bill_t__new_mexico_

Photo contests too often accomplish their goals. Recovery is long and painful.

Photo contests are generally run by pedantic tyrants seeking to discourage genuine talent, encourage syncophancy, and establish themselves as Little Caesars. A specified size and mounting technique is an early hint, there's more to follow...

 

Screw 'em, exhibit your photographs first at restaurants, craft fairs, and such, and then at galleries. Even local school Christmas fairs are a good place to start. Cast off all rules, exhibit whatever feeds your soul, within the limits of common decency of course. The public has better taste than contest czars, and will reward good work with hard cash rather than brownie points.

 

But if you simply must...Luster surfaces often give the jazziest looking prints, that counts for a lot in these circumstances. Be sure to crank up the color saturation as far as possible without damaging your vision. Saturation wins contests, it's a well established fact. As for cardboard, maybe they mean decent quality mounting board for dry mounting, or foam core for adhesive mounting. But be careful, you can easily break a Rule by choosing the wrong materials.

There was really nothing wrong with the original. To my eye, all the "fixes" look contrived by comparison. Gimmicky post processing is too often used to sort of apologize for a perceived inadequacy.

 

For pictures of this type, by far the best fix is to reshoot until you get something you like. But in fact your original does a nice job of portraying something interesting about the subject's personality, and the variations only take away from that.

I often use Premium Luster for large panoramic prints on a 7800. If offers the best color and contrast fidelity when compared the my calibrated monitor. However, it does not produce the "fine art print" look of matte paper that some buyers prefer. Nevertheless, I like Luster a lot for it's accurate representation of the image and it is remarkably cheap in large rolls. And I dislike it for being so thin! It's hard to mount or even handle 24" wide prints, the slightest mistake will produce a kink. It's much more manageable at 13" and would be a good pick for the 2400. And as someone else mentioned give it 5 days to air dry before covering with glass or Plexiglass in a frame, otherwise the glass will fog from glycol outgassing.

 

I just got a roll of Innova Art Fibaprint Gloss which is much thicker and for which I have high hopes. Haven't had a chance to test it yet, but others have recommended it highly.

 

Rolls can be cut down on a large table saw or band saw. Fine-pitch "finishing" style blades produce very clean cuts if handled by a pro, who will be likely to have an adapter to cut cylinders. These are the kinds of blades that make clean cross cuts in plywood and laminates. You need to tape the roll very tight before cutting, and you will lose several feet to scraping, clamping impressions, and tape marks. Even so it's still much cheaper to cut down 44 inch x 100 foot rolls than buy over-priced Epson 30-something foot rolls.

 

PS...don't try to cut rolls on a power saw unless you know what you're doing! They will spin dangeroulsy out of control unless they are clamped in a proper adapter!

 

All you need to feed the paper roll to the printer is something about as sophisticated as a paper-towel dispenser. Cover the roll and the path to the printer with a large piece of paper to prevent dust settling on the paper surface. I read on a forum where somebody attached a towel rack to the wall just above the printer to hold the rolls, I'm sure this would work fine. In any case lightly tighten up the roll after each print, even the 7800 requires this!

After trying a botom-end Spyder 2 package I bought an Eye One 2. My CRT has a non-linear green response, the Eye One corrected it perfectly whereas the Spyder2 generated profile was still distinctly green. For most monitors both require about the same amount of user input, although the Eye One 2 can also calibrate certain monitors like my LaCie Electron 22 completely automatically.

I usually print about 55" wide, the biggest size that works out with standard 40"x60" mats and foamcore. This results in heights between 16" to 22", all of which fit well into a 27"x60" frame size.

 

PTGui is an outstanding stitching program. It allows as much "hands on" as experienced user could want, but also has a wizard mode for newbys. It is also the fastest stitcher I have used, no small thing when dealing with giant stitches.

 

PT Assembler is another great stitching program, it has a slightly steeper learning curve but can take stitching about as far as it can go.

 

Photoshop has some basic stitching capability but still leaves something to be desired.

 

If you just want to dabble at stitching, Autostitch.exe can be downloaded for free. It only handles .jpg's, gets confused about frames with only blank sky, but is otherwise almost 100% automatic and the output is surprisingly good.

