Category Archives: Technique

Mounting glossy prints

Printing

Care needed.

I finally got around to mounting some glossy prints made on the HP paper I received as a gift.

The Seal 160M.

I use a Seal 160M press which I bought ages ago, used, on eBay for some $400 + half my net worth in shipping. It weighs a ton! They are still in business and even shipped me some missing nuts no charge. Today’s price- some $1,400 – reflects the uncompetitive cost of US labor. Will we ever see a flood of cheap ones from China? After all, a press is just a couple of slabs of cast iron and a heater. I doubt it. Few make big prints for mounting any more and I doubt the replacement market in commercial businesses is significant.

Only a fool buys these new. They regularly crop up for $250-500 used and all parts are readily available, not that there’s much to go wrong. The 160M weighs 60 lbs so try to buy locally. The 210M comes in at a whopping 75 lbs. Buy locally and bring a friend.

Typical eBay selling price – this is for the 210M. The 210M has two pressure adjustment knobs in contrast to one for the smaller 160M

The device could not be simpler, so if the heater or thermostat blows, replacement is cheap and the process simple. The whole thing is made up of less than two dozen parts, and B&H carries the essential ones. Framers’ Island also carries spares, including thermostats.

Not exactly complex ….

You can read all about mounting prints here.

I turned the temperature down from my usual 190F (HP Satin) to 170F for the glossy and also first removed the heated platen and gave it a thorough scrubbing with steel wool to remove any surface imperfections. You know how glossy is! Further, I’m careful to keep the release paper (prevents the print sticking to the heated platen) in a dust proof bag to avoid ingress of particulate matter which could mar the surface.

The results are simply spectacular. The surface loses a minor amount of gloss (it will much more at 195F so temperature seems critical) and there’s not a divot or scratch to be seen. But it is a labor of love! The faster these prints go behind glass, the better.

Mounted glossy prints with helper.

To learn more about the Seal press click the download buttons below. If you track down a used one, look for the S or M designation in the model number, indicating it’s a later model which does not use asbestos in the wiring insulation. Life’s too short as it is.

Download the Seal 160M/210M manual. 160M – up to 2×18.5″,
210M up to 2×23″. Both accommodate any length.

Download the Seal 110S manual – up to 2×12″

The maximum width of a board which these will accept is twice the larger dimension of the platen – you simply flip the board around. Overlapping/reheating a previously sealed area has no deleterious effect. The maximum length is infinite as you simply slide the board sequentially through the press. A 13″ x 19″ print needs two passes in my 160M, whereas an 18″ x 24″ requires four, both when centrally mounted on a 22″ x 28″ mat. It’s the size of the mat, not of the print, which constrains capacity. 2 minutes under pressure per ‘press’ using Drymount mounting tissue and release paper does the trick.

Nothing beats a professionally mounted print and, as I have written before, I am still searching for evidence of fading or discoloration in prints I mounted almost 40 years ago using a domestic iron. So when snake oil salesmen come calling, telling you that heat mounted prints fade, ask to see the evidence.

Glossy paper

Printing

The touchstone of the photographer’s art.

Its been quite a while since I made glossy prints. In the darkroom days I would squeegee the print, face down, onto a high gloss sheet of chrome-plated steel then heat the thing in a press. If you got things right the resulting print would emerge with an indescribably high gloss (this was before awful RC papers ruined traditional printing) which was also quite incredibly fragile. Any moisture or fingerprints and the surface would be ruined. But the definition afforded the image was beyond compare.

This was not all good, of course. Every imperfection in the image was disclosed, every grain of Kodak’s unbeatable TriX emulsion revealed. Sometimes you wanted that. Sometimes not. And the whole process was a real pain in the nether regions but once you saw an unglazed, normally dried glossy print you never wanted to go there again.

Nearly all the many prints I have made on my HP DesignJet 90 dye ink jet printer have been on HP-branded Premium Plus Satin paper. This paper has a semi-gloss finish, retains detail well and is very easy to use. It has a swellable surface, meaning its pores open when sprayed with ink to absorb the dyes. After a few hours the swelling subsides and the print is less fragile and can be handled easily. Until then the surface is quite fragile. I always handle paper using cotton gloves because any grease from fingers on the surface can result in poor ink absorption, blotchiness and reduced life. Done carefully, HP’s Vivera inks are certified by Wilhelm Research for some 80 years longevity.

Well, take a look what arrived on my doorstep the other day:

Nice things happen to nice people.

The buyer of a hefty chunk of my Canon 5D outfit found several goodies in the shipments I made. A few CF cards, a wired and wireless remote, an LCD protector, a CF-to-SDHC adapter and so on. He had been a pleasure to deal with, none of the usual game playing or nickel and dime nonsense so beloved of buyers of even fairly priced gear, that I felt it was the least I could do. Well, Barry B. dropped me a note saying that he no longer made prints and would I like some HP Glossy? Is the Pope a Catholic? It gets better. The small fortune in printing paper is not only the swellable type specific to my HP DesignJet, it was shipped to me at no charge! There are decent people left in the world …. thank you, Barry.

