting images are then stitched together using HF in the usual way – a process rendered trivially simple by this superb application.

You can see an excellent video of the device in action, made by the manufacturer, by clicking here.

The StackShot kit.

The maker says that steps can be as small as 0.01mm and while it’s not cheap at $475, it does look like just the thing for those special subjects. For another $50 there’s a version with a USB port allowing control from your laptop, but I cannot figure out from the operating manual on their web site whether the software runs on OS X on a Mac.

An excellent Photoshop CS5 book

Software, Technique

Videos seal the deal.

I’m finding the help files in my recent upgrade to Photoshop CS5 frustrating to use. Often the chronology of steps to get to the point at which the Help file is invoked is missing, so you don’t know how to first get to where you are. So that got me searching for a better guide and, of course, there are so many books out there that it’s hard to know where to start.

So I resorted to looking at on line video tutorials among the many Photoshop podcasts on AppleTV. That was an even worse experience. Many podcasts do not cover CS5 and of those that do you are often stuck with someone who thinks he’s funny and spends endless time sharing his sense of humor with you at the start of the video. Frustrating. Then I chanced upon a teacher named Richard Harrington and found his narrative professional, correctly paced and on point. So I bought his book for some $35.

Click to see the book at Amazon.

The book itself is slim as these things go, at 300 pages, but the included DVD contains no fewer than 72 videos illustrating key techniques. These could be higher definition but they are well done otherwise. Additionally, there are quizzes on each of the sixteen chapters, reflecting the serious, academically-oriented thrust of this production. Further, there are many TIF files to allow the in book examples to be replicated hands-on. This is an excellent method of learning the essentials of this massively complex application.

I’m adopting the Pareto Principle, reckoning that I can get 80% of the power of CS5 by learning 20% of its content. Right now I’m at something like 10/2!

Harrington’s book and tutorials are recommended if you value your time and prefer professional tuition; you can get a sense of his teaching style by looking up his video podcasts online using iTunes. The definition of these is the same as that of the ones on the DVD, which is to say not great, but you can make things out.

The iPad as drawing tablet

Technique

Move over, Wacom.

Photographers who do much outlining work with the Lasso tool in Photoshop often end up using a Wacom tablet. This is an electrostatic tablet with a pen; the pen is dragged along the surface and activates the on-screen pointer in Photoshop.

I never found much use for my small wired Wacom and gave it away a few years back. As I find I’m using the Lasso tool now and then to blur backgrounds, I find I have a hankering for a pen tablet again.

iPad to the rescue! A combination of the Pogo Stylus and Mobile Mouse is all you need. And the iPad is wireless. Mostly I use my finger for outlining, controlling the Lasso tool in PS from my iPad, but if more accuracy is called for the Pogo Stylus can be useful. With the enhanced outlining in Photoshop CS5 I find my finger suffices nearly every time. If you already have an iPad, Mobile Mouse is about the lowest incremental cost of entry to to a tablet outlining tool there is and outlining with an iPad is far smoother than with a mouse.

Rollover the image (use Safari or Chrome to render – does not work on an iPad):

Cyclists after and before using the Lasso tool in PS CS2 and Mobile Mouse.

I also livened up the processed image, as a rollover discloses. Take a careful look at the hair of the beauty on the right ….

HP DesignJet monochrome printing

Printing

Using the right profile.

I’m really not a black and white guy, having last seriously used the medium in 1979. Still, now and then I make a monochrome print from a color original, using the ‘B & W’ option in Lightroom’s Develop module. This is well engineered as you can still vary the mix of the original colors using the sliders for each, and can easily alternate between color and monochrome renditions to gauge the effect.

The dye ink HP DesignJet printers are renowned for the outstanding depth of their black inks with no bronzing on HP Premium Plus Satin Photo paper. Read on to get the best black and white rendition possible, short of paying up for custom profiles.

Using the stock Premium Plus Photo Satin color profile a monochrome print from my DesignJet 90 is too cold. I mostly prefer a slightly warm rendition, so I set about finding dedicated monochrome profiles for this fine paper.

HP still offers free downloads of icc paper profiles from its website for black and white printing and warn that these should not be used for color prints as the results may be unpredictable.

Click below to download these:

Click to download HP monochrome profiles.

There are many to choose from. Basically you experiment until you find the profile that suits your tastes. The download includes instructions for Photoshop but you can readily adapt these to Lightroom.

After downloading, I installed the HP neutral profiles by dragging and dropping the downloaded folder to Username->Library->Colorsync->Profiles. I printed the test print (named Neutral_Profiles,jpg and to be found in the ‘Index_profiles’ folder in the download) using Snow Leopard and Lightroom, and telling LR to use the Neutral 0 profile.

