scott_eaton5

This is entirely wrong, and I'm tired of arguing with you about it. There is a big difference between a $80 desktop printer and a $75,000 LightJet or Lambda printer and front end software. In the later case the lab is investing in a commercial market segment and doesn't have time to play with DPI settings in photo files. When a professional client is having a 12 foot mural made and paying several grand for it they don't mickey mouse with DPI settings in photoshop . You really think that guy is going resize his file to 300dpi native in a mural that size? A large format InkJet printer on the hand *does not* come with high end RIP software because of the drastic difference in price and market segment. Most small time inkjet / vinyl guys are going to making vector based advertisemenst that will rescale native anyways on the basic of vector conversion. It's typically a volume business. A guy running a 36" Epson in his basement likely won't invest five digits in software. Do you even know what a RIP is? Do you even know what a LightJet is? Lambda? Inkjet printers which you keep talking about are the exception in the commercial photo printing world. In the case of the RA-4 printers you want to present them with RAW data...not interpolated crap in Photoshop because the RIP on the front end of these beasts will do a far better job than Photoshop or any plug you have. The shop I have metal prints made paid $10,000 for their LightJet RIP alone which they also use for Metal Print dye sub printer. You can easily see the difference vs having Photshop interpolate and they won't accept upscaled files from clients. Also, newer Lambdas are something like 400dpi. LightJets and Fuji Frontiers around 300'ish native. So, even if you upscaled the file to 300dpi in Photoshop that's not enough data for a lambda and the printer has to upscale to native resolution anyways. 300dpi is just an arbritary number that's deprecated in photoshop. It could be 287 or 323...doesn't matter. You are also wrong with setting a lower end DPI limit. I go well below 200dpi all the time with metal and RA-4 digital prints and they look fantastic. With inkjet I don't because it's much higher mechanical resolution and the there's less diffusion not to mention the front end RIP is rarely there. Rodeo_Joe is also correct on Printers doing it native, although the printer itself isn't doing it but the driver in front.

Canon AE-1. It wasn't necessarily a bad camera, just over-rated. I know they AE-1 heralded in some manufacturing innovations, but it also introduced a host of superfluos features that other manufacturers soon followed. The camera sucked 6volt batteries like they were jolly ranchers. It only had shutter priority mode, which is the most useless exposure mode for enthusiasts unlike AE priority where you can dynamically turn the aperture ring while looking through the view finder and present yourself options. It wasn't very durable. Sucky 60/sec flash. Terrible shutter / mirror recoil that compared to my later purchased FE-2 felt like an AK-47 and made the camera impossible to handhold while the FE-2 could go down to rangefinder shutter speeds and deliver clear shots.

You don't want the resample box checked when you upsize the print unless the lab has instructions to do this. I was going by memory but Ed is correct - it's the resample option (should be unchecked) after resize. By checking the resample box and increasing print dimensions Photoshop is now interpolating and adding information in a way that's rarely as good as the lab printer can. Commercial labs I get murals done at won't even accept upscaled files. They'll punt them back and tell me to let their printer do the upscale. Again, most commercial labs are using RA-4 digital printers for volume enlargements, and the front end RIP on a Lambda or LightJet or Frontier will do a much better job than having photoshop rescale. Big reason these printers are so popular is they upscale anything to their native 300-400 dpi to huge dimensions and it holds up well. Ink-jet is a different matter. They are primarly used at lower volume / fine art type shops and sometimes they require you to rescale to nothing less than 240dpi ahead of time. This should be on their main site for instructions. Funny enough but RA-4 and Inkjet based labs are kind of divided like the Hatfields and McCoys with each lab thinking the other guy's technology printer is junk. Unfortunately the net result is confusing consumers.