On receipt the first thing I did was to download the paper profile from HP and make it available to Lightroom. Then I took an image which would really benefit from the ability of glossy paper to render fine detail and ran a test print. In this image I had retouched some overhead wires using Photoshop CS5 and Content Aware Fill and it looked just fine on my Dell 2209WA display. But, oh! boy, the test print clearly displayed my retouching so I had to go back into PS and try harder. That’s glossy paper for you. Every imperfection, every pore, every blemish, is writ large to the world.

A second print – I have no fewer than 125 sheets of 13″ x 19″ to play with so I’m feeling a tad profligate – put all to rights and the quality is simply breathtaking. And this from the Panny G1’s poncy little MFT sensor!

A warning. Before these swellable papers dry, a matter of a few hours, they will show a mottled surface reflecting (!) disparate ink absorption across the surface. Give them a few hours and the surfaces returns to normal, meaning a high gloss almost as good as those monochrome prints from ages ago, but a lot easier to make.

Glossy is not for everyone. It’s hard to display, attracting reflections as it does. It’s fragile and really needs mounting behind glass. It’s unforgiving when it comes to the photographer’s technique. And it needs to be handled with kid gloves …. OK, cotton gloves. But, done right and displayed right, a glossy print remains the touchstone of the photographer’s art.

Why do you think that nice Mr. Jobs insists on those dumb glossy screens on all his computers? Because they plain look better on a casual acquaintance. That’s fine for prints. Not so good for computer screens.

HP Glossy is anything but water resistant, so keep it away from rain drops and the like:

Two minutes under a tap and the emulsion starts to run.

Another fine Photoshop CS5 book

Software, Technique

Evening again.

I made mention of Martin Evening’s fine photography and technical writing when I looked at his Lightroom 3 book a while back. Having just upgraded from Photoshop CS2 to CS5, I favorably commented on Richard Harrington’s book recently. It excels for its author’s clear language and an abundance of videos, even if the definition in those is sorely lacking.

Given my previous experience with Martin Evening’s work I went ahead and splashed out on his CS5 book. By contrast to Harrington’s it’s more print than video; the quality of the videos is simply outstanding and I only wish there were more. His video on masking and replacing the background in a subject is so well done that I tried it with a couple of my own snaps and the instructions worked perfectly first time. The chapters are color tabbed so that you can jump to what you want with ease, and taking this large work in bite sized chunks is, I find, the way to learn. It took a couple of decades to get PS to where it is to day, so no one is going to learn it overnight.

Click the picture to go to Amazon.

I find I tend to watch the Harrington book videos on my TV whereas I tend to sit at the HackPro and work my way through the Evening examples. Like Harrington’s, the book comes with a DVD replete with pictures and videos.

Recommended. And I have to go back on what I wrote about the LR3 book; it’s far easier to use a paper copy than an iPad version. It’s just easier to look things up in a book.

Small sensor noise

Technique

Working with the G1.

In addition to avoiding the Nazi guards trying to enforce a truly moronic ‘No Photography’ rule at the de Young Balenciaga show, I had to contend with camera shake and noise from the Panasonic G1’s small sensor which, even cranked up to ISO 1600, was resulting in long shutter speeds. While the OIS in the kit lens helps greatly, adding two full stop’s worth on the shutter speed front, it’s still all I could do to get a half decent image in the low lighting used at the show. The 1/10th shutter speed in the images below figures to probably an effective 1/40th as regards camera shake with the benefit of the magic that is OIS anti-shake technology. The 28mm (FFE) focal length used also helps, adding a further stop compared to a 50mm standard lens, so that 1/10th makes me look a lot better than I really am, figuring to an equivalent 1/80th or so with a 50mm lens and no OIS.

You can see the original snap which I am talking about here.

In the following images I show enlarged screen shots from Lightroom 3 which are equivalent to a 30″ x 45″ print, meaning huge.

Here’s the first snap with only standard sharpening applied on import of the file to Lightroom, meaning 100/1.1/64 which I find optimal in counteracting the anti-aliasing filter in the G1. Noise reduction in LR3 was set at 0:

Luminance noise is clearly visible though I also have a 13″ x 19″ print in front of me, made on the HP DesignJet90 printer on HP Premium Plus Satin paper (the textured surface tends to mitigate noise to some extent compared with glossy paper) which is perfectly fine unless you stick your nose in it.

In the next picture I applied the following settings in the Detail panel of the Develop module in LR3:

Anything much over 50 on the Noise Reduction – Luminance slider results in artifacts, and falling definition, so it’s a juggling act between noise reduction and sharpness.

The bottom line is that, even at ISO 1600, the small MFT sensor in the Panny can more than cope with noise at any reasonable reproduction ratio for your images. And, as I wrote here, anyone knocking the Panasonic kit zoom as a piece of plastic junk is simply clueless and would likely be better employed telling innocent patrons not to take photographs at costume exhibitions.

To get an idea of the relative size of the Micro Four Thirds sensor (same as Four Thirds – circled) the following image from Wikipedia tells all – it’s approximately one quarter of the area of a full frame sensor as found in the costliest DSLRs:

Incidentally, with the near-grainless sensors in full frame 35mm DSLRs it’s very hard to make a case for the extremely costly medium format DSLRs from the likes of Hasselblad (made by Fuji), Leica with their S2 and others. The gear is far heavier, the lenses bulky and the cost exorbitant, not to mention having to cope with huge file sizes which will need superior computer gear to process efficiently.

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.