Category Archives: Technique

Latest ICC color profiles for HP Designjet dye printers

Printing

HP updated these recently

While I have been a happy user of HP’s branded papers exclusively for my Designjet 90 18″ wide dye printer, HP does not entirely neglect the aftermarket for paper makers.

Indeed, HP has recently updated a bunch of color profiles for some well known papers which feature the swellable/absorbent surface of HP’s paper, allowing the printer’s dye inks to be properly absorbed. These are for use with the Designjet 30/90/130 series of printers.

Here are the papers supported, with details of how to feed the paper into your printer – tray, rear slot or roll (by the way, I always use the tray to (multi-)sheet feed my 13″ x 19″ and 18″ x 24″ HP Premium Plus Photo Satin paper and have had no issues):

As you can see, HP recommends that many of the heaviest papers are loaded one sheet at a time. For reference, HP’s Premium Plus Photo Satin weighs in at 286 grams/sq. meter, whereas the heaviest William Turner is 310. I suspect, but cannot confirm, that HP’s papers are made by Hahnemühle which has been around since 1584, so they just missed making the stock for Gutenberg’s bible, printed in the 1450s.

Here’s their data sheet on the heavier William Turner paper:

Many stockists carry it, not least of all Atlex which I have found to be reliable. The William Turner comes in sizes up to 17″ x 22″ or in larger rolls – these you would have to cut down first. Sounds like an interesting option for HP users and, as I mentioned recently, I would be a buyer of the HP DJ 90 or 130 (24″ wide) today – it’s not like parts and supplies are about to disappear for a printer which shares consumables with the DJ 30 (13″ wide) which sold in vast numbers to photographers everywhere. And, at its price, the wide carriage HP has no competition.

Finally, why dye based inks in preference to pigments which now dominate the market? Can you say lousy blacks? Bronzing? We dye printer users know nothing of those issues.

In tomorrow’s column I will provide a step-by-step guide to making new profiles of your choice, for non-HP branded papers, display correctly within Lightroom 2 because, goodness knows, HP’s installation instructions are about as wrong as you can get. Suffice it to say that if you follow mine, your profiles will display correctly in LR2 thus:

Linhof S168 tripod

Technique

Made in West Germany – which quality once called home.

Back in the fifties, the final flowering of the machine age, if you wanted quality in photo gear you used a Leica. However, if you wanted real quality in your pictures, we are talking billboard sized prints here, you used a Linhof. This apogee of field camera design, in the many Technika models, came mostly in 4″ x 5″ size and was the love of industrial photographers across the world. In addition to a broad range of Zeiss and Schneider lenses, you could fit any number of accessories to your Linhof and make it sing. But the only thing you would fit your Linhof on was a Linhof tripod. Naturally.

I have owned mine some twenty years and it will likely go to the grave with me, though I suspect it will refuse to melt when my body is subjected to the fires of hell in the incinerator. I have never understood why one would want to waste valuable real estate on all those tombs, Père Lachaise and Highgate being the only exceptions where this sort of thing makes sense. A world where we cannot commune with Chopin or Michael Faraday would be a sadder place.

All my recent work with multiple images – HDR, panoramas and now Helicon Focus – suggested a piece might be in order about the tripod I use as these techniques dictate one is used. No, its not a $1,000 carbon fiber Gitzo, much as that would be nice to have.

My Linhof tripod came (for very few dollars) with a Linhof pan and tilt head, useless for still photography, so I replaced it first with a Leitz ball and socket head and, later, with the funky Novoflex Mini Magic. Plus, of course, a Manfrotto QR plate. The nice Leitz head now happily makes its home on my Manfrotto monopod.

Update January, 2014:

The massive and very well made Sirui K-40X ball head is a match made in heaven for the Linhof, and far superior to the funky Manfrotto head. Yes, the spirit level in that device is also useless.

Over the years I have had to install three new rubber feet (they are retained with circlips) and had to glue the broken center column knob with epoxy after it disintegrated. It now looks worse but is much tougher and I sure as hell was not going to pay Linhof $40 for a replacement. The use of light alloys makes the tripod easy to carry though not as light, maybe, as the latest, costly carbon fiber and basalt creations. I console myself with the thought that the extra exercise is good for me!

Despite my best efforts to destroy the sliding legs with multiple immersions in sand, mud and sea water, the Linhof laughs at my amateurishness and soldiers on. After a day at the beach I flush it with tap water, pad it dry and it’s ready to go. No nasty, sticky, dirt-loving lubricants needed. Further, the main leg sections are rubber coated, so your tripod does not accrue that totally ghastly scarred look after a few years’ hard use.


The Linhof S168 – 29″ tall when collapsed

There is only one right way to enhance stability and that is with cantilevers. Ask any bridge builder. Linhof got that totally right with these light yet strong ‘C section’ beams.


Massive cantilevered legs

To be useful a tripod must be capable of rapid deployment, and the push button sprung lower leg releases means erection is a matter of three or four seconds. For the most part the long, two section center column suffices for the rest of the extension. The Manfrotto plate means that attaching the camera is instantaneous – obsoleting yet another reason to avoid using a tripod.


Quick release lower leg section. The twist collar releases the upper section.

If you are working on an uneven surface, the twist collar sections can be selectively deployed (the push button sections are ‘all or nothing’) to even things up. I rarely use them.

The leg tips can be extended for hard surfaces.


Extendable rubber tip. Note the coarse threads which aid in dirt removal under the tap.

Or retracted for slippery ones.


