Just doing what it takes

I have been unsparing in my criticism of Apple’s cynical move to producing only glossy screens on its displays. The thinking is identical to that of the jeweler who installs strong quartz iodine spotlights in his store. That 1 carat bauble that so impressed in the store, thanks to the Hollywood lighting, leads to a sense of dismay when viewed at home. It’s no different for Apple’s glossy screens.

So what on earth was I doing ordering glossy printing paper for my HP DJ90 the other day?

An engineering company. Note the micrometer and the Swiss manufacturer!

Well, I may dislike glossy when it comes to making and printing my photographs, but I am not beyond learning from the ace salesmen at Apple, Inc.

Simply stated, I have not submitted a photo for publication since 1977 when I left England and started getting paid for my labors in America. So great was the increase in income and reduction in tax (the top income tax rate when I left the UK in 1977 was 83% ….) that the modest amounts that publication brought no longer made sense. I could earn more the easy way and use the money to take the pictures I wanted to take, not the ones some editor preferred to see.

But the bug bit again recently and while I have no intent to make any money from getting my stuff in print (and the odds of doing so are, let’s face it, pretty remote in an internet world), my ego can now afford it. And as first impressions are 100% of the battle with photographs, when that editor opens my envelope of snaps I want them to say ‘wow’. Glossy paper does that.

So the medium, not the content, may be the message, but if it ghastly glossy paper helps get me into print, so be it. Just don’t expect these prints to be gracing the walls at home any time soon.

This is my first experience of using HP Premium Glossy. The inked areas are matte whereas highlights where no ink was deposited retain the original high gloss of the paper. However, after drying for a couple of hours the inked areas take on a good gloss, although not as high gloss as virgin paper. So it may explain why some later printers now use a glossing agent to restore high gloss to a print – the DJ90 does not have this technology.

A useful Lightroom technique

When I make large prints on the HP DJ90 dye printer, it’s usually strictly a ‘one at a time’ sort of thing. The prints are 18″ x 24″ (‘Super A4’ is the uninformative European description), which is as large as my HP will go and, after an obligatory 24 hour ‘drying’ period to let the ink dyes set, they are dry mounted and framed.

However, with my new found determination to get some work published again, smaller prints were called for – 9″ x 12″- and these just happen to divide an 18″ x 24″ sheet into four equal parts.

Rather than cut up the paper first and then do four print runs, it proved just as easy to make one combined print job and do the cutting last.

First I went into the Library module of LR2 then clicked on Library->New Collection. I dragged the candidates into this new collection and oriented them all vertically (Photo->Rotate Left/Right). These candidates had been processed and cropped just so, so that no further adjustments would be required.

Into the Print module of LR2, where I clicked on Tempate Browser->Lightroom Templates->2×2 Cells. Lightroom comes with this template installed. Moving the mouse cursor to the base of the screen to disclose the filmstrip – which I have set to hiding mode so it is ordinarily invisible – I simply highlighted four contiguous images, which then appear on the print ‘canvas’.

The screen now looked like this:

Then it’s off to the races, printing in the usual way. It takes a lot less time to do than to explain and you have the benefit of applying the same print settings to all pictures on the ‘canvas’. Of course if you process the originals poorly, then you may end up with four clunkers, but I seem to have lucked out.

Note the personalized nameplate at the top left of the Lightroom pane in the last picture above. You can do this by going to Lightroom->Identity Plate Setup.