The Online Photographer

This week's column by Ctein

While slaving away in the darkroom to finish the printing for the last, blow-out TOP dye transfer print sale (see the footnote* for a status report), I started musing on how many hours I've spent doing dye transfer, total. I can figure that out. By the time I started doing dye transfer printing in 1975, I was doing pretty good record-keeping. (Figuring out how much time I've spent on all photographic printing and film processing would be more difficult, because I put in a lot of time before I started keeping detailed records. A project for another day.)

First question for myself: how many photographs have I printed as dye transfers? My own portfolio totals 300. Here's the very first photograph I ever made a dye transfer print of:

Off the cuff, I don't have quite as precise a number for the printing I've done for others. I could figure it out by digging through a bunch of disconnected records, but that'd be work. I'm sure it's at least 200 photographs. I'd be awfully surprised if it was 300. So let's call it 250, which means I've printed a total of 550 photographs (+/– 10%).

The time it takes to print a photograph as a dye transfer varies a lot. Sometimes it's been as little as four hours of darkroom time until I'm ready to pull a finished print. Sometimes it's been a dozen. 6–7 hours sounds about right, for the average. Give or take, oh say, an hour. Multiplied by the number of photographs, I'm looking at 3,500 hours (+/– 20%) of darkroom time.

That's just until I'm ready to make finished prints. Rarely did I make only one print of a photograph, either for myself or for clients. Again, no precise numbers unless I want to dig through too many records. I settled into the habit of making four prints of my photographs (one for the portfolio and three for sale). Clients rarely ordered fewer than two prints.

In my early days, I made fewer than four prints; conversely, sometimes clients would want a lot more than two prints. Plus, there are the times when I'd sell all three of my photograph's prints and make more. I'll guess 3.5 finished prints, average, for each photograph I've printed. (That doesn't count the TOP sales; we'll get to those.) Multiplying up, let's call it 1,900 prints. So, once I've got to the point of making those finished prints, how much time do they take? Well, the darkroom time isn't too bad, typically half an hour per print, and that's pretty reliable. Rounded off, I'm up to 4,500 hours of darkroom time.

Ah, but, there's the spotting and finishing. As I said in the footnote, those take up a lot more time than printing. This really varies from photograph to photograph; some require essentially none of this and others take all day. On average, it's a solid hour and change, so there's maybe 2,200 hours of non-darkroom time.

Now, what about those TOP print sales? They're exceptional. I spend a lot more time getting to the point of being able to make a first print, because I want the printing to be as easy as possible and exactly right, and I also make multiple sets of matrices, for when I screw one set up in the course of printing the run. So, maybe 100 hours of darkroom time.

Smaller prints take a lot less time to spot and finish than big ones and Mike and I were careful to choose the prints in our previous sales to be ones that I knew would take very little spotting and finishing time. That's how I could afford to make the prices so low. I know I spent less than 40 minutes printing and finishing each of the 1,000 small dye transfer prints I sold through TOP. Let's call it 500 hours of darkroom time, 200 hours of finishing time. Total so far: 5,000 hours in the darkroom, 2,400 hours out.

I've omitted two things—the very end and the very beginning of my dye transfer career. The very end is, of course, the TOP sale I'm currently working on. Like the earlier sales, it's atypical, but in different ways. 150–200 hours of darkroom time (that includes the considerable pre-sale prep) and an equal amount (I hope!) of spotting and finishing time.

Now I'm up to 5,200 hours of darkroom time and 2,600 hrs. of non-darkroom time (unless I screwed up my addition) with a 20% margin of error.

It's difficult for me to estimate how much time I spent in the first few years. My routines weren't standardized and there was a steep learning curve I was climbing solo, filled with trial and error. I can't look to my volume of finished work for a good estimate, although my records say I printed about 10 photographs a year in the early years. Probably the best reference point I have is the 3-year interval from when I started (1975), and when I went back to Rochester to see Kodak's dye transfer experts, Frank McLaughlin and Bob Speck (1978). At that point, I could reasonably say I was proficient, since they declared that they had never seen better dye transfer prints than mine. (I know better printers than me, but who am I to turn down a compliment!) It's likely any printing I did after that would fall under the earlier analyses.