 

http://www.ptgui.com

 

http://www.tawbaware.com/ptasmblr.htm

 

http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html

Those are all digital stitches shot with a D70 or D2X. Most are in the range of 70 to 300+ megapixels, typically 1 to 3 rows of 8 to 20 images each. Several are more than 10,000 pixels on the short dimension.

 

Yes, good light is the thing, I usually shoot just a few minutes before sunset. Biggest problem is getting all the images shot before the light changes too much or disappears!

 

Workflow is through ACR to PTGui in .tif format for the basic "ground" set of exposures which also establishes a set of stitching control points. Then I go back to ACR to either reprocess the images for the sky, or process a darker set of "sky" images shot at the same camera positions with automatic bracketing, which are run through PTGui with the control points from the ground set. Sky and ground versions are merged in PS using layers and a mask. You gotta like 1+ gigabyte PS files to do this kind of work, and patience is a must. Come on Adobe, where's that 64 bit PS?

 

It's worth it though, giant ultra-sharp prints are marvels to behold. People go gaga picking out details from the really high reso ones, like people sitting on a rock a 1/4 mile away, someone standing in the door of a distant house, etc... You're gonna like that printer!

Thanks David, I'll try it out!

There is no practical difference, except that when in doubt Apple generally goes for style over function, and Mac users worry excessively about clothes. Most of the successful still photogs I know use PC's, and PC's dominate in areas like motion picture visual effects.

 

The little clip posted above demonstrates Apple's yearning for the good old days, when Apple really did have something special to offer. But since that time Apple has inherited a lot more from PC's than the other way around.

Hello Lee -- I just hit the 400' mark on my 7800 paper usage, about 80% coverage on 24" paper.

 

According to the printer's statistics it has used 1180 ml of ink so far (presumably all colors combined). I don't know if that number included the original charging, but even so that works out to very roughly 1.9ml per printed square foot, which is (again roughly) about $0.80 per square foot of ink coverage. In any case it's a pleasure working with the larger cartridges...swapouts are now sort of milestone events rather than constant nuisances.

 

The 7800 has been giving me just great prints, I'm really pleased with it. No hassles so far, although like any printer you have to be attentive about keeping the heads clean. My best advice is to let it clean the heads when it wants to and always use the automatic mode. My panoramic prints are selling faster and easier at the larger sizes, my investment was more than worth it. "Big" seems to connect well with those who have large bare spaces above their sofas.

 

David, could you please describe the Innova F surface a bit. With the "F" I just assumed it was super glossy, but is it actually something towards mat?

FWIW, with my 7800 (and other printers I have used) I sometimes saw this on thicker papers when printing at 1440 DPI. On some of the earliest manufactured Silver Rag rolls I used, the surface texture was somewhat uneven and I saw cases where banding would come and go as the texture varied. That problems has since been corrected Museo.

 

At 2880 DPI, I have never seen banding on any medium. Also, printing at 2880 DPI will "cover up" a few clogged nozzles, whereas 1440 DPI needs to have all nozzles firing perfectly.

 

In regard to Roger's comments about test patterns, I have occasionally printed nozzle checks with only 1 or 2 missing segments, then run the Automatic head cleaning. Quite often on the subsequent automatic printouts I would see several missing segments which would be take three or more additional iterations to clear! Since then I have always allowed the printer to do a "Power Cleaning" when it wanted, and have had no further problems.

Epson Ultrasmooth Fine Art is on a slightly warm base without the intense brightness of EEM. I haven't used it recently but it's a great paper in its own right if you're not looking for sparkly highlights.

 

"Velvet" well describes the very fine, just-less-than-smooth texture of those types of surfaces. Epson Velvet Fine Art is extremely delicate as a consequence, very easily sleeked.

Check out the new Epson 3800 before you buy the 4800! Unfortunately, they get you on the inks, but the initial outlay is less.