As luck would have it that one gave me the result I wanted, viewed by daylight, warmer than the stock color profile and just right for my taste, so I renamed the Localized Description String as explained here in the ‘Neutral 0’ profile to HP 90 Neutral 0, and checked it off, along with the regular color profile in the Print module of LR (you can also see the other B & W profiles which I did not rename in this screenshot):

Now when I go to the profile selector in LR I see:

It takes less time to do than to explain and is a worthwhile step for best black and white print quality. You can use any one of the many profiles to suit your preference. I like life simple, so I only use the two profiles above with HP Premium Satin photo paper.

HP DesignJet printhead diagnosis

Printing

Finding faulty heads.

For the HP DesignJet six head dye ink 30/90/130 printers and their four head predecessors (10, 70, 120, etc.) HP recommends running its Image Quality Diagnostics Page using the System Management Utility when you experience print quality issue; the Utility can only be run for Mac users using OS Leopard or earlier. That’s a shame as HP has committed to stocking repair parts, heads, inks etc. for 10 years after the printer is discontinued, and as they still sell the DJ130 on their site that means through 2021 at least. Too bad their Mac software is obsolete, requiring an earlier Mac OS or a Windows PC.

When the DesignJet has a faulty printhead the front panel indicator for the head is meant to flash. The problem is that it does not always do so.

Here’s a print I was making the other day; all was proceeding swimmingly until the last few inches on the right of the 13″ x 19″ original, where the color suddenly goes awry. The image below is a low quality photograph of the 13″ x 19″ print as my scanner does not go beyond 8 1/2″ x 11″!

Prining problem with the DesignJet.

This problem is not unknown to DesignJet users and generally indicates a clogged or faulty head. However, there was no indication on the printer’s front panel of any problem and the first Image Quality Diagnostics Page report I ran showed all the color squares at the top to be solid and full.

However, because sometimes a head can temporarily recover from a clog, I simply ran the report again and the problem was now disclosed clearly, as follows:


Faulty head disclosed.

Consulting this chart from HP ….

…. I immediately concluded that the Cyan head was at fault. Rather than try and clean it, I simply ordered a replacement as the original was over 1,100 days old. Further I have found cleaning to be a quixotic exercise which rarely fixes a printhead problem for long. While HP states that the smaller color squares are merely for warm-up before printing the head alignment grids to their right, the total absence of Cyan in the related small square confirmed my conclusion, suggesting that the little color squares have some value after all.

Also, note that HP’s statement that “All patches associated with a given color must have banding, for the corresponding printhead do be determined at fault” is incorrect in my experience. As you can see, Cyan affects squares A2, A3 and B3, yet only A3 and B3 disclose banding, above. After many print head replacements, I have never seen three banded patches and five of the six cartridges – all except Black (K) – affect three patches each. I have had all five of Y, C, LC, M and LM fail and in each case the report only disclosed two banded patches.

The LC, LM and Y ink cartridges are much larger than the K, C and M ones, meaning that on average HP expects prints to use more LC, LM and Y ink. Yet with all my non-black heads failing it seems that volume of ink use is not the driving factor. Mine were all over 1,100 days old so age may be the deciding issue for light users. Whether age of the ink is relevant I have yet to determine. Some of my ink cartridges are past their expiration date.

After changing the Cyan printhead I placed three sheets of plain letter sized paper in the DJ; the DJ automatically runs a head alignment when a head is replaced and will do so up to three times. A check mark on my first and only page confirmed all was well, and printing was restarted.

The Ink Consumable Usage report section:

But wait a moment, you say. I just checked the Ink Consumable Report on the two page Information Report I ran from my DesignJet. It says that all is well as my head has only used up a fraction of its life.

Oh yeah?

The unhelpful Ink Consumed Printhead data for the old LC head.

Well, right after I replaced the Cyan head, above, and made one print, the Light Cyan head blew! Yet the report, above, says the LC head was only 18% through its life (green oval). That statistic is useless, it seems, for old heads. Read further down and you will see that the LC head is no less than 1,117 days old! Now I have only the ancient K (Black) head left to blow. The K head is a model 84, all the others are 85, so I’m running it until it drops, hoping that any design difference will help. As a minimum it will be an interesting discovery process. And it’s still cheaper to waste a sheet of paper than buy a new head. Moral of this story? Old heads are likely to fail even if modestly used. Keep spares.

Am I complaining? Not really. After four years of sitting there, mostly inactive, I can hardly grumble about a $35 head failure.

All is once again well. Now I have to make a lot more prints to bring down my average cost per print – logic akin to that of the US Government spending more money on its war machine to keep down the cost of oil.

Flagmakers, San Francisco. G1, kit lens @ 29mm, 1/500, f/5,2, ISO320.

Note on the picture: The original was taken in a dark alley with insufficient room for square composition and is surpassingly bland. A few seconds in Lightroom and a round trip to Photoshop to fix leaning verticals, and the power of RAW is writ large in allowing me to restore some color to the original.

The original of Flagmakers.