Now comes the wild-ass guessing. I was most definitely not doing dye transfer full-time. I'm sure I wasn't putting anywhere near 1,000 hours a year into it: I didn't have the time and I didn't have the money. It's an expensive process! It's hard to imagine I was spending less than 500 hours a year on it, but maybe. Still, I'll generously guess 1,000 hours of darkroom time and 500 hours of non-darkroom time, on top of what I previously figured in.

So, there you have it! Thirty-eight years of dye transfer printing roughly equals 6,200 hours** of darkroom time and 3,100 hours of non-darkroom time.

The import of all of this? Thinking about such things keeps me from getting too bored while rolling out prints in the darkroom.

©2013 by Ctein, all rights reserved

*I know many of you are curious about my progress, so here's where that stands. I'm 90% done with the printing but less than halfway done with the spotting and finishing, which takes longer. And the shipping part? Not even begun. I may not be able to have everything shipped by June 17. If there's anyone out there who wouldn't mind getting their prints later (shipped by the end of July, I promise), I wouldn't mind hearing from you, via email: [email protected].

[**A standard work-year (eight hours a day times five days a week times 52 weeks a year minus two weeks annually for vacation) is considered to be 2,000 hours. —Ed.]

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robert: "6200+3100 hrs = 9300 hours. Seven hundred hours short of mastery and you are giving up dye transfer?? but you are so close!  :-) "

[In case you might be wondering, Robert is referring to the notion that it takes 10,000 hours of practice before true mastery is achieved, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell's 2008 book Outliers: The Story of Success. —Ed.]

This week's column by Ctein

One (of many) things I find interesting about printing is that some photographs demand to be printed a certain way and others seem to accommodate a substantial range of different "looks." I have no doubt that this is a function of my artistic mood as much as the photograph. But, still, there are some photographs that I see the need to print in exactly the same way, day after day, if they're going to look right to me. Others, my opinion changes about.

This used to bother me. Eventually I realized that there is no objective arbiter of rightness; it's whatever I think looks good. If a particular photograph looks best to me printed five different ways on five different days, then probably all of those are right for some legitimate value of "right."

Two of the photographs in my recent dye transfer sale illustrate that phenomenon. The "Roses against Black Stone Wall" photograph only looks right if I print it with precisely the right brightnesses; much lighter or darker than that and it's wrong. (Who judges right and wrong? I do; I'm the artist and I'm the only one with standing.) But the hue of that wall can go all over the place. Some days I like it closer to neutral (figure 1); some days I like it very cold (figure 2).

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

(Note: the illustrations are just that, illustrations of differences. There's no point in telling me you like figure 1 better than figure 2; you're looking at lousy JPEGs rendered with lousy publishing software. They don't look anything like the prints, and it's the prints I'm talking about. But I gotta give you something to look at, don't I?)

"Niagara Falls" is a different case. I'm pretty particular about the color balance in this one. Oh, a few CC one way or another from the particular blue-cyan I want looks good, but it can't go very far or the clouds end up appearing to be too cyan-green or too pinkish-white. But, brightness? Yeah, it's a high-key photograph, but which particular high-key I think looks best is all over the map. I'd say there's a good half-stop variation in print density in the way I've printed that photograph over time, and there's a pretty significant difference just from day-to-day. Some days I go in to print it and I think it should be really, really light (figure 3). Other days I think it should be distinctly darker (figure 4). And that's under constant bright incandescent lighting; start messing with that and I suppose anything is possible.

Fig. 3

Fig. 4

I used to try to print exactly the same way every day, matching the previous day's prints. Now I just print it however it looks best to me. Yeah, this is lessening of consistency, but who says I was right the previous day...or even more right than I am today? I can't!