Spike for your favorite oak floor

The column knob benefitted from some epoxy a few years ago. The built-in spirit level works fine …. and is totally useless.


Epoxied plastic knob. Germans and plastics simply do not mix ….

And you want to go really high?


Did I say this thing was tall? I’m 6′ of the total extension!

The Linhof S168 gets so many things right I would be rushing out and searching for one if I were you. Tripods simply do not get any better and a couple of enhancements (ball head, QR plate) make it the most quickly deployed and most sheerly useable tripod there is. If you are searching for a good, used Linhof, I strongly advise looking for a model with the cantilevered legs as these add tremendous stability for a minor weight penalty, and greatly ease deployment. It’s worth the wait for the right one as this will be the last tripod you buy.

The other manufacturer I would look at from that period were I searching for a top quality heirloom tripod would be Schiansky. It’s a name you no longer hear but they made a superb range of tripods at the time the Linhof S168 was on the market.

The 400mm close-up lens

Technique

Helicon to the rescue.

Go to Helicon’s web site and you will, understandably, see many examples of the use of this application in insect photography. That’s a natural given the miniscule depth of field for such small subjects in extreme close-up.

But how about at the other end of the spectrum, when used with really long lenses?

Well, it turns out Helicon Focus is every bit as capable.

In the following example I was taking snaps of the maple tree, in full fall color, at a very close distance (maybe 15 feet) using the 400mm lens at maximum aperture. This renders the background as a complete blur, but also very much restricts depth of focus in the subject, as this picture discloses:


Maple leaves. 5D, 400mm ‘L’, 1/500, f/5.6, ISO 250

I took nine images with the lens on manual focus focusing through the depth of the subject. Helicon refused to combine these, so I took out the first and last (which, on closer examination, had nothing sharp anywhere) and tried again. Success.


Composite of seven images using Helicon Focus. Manual exposure setting.

Why not simply close down the aperture and take one snap? First, that would dictate a very slow shutter speed with the attendant risk of camera shake even though the camera was mounted on a solid tripod. Second, there’s no guarantee at these short distances that everything would, in fact, be sharp, as 400mm lenses have little depth of field at any aperture, and depth-of-field preview in SLRs is near useless at small apertures. The Helicon approach generates an image which simply pops from the background while in no way changing the blur. Formerly blurred twigs now no longer detract from the image and the result is dramatic and natural looking.

Snags? Well, your subject has to be stationary, you must use a tripod and on close examinaton you can see some ghosting here and there:


Detail of ‘ghosting’ in the combined image

But when you realize that this enlargement is consonant with a print size of 40″ x 30″ and the effect is not objectionable, it’s something I can easily live with when balanced against the advantages of the technique. And who knows? When Danylo Kozub and his fellow geniuses at Helicon release the much awaited updated Mac version maybe even this minor issue will be resolved?

So Helicon is not just for the macro and microscope photographers amongst us.

More Helicon macros

Photographs, Technique

Make your macros sing.

I wrote about Helicon Focus recently and for this new inductee to the macro world it’s fair to say that the software opens up new realms in macro photography. This application requires that you take several pictures of your subject, each focused slightly differently, after which it applies some serious processing to stitching together the sharp zones of each into one sharp whole. Magic!

Now your subject must be still and you need to use a tripod (unless you are very lucky doing this handheld, which I think is a long shot) to permit proper stitching of the sharp zones from your constituent images.

I import the originals into Lightroom in the normal way and stack them using the ‘time between pictures’ slider, which allows automatic stacking of pictures taken close together. I then export the stack in TIFF, making sure there are no export size constraints in the Image Sizing section of the export panel. The exported images are then dropped into Helicon Focus, I hit ‘Run’ and ‘Save’, then import the composite image back into Lightroom where it is added to the top of the stack, like so:

The deeper the required depth of focus the more images you need. For reasonably square on subjects with some depth I find 3-5 images works fine. For more drastically sloped ones, more may be needed. Digital film is cheap! Take too many rather than too few. The processing times in Helicon on my MacBook (C2D) are short – four uncompressed 72 mB TIFFs are combined into one new one in the space of thirty seconds. These are full frame TIFFs generated by Lightroom from the RAW originals taken on my Canon 5D.

Even though these images were taken at f/22, the close focus distance and the 100mm focal length of the Canon macro lens make for very shallow depth of field, so I simply set the lens to manual focus, focus on the nearest part of the image and take a picture, repeating with a small adjustment of the focus ring every 8 seconds, the time it takes for my ring flash to recycle to full power. That’s important – you really want your images identically exposed.

And here is the result – taken yesterday after more time spent wading in the tide pools at my top secret Highway One location on the Pacific coast, 22 miles west of home. This chap was hanging out on the underside of a big boulder waiting for high tide. If you do this sort of work, check the tide tables before you go – the best being revealed at low tide. He is maybe 3″ in diameter.


Starfish. 5D, 100mm macro and ring flash, 1/60, f/22, ISO 400, tripod. Four constituent images.

Do this sort of thing at sunset with glancing rays from the sun and add a touch of ring flash to reduce the contrast range and make all tones easily visible (much easier than doing HDR), and you get something like this:


Kelp at sunset. 5D, 100mm macro and ring flash, 1/45, f/22, ISO 400, tripod. Five constituent images.

It’s no surprise if I tell you that the Canon Macro plus Helicon Focus are in the running for my Best Gear of 2008 award.

If you want to see Helicon Focus applied in the more traditional area of photomicrography, take a look at the beautiful images crafted by Charles Krebs.

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.