Make sure when you resize your image in Photoshop to 30x45" you uncheck the option box to resize the image. You then choose a fixed crop box at the specific size in inches. Photoshop should then do it correctly. If 'Resize' is left checked Photoshop will just rescale to whatever size you indicated at the default dpi (usually 300) and you will get a 30x45 at 300 dpi with massive amounts of fake information (interpolated) added. You do not want this. The lab should be doing this, especially if it's a Lambda / LightJet RA4 type printer, which is the most common type for online enlargements. They should also have no problem with a 30-45" file from a 24mb capture provided it's sharp and artifact free.

Streaking caused by aggressive agitation across sprocket holes are one of the most common problems with hand processed black and white. I can also induce the problem via putting a nitrogen burst pipe too close to film reels. I also used to work with these 4x5 racks that had perforated holes about 1/4 inch apart for developer flow, and they produced a similiar problem as 35mm sprocket holes. The issue is also strongly dependant on films you use. Kodak Panatomic -X and Plus-X were the most sensitive while the newer Tmax films are fairly resilient to it. First time I used those 4x5 racks with a customers plus-X sheet film the streaks were so bad he had to re-shoot. Made sure I agitated at 1/4 the speed next time. There's a reason most commercial labs switched to tube development / Wing Lynch processors for B&W because the rotary action of development never caused developer to traverse sprocket holes and hence you got really smooth density uniformity across 35mm. The way my zone system college instructors taught is the way I suggest doing it; as you invert the developer tank rotate it at least one turn. This breaks up the vortex pattern to a great extent although if you're using a film prone to the problem it will be tough to eliminate completely. We shot neutral grey cards and were actually graded on how uniform our frames were in college, which was good technique to learn in the long run. The fact you have not experienced the problem tells me you've been lucky enough to avoid those films and developers prone to it. Just quickly inverting a development tank is asking for trouble. If anything is dumb it's the use of acetic acid acid / stop bath / vinegar. Only a brief rinse of water between developer / fix is required to normalize pH.

If you are using color filter within the normal gamut capture of the sensor then in theory you should be able to get the same effect with channel mixing in photoshop and are wasting your time. Using a #25 red filter for instance is no different than tossing out the green and blue channels with one exception: the heavy red filter doesn't take into account bayer AA filtering and you can get some nasty aliasing. So, tossing out the green / blue channels in a photo editor should yield slightly better results than a filter on a digital camera. In practice it's a not so clean cut. Digital camera sensors aren't perfect bandpass filters and have their own limits. Why I constantly harp we need more capture channels than RGB at the sensor level, especially to help keep red/orange/magenta blowout in check (cough 60D / 7D cough). With a milder filter the camera's white balance will try to balance it out. If it's too extreme you'll get all kinds of weird crossover problems.

Unless you are printing really big or doing heavy cropping sensor noise on newer cameras might as well not exist anyways. If it does chromatic noise is likely what you are seeing because it's pretty ugly. There are plenty of times flash is desireable because ambient light, even though 'grain free' just isn't pleasing. I used to shoot wedding receptions and other informals with my 35mm Nikon gear and used a SB-16B which had the ability to bounce and fill flash at the same time with dead on exposure. With a 8-10' white ceiling I'll take those shots over straight ambient regardless of grain/noise anyday.

One of the trends in photography that used to drive me utter bonkers and has faded (but not yet entirely gone away) was the fad in the 80's and 90 's of taking small contact prints or polaroid transfers and mounted them with a giant white matte. So, you have this little 4x5" image surrounded by five square feet of white board not to mention the frame. Pretentious and trying to draw attention is an under statement, and there was a long standing stigma that any photograph not mounted and framed with a big white matte was only good for your fridge door. Those art snobs have steadily died off, or dropped over with coronaries when they saw the first floating color 30x40 metal transfer or acrylic prints :-) I just want to see somebody's pictures...in print or digital. I'm also always the first to point out some body's work I think would look exceptional given a metal or acrylic treatment as well just knowing they'll beam when they see the final product. I have found I prefer to keep my B&W work more conservative and only displayed when matted and framed given I'm very meticulous about the final product and only use the best fine art printers.