It's just one more reason why fine printing is an art and a craft and not a science.

©2013 by Ctein, all rights reserved

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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John Camp: "Years ago, when I first started collecting photography, I decided to buy a print of Ansel Adams' 'Moonrise.' Adams printed several hundred of these, which was good for me, because it kept the prices relatively low for what was already seen as a classic photograph. I then got involved in a protracted discussion with a couple of different gallery people about getting a 'good' version of the print, and wound up buying one that was supplied through the Weston Gallery of Carmel. A 'good' print had to do with the treatment of some very subtle cloud layers against the dark sky, and it seems that even as good a printer as Adams was, some of the cloud results were favored by collectors over others. I've look at a lot of different versions of the images now, besides the one I own, and I can see differences, but they're very, very subtle. Whether he had a particular vision on one day or the next, or if he just had a range of acceptable prints, I don't know...but I do know that some collectors look at these things, and what they think may be different than what Adams thought, and all of that can affect the price of the prints...."

Mike Haspert: "You said,'Yeah, this is lessening of consistency, but who says I was right the previous day...or even more right than I am today? I can't!' Now there's a thought that fills some big shoes. Walt Whitman said, 'Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.' I believe I speak for many when I say. 'Thanks for the free lesson.'"

This week's column by Ctein

Two disappointed readers who missed out on last week's blow-out dye transfer sale asked me if I'd be making digital prints of "Roses Against Black Stone Wall" and "Niagara Falls" in the future. I won't be able to say for certain until I try, but the prospects are very good for the latter and problematical for the former. Why is that?

It goes to the inherent strengths of the two media. Something that dye transfer has uniquely going for it is the huge density range it can render. It's possible to achieve a D-max of 3.0 if the subject demands it. Furthermore, the medium is more linear in the shadows than conventional darkroom materials. That means that dye transfer prints can hold more and deeper shadow detail and produce better tonal separation in the shadow detail that falls within the range of other print media.

For many photographs, even most, this is not a critical issue; the quality of the shadow detail doesn't make or break the photograph. Sometimes, it does. Within a few years of taking up dye transfer printing, I was photographing with that in mind. I knew I could print an exceptionally long exposure range and rich but open shadows, so I didn't hesitate to photograph subjects that would demand that. For example, I started photographing in the American desert under the midday sun, a time avoided by most color photographers, because I could hold both highlight and shadow detail in my prints.

I definitely made the photographs in my Jewels of Kilauea series with dye transfer in mind. All that rich, black shiny pahoehoe just soaks up the light and provides a great backdrop to the iridescent flashes of color that I'm photographing. The problem is, many of the compositions fall apart without that impression of intense shadow detail you could fall into. Figure 1, for example. I've tried printing that as a digital print. So far it's been a failure. The photograph doesn't work well without those three dimensional shadows.

Fig. 1.

A lot of the photographs in the series are like that. Probably has something to do with why those prints haven't sold very well; I can't reproduce that quality in a JPEG any more than I can in a digital print. Consequently, the online presentation doesn't show those photographs in a good light.

All of this is subject to change, of course. There's no fundamental reason future digital printing technologies and displays can't give me as rich and long-range a rendering as dye transfer does. But at the present time they come up lacking. I'd say that approximately 20% of the photographs in my portfolio just won't work as digital prints, for the present.

"Roses" may turn out to be one of them. I won't know if it depends upon that shadow detail richness and three-dimensionality until I try printing it without that. I may be able to come up with an interpretation in a digital print that entirely satisfies me. If not, I'll be disappointed but not surprised.

At the highlight end of the tonal scale, though, digital printing is massively superior to anything I can do in the darkroom. In this case, though, it's not about any inherently superior tone or color rendition in the digital print media—it's all about the control.