 

I print large panos on Museo Silver Rag and Epson Premium Luster rolls. The Silver Rag is so thick it is almost as though it is mounted on thin carboard. For framing it can be safely hinge mounted with strain relieved tape hangar strips every foot or so. Premium Luster is so thin it must be mounted on some backing, I am currently using DryTac "SureTac" adhesive rolls. Overall Luster is much cheaper per the same print size, even counting the adhesive material, but the hassle of mounting makes it a little more time consuming. It's hard to beat Premium Luster for color and overall image fidelity, which is probably a function of the excellent Atkinson profiles availble for it compared to the rather so-so manufacturer profile for Silver Rag.

 

BTW Enhanced Matte is still an awfully nice looking paper if you care to go through the exercise of adjusting your image to work well with it. I have not seen the yellowing so often reported, but I live in a rather dry environment.

Right now today with XP, the most RAM that the operating system can use is 3gb, assuming you have invoked the /3gb switch. This lets you give PS something like 2gb, if you still want to leave reasonable headroom to running other applications at the same time. This makes it practical to edits files in the order of 400+ megabytes without slowing to a crawl.

 

There is an important practical consideration. Most motherboards only have 4 RAM slots, which means you will need at least 1gb sticks to reach 3gb, for an actual 4gb in the system. Also, a few motherboards offer 6 ram slots, but in truth few are actually stable with 6 sticks installed due to electrical bus loading.

 

Presumably Vista will let us use a lot more RAM, so if you are going to buy more RAM you might consider 2gb sticks as an optimistic investment in The Future.

 

Here's some tech stuff straight from Adobe...

 

http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/320005.html

oops, sorry Anna, replied before reading fully. That's the only 1 I know about.

Lots of new high quality printers in the pipeline now, but not quite on the shelves. You could wait a few months and check out the new crop. However, today you probably couldn't go too wrong with the tried & true, fairly well debugged Epson R2400. Don't forget that printer happiness is equal measures of machine and good technique, blah blah blah...

Scroll down to "Aly's Vintage".

 

http://www.atncentral.com/download.htm

Well, if you REALLY want a wow, get a roll of 17" something and print 'em BIG! Size really does matter!

I find bare white expanses of papers like Premium Luster and glossy papers to be simply overwhelming see next to any normal matte paper, when the print's white surface is visible. I sometimes increase the canvas size past the image, select only the newly added area, then fill is with something like RGB 248 246 244. That gives a sort of off-white, slightly cream color that blends well into most real mattes. You can texture it if you like.

 

Crescent Artic White is pretty darned white. So is the whitest Rising Museum Matte Board, especially considering that it's archival...sorry can't remember the number but it's quite dazzling. But such big super-white expanses around the print are hard on the eyes and can make a darkish print look murky.

Thanks for that writeup Marc!

 

Some time ago by accident I submitted two sets of panoramic images to PTGui at the same time. They were about 10 images each of the same scene, but shot with different yaw and slightly different pitch. PTGui lined them both up perfectly, with nearly-the-same images registered over each other on individual layers, all based on 1 set of control points. In PS I could have easily separated the layers into separate panos. Haven't tried it recently, but it worked great that time!

Dunno, this may be CS2 only. It'll knock your socks off.

 

Select a background color you would like to see radiating from your subject's lighter tones. Try white or pink to start, these work well with all of humankind's many hues. Experiment later.

 

Filter->Distort->Diffuse Glow. Try to restrain yourself. If this just looks weird, you've got the wrong background color, that's the key. For more control, do this on an image copied to a new layer on top of your original, then mix with the opacity slider.

1. Way overdone.

 

2. She'll love it, and you too!

I've had experience with other thick papers. One way to avoid it is to very delicately bend down the trailing edge corners. It's not so much a bend, as giving the paper corners a bias to curve downwards, doesn't take much.

Doggone that sRGB anyway!

 

The best service might be one that would agree to give you the printing profile they use in their printer and paper. This way you can at least get some inkling of what colors will get clipped and shifted by using CS2's "View->Proof Setup" screen. *Theoretically* you can then modify your image to avoid such clipping, or at least minimize the surprises.

Well, if you select the "wrong" paper type in the last Epson printer driver screen you can control how thick the ink is laid down. For instance "Enhanced Matte" lays down more ink that the glossy choices. But as you pointed out, do this at your own soggy risk! This is probably most useful for achieving delicate shades, since too-heavy ink applications have a way of looking pretty ugly.