Once you get up to and beyond 18mp or so AA starts to not matter as much. Much more of an issue in the days of sub 10mp sensors. What you shoot is also relevant. Portrait or product shooters are obviously going to be fussy when it comes to moire rearing its ugly head on fabrics. When you shoot a lot of landscapes like I do I can do without AA. Medium format and larger transparency films, especially long density range ones like EPP easily match digital in terms of being overly clinical when it comes to skin tones. Magazine printing helped mask the problem, but drum scans showed how brutally detailed MF trans could be. Air brush anyone? Its 35mm and print films that set a standard for fluffy skin tones. Don't want to retouch as much? Then shoot Vericolor III or Reala. Of course everybody's skin tones all looked the same.

Glen mentioned a really good tip before spending money on a big enlargement, and that's doing a crop test. I do the same before making a large print and want to make sure I'm not upscaling too much. You spend $2-3 on a test 8x10 at the final size and DPI as your full mural will be and you can view exactly what the quality will be, Worth it in my book. Good tip Glen.

I hate responding to necro threads revivals, especially ones where film pundits quote stupid remarks about digital simply because they can't take decent pictures with digital and need an excuse bordering on middle ages alchemy, but in keeping with technical accuracy... The problem with DPM measurements with color film is that resolution is not linear throughout the density range of film, especially print film. With print film resolution, which is basically measures as monochromatic density difference with split pairs differs greatly from dmin to dmax. In plain English the low density areas (low mids to shadows) can't record as much information as higher mid tone ranges where the dye clouds have their best ratio of density. High density areas of print film (highlights) quickly start to block up and also lose the ability to maintain split pairs. Print film, particularly low contrast ones like portait films might have a very long exposure range exceeding 12 stops, but the amount of actual information in the extremes becomes severely compromised. White noise is not information. Color slide film is a little better in this regard thanks to it's higher density range. However, you still have the problem with the extremes losing information. Highlights in slide film consist of film stain (nothing). There is no information there. Digital capture is far more linear in this respect because the sensors and processing are designed to be linear. Your final file might be 24-bit or your working space, but at sensor level bit depths are much higher. Much higher than any print film working beyond a 10 stop brightness range that's for sure. I have 4k by 6k drum scans of the much heralded RG-25 and my 60D yields more information in a 20x30 print (especially luminance data) , and unlike the 60D file I have to thrash the RG-25 scan with de-noise filers to reduce grain and trade off information even more. There's a reason pros before digital shot MF and LF, and that's because 35mm is a terrible format in regards to pulling information from, optically or with a drum scanner. Because somebody needs a desperate bone in the fight against digital and quotes anything they can find doesn't change how bad 35mm is in terms of commercial reproduction.

If the lab you are using is worth a salt and these are RA4 based digital prints (most are) then there's no need to upsize. All those printers have excellent RIPs that upscale seamlessly as long as you have a tack sharp file devoid of artifacts. 100dpi is no problem for a big print or mural provided again it's a good file. I do it all the time. For inkjet printing dpi is another story, but most of those fine art printers will warn you about dpi ahead of time.

Hasn't been an i7 made that didn't excel at this task. Mine is 5years old and chews through anything I throw at it thanks to high core efficiency. If at all possible try to load your program and apps on an SSD and use the spinner for bulk storage. The performance improvements are dramatic and SSD prices are due for yet another drop.

Spring Hastas.

To be blunt, if I'm trying to 'future project' and want the best document to remember a person or event by I shoot video. I don't try to fool myself that a still is going to be cherished more than an MP4. My family has boxes of pictures and slides of relatives I lost decades ago, and I would trade every one of them for a few minutes of smartphone video to hear their voice and watch them move. When shooting still for pure art purposes and there's a sales intent I just try to stay away from things than are cliche', including technique. One of the best aspects of Pre 60's photography (when smaller formats and unstable dye technology started to take hold) is that those larger film formats hold massive amounts of detail and tone, and that helps give the image so much longevity. JD's shot is a superb example of this. I've always been a detail nut and try to incorporate as much detail as I can in an image I want to stand out and still be pointed out in 20 years.