Highlights are very difficult to precisely control in the darkroom, regardless of the process. It's inherent in the nature of silver halide print materials; there is always a severe rolloff in contrast in the extreme highlights. Consequently, it's very hard to separate delicate highlight detail from the paper-base white. In addition, the usual darkroom controls and masking methods, even with a process like dye transfer, give you fairly poor and crude control over the exact shape of the highlight curve. While precise tonal placement is possible in midtones, with highlights you're substantially stuck with what the print hands you once you've established the overall exposure and contrast.

The curves tools in digital printing make it possible to shape highlight tonal rendition with exquisite precision, independent of any other control you exercise over the print. Most notably, it's possible to get a linear rendition of tones and colors that preserves both delicacy and separation much better than in a darkroom print.

Fig. 2

A photograph like figure 2 is a good example of one that turned out much better as a digital print than a dye transfer. Not that the dye transfers don't look fine, but the digital print looks even better. Getting exactly the right tonality and tonal separation in those clouds so that it properly mirrors the forms in the hills, which is what makes this photograph work, succeeds better in the digital print than in the dye transfer.

Fig. 3

Extreme highlights exist in places you wouldn't think, for example in figure 3. Colors that are close to primaries, like the greens and yellows in this photograph, actually depend on the quality of the highlight control. The reason for that is that colors that are very close to primaries contain only small amounts of the complementary color. For example, where the greens are most intense and delicate in this photograph, there is almost no magenta density; the precise quality of the greens is entirely dependent upon the highlight rendition of the magentas.

Figures 4 through 6 show the red, green, and blue channels for this photograph; they would correspond to cyan, magenta, and yellow ink or dye densities in a print. Notice how high key much of the green image is, especially in the yellow-green grass at the base of the hills. Getting these colors and tones exactly right requires being able to control the highlight curve shape for the magenta image very precisely, and that's extremely difficult in the darkroom. By itself the dye transfer print looks wonderful, but placed side-by-side with a digital print the colors in the dye transfer print look cruder and less real.

Fig. 4. Red channel.

Fig. 5. Green channel.

Fig. 6. Blue channel.

What's best?
Some of you may be wondering, apropos the discussions of a few weeks ago, how this relates to the art market.

It doesn't. The art market is not remotely driven by measures of visual quality, either objective or subjective, nor by the artist's intent. The concerns of this column have nothing to do with making prints that sell better or for more money.

My dye transfer prints, both of my own photographs and others', sell substantially better than digital prints of the same photographs, even when by every visual measure, and even by the artist's own vision, the digital prints are superior. Does this distress me? Let me rephrase the question—

Does it bother me that people would rather buy a much more expensive print of mine? You get two guesses, and the first one doesn't count.

There's art, and then there's commerce.

©2013 by Ctein, all rights reserved

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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-et- (signed Tom): "As an addendum to Ctein's comments above, a couple of years ago I wrote to him asking about purchasing a dye transfer print of 'Apollo 17 at Dawn.'  However, I was interested in a larger print than the size he listed in his catalog—which offered only the smaller of the two sizes for which his other dye transfer prints were available.

"Ctein replied that this image would not meet his standards for quality if printed any larger, due to limitations imposed by the negative sharpness. He wrote that he had a second negative shot at the same time that was quite sharp, but simply could not produce a quality dye transfer, so his only option was to limit the size of his dye transfer print from the first negative.

"I expressed my regret at the circumstances he described, as I really liked that image for both artistic reasons and sentimental reasons. (I had been one of the design engineers on the Saturn launch vehicle for the Apollo capsule.)

"Ctein replied that the discussion had made him take another look at his negatives, and that he thought that he might be able to use the second negative to generate a print that met his standards if he used digital techniques. Accordingly, he was going to experiment to see if his 40-year-old negative that could not be used for a dye transfer print would work well for a digital print.

"Some time later he wrote to say that his experiment was a success, and he was pleased with the large digital print from the second negative. Was I still interested? My response was very brief—'How much do I make the check out for?'

"The resulting print is now framed and hanging on the wall in my home. It is everything that I would have expected from looking at his dye transfer print in his online catalog, and much more."

Nigel: "That was one of your most interesting columns—which is high praise indeed. Though it makes me wish even more that you'd offered the SR71 pictures in the recent sale (probably a minority view)."

Mike replies: I have to take the blame for that, as I chose the pictures. The SR71 shot was in the running, however. I'd still like to see it as a dye.

Frank Gorga: "My first response, upon reading only the title, was 'of course, just like painting, water color and oil are two different media and no one confuses those.'

"Then I remembered an encounter I had with an acquaintance some years back (when digital was fairly new). This fellow knew that I made cyanotypes (I still do) and he wanted to show me his cyanotypes.

"You can probably see where this is going...he had some bluish-toned inkjet prints (on glossy paper, no less) for me to look at. I tried to be polite and explain that they were not at all similar to my cyanotypes except for the hue.

"I have had similar discussions many times since but it is a losing battle. I fear that the differences in media are lost on many photographers...present company excepted!

"And don't get me started on simulated IR images...these should be against the law!

"Thanks for the interesting article. It is too bad that this is the end of the line for dye transfer."

This week's column by Ctein

I frequently describe dye transfer printing as being a little like having Photoshop in the darkroom. For a complete description of the process, as I use it, please read this article. Because I'm dealing with individual separations, I can control the characteristics of each primary color component of the print—think "channels" in Photoshop. This lets me do things that would be impossible with conventional color printing. It also makes some kinds of controls trickier.

Castle Eilean Donan—1995. Photo and print by Ctein.

My photograph of Castle Eilean Donan, one of the four images Mike and I offered in the final blowout dye transfer sale on Wednesday, has several problems as a "straight" print. First, the light in the foreground and in the sky was considerably brighter than the light on the castle, so the print needs dodging and burning in if it's going to look good. (In my experience, most photographs can be improved by judicious dodging and burning-in.)

Second, since the photograph was made from a long distance away with a telephoto lens, there's some contrast loss and color shifting caused by scattering and haze in the air. If you've ever tried making photographs out an airplane window, you know what I'm talking about. The whites come out looking fine, but the scattering fills in the shadows, so that they're bluish and the scene is lower in contrast overall than you'd like. In the case of my photograph, the scattering is more greenish than blue, probably because of relatively low grazing light and all the foliage, but the overall effect is similar.

The third problem is that my telephoto lens had some uncorrected secondary lateral chromatic aberration. In other words, a bit of color fringing. I find this especially annoying in dye transfer printing, because it looks like I'm a sloppy printer and have misregistered the matrices, when it's the fault of the lens.

Solving the first problem takes a bit more cleverness than with conventional printing. Remember, this is a separation process: there are three separate exposures on three separate sheets of pan matrix film, one for each primary color. Manual dodging and burning in just won't cut it; there's no way I could do that precisely enough to avoid color fringing.

One of the smartest things I ever did, early in my dye transfer printing career, was to make up a bunch of dodging and burning masks out of sheets of 4x5-inch B&W film. I probably have 100 of these, in various densities, abruptness of gradients, and shapes of gradients (lines, arcs, and angles). The masks aren't sandwiched with the negative; they sit on top of the negative carrier, several millimeters away from the negative. That way, any dust or scratches or slight imperfections in the masks don't show up in the print.

When I need to do dodging and burning in of a dye transfer print I look through my assortment of masks and figure out which combination will do what I need. In this case I wanted a fairly sharp-edged burn of about a half stop at the bottom, and a much more diffuse burn of half a stop at the top. Figure 2 shows the two masks I used in combination with my negative for this photograph.

Fig. 2.

Reducing the aerial haze is pretty easy in dye transfer. I can mix up dye baths of slightly different contrasts. It's like making the curve steeper in Photoshop in one or more of the channels. In this case, I kicked up the contrast of the magenta dye bath by about half a grade, to neutralize the excessively greenish shadows.

Getting rid of the lateral chromatic aberration is a tricky thing, but it's doable (sometimes) with sufficient care. How did I do it? I changed the height of the enlarger head slightly between the exposure separations. That alters the relative magnifications for the different separations, and if I do it just right, I can undo chromatic aberration. For this photograph, a height adjustment of 1 mm was what I needed to eliminate the color fringing (figure 3).

Fig. 3.

Sometimes this trick doesn't work, and the separations fail to align properly. I suspect that's due to irregularities in the gearing of the enlarger head that causes it to slip a bit sideways if the gears are in just the wrong position. This time I was lucky. The trick worked perfectly and reliably for this photograph.

Just another ordinary day in the darkroom, when you're a dye transfer printer.

©2013 by Ctein, all rights reserved

Ctein's weekly column usually appears on Wednesdays, but this week we were busy with the sale on Wednesday. (May the admiring editor just add that this is the first time he has ever heard of adjusting enlarger height to correct LCA, and his mind is suitably boggled by the degree of precision in technique this requires.)

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Lobster Carapace, Cabo Pulmo, Baja Mexico, 1991

The short take: As you've read here, Ctein is closing his darkroom within the next year. Before he does, through the end of this year, he's taking one last round of orders for his dye transfer prints.

After the end of this year, you'll be limited to whatever he has an inventory. When he closes the darkroom, a lot of his photographs will go out of print. So if there's a particular photograph of his that you've been eyeing, this may be your last opportunity to get it.

There's something else. When he does close his darkroom down, sometime between the end of this year and the middle of next, he's going to be raising the prices on his remaining dye transfer prints substantially—a minimum of 40% and, in the case of the very last dye print of any particular photograph, as much as 300%.

Can this really be the end?
We've cried wolf about this before. When Ctein had his first dye transfer sale here on TOP, I made noises about how it might be your last opportunity to own a real dye transfer print. That turned out to be wrong: a number of former dye printers approached Ctein during and after the sale, offering their unused materials to him, and, far from running out of paper, as he expected, he actually ended the sale with more paper in stock than he'd started with. He's now had a second dye transfer sale, and still has some materials left.

This time there really is a wolf...we just don't know exactly how close the furry feller actually is. Ctein will run out of paper within the year and he's not looking for more (as he's written, he's even looking forward to that darkroom closing).

Necropolis Overlooking Glasgow, 1995

Why a dye? Carl Weese's idea, from about 1996, was that B&W photography was already perfect, but that digital would represent the true coming-of-age of color photography. And thus it has come to pass. But of all the pre-digital color photographic methods, at least, dye was the aristocrat, a rare and damnably difficult-to-master process of almost unparalleled beauty.

In the 1990s, you could fit all the master dye transfer printmakers in the world into one living room. (I actually published that picture, in a magazine—sorry I can't show it to you.) Now, you could fit them all in a modestly-sized bedroom. Well, assuming they were good enough friends.

Ctein's prices may be bargains for dye transfer prints, but these aren't purchases everybody can enter into lightly, and he knows he isn't giving people a lot of time to make up their minds. To make your life a little easier economically, he's accepting layaways on orders, so people can pay for their prints gradually over a year or so instead of having to come up with a large chunk of money all at once.

Sometimes, there really is a wolf
So anyway, that's the announcement: Ctein is coming to the end of an era, and offering layaways on dye prints from his portfolio. There are info pages with layaway and pricing details.

And here's a page where you can see all the pictures that are available.

Keep in mind you're not really seeing the prints in the JPEGs, unless you know how to "translate" from one to the other in your mind. I know I have a reputation for hating cat and flower pictures, but this one for instance is just gorgeous as a dye, let me tell ya.

Mike

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

By Ctein

My last column, published on June 20th, explained that there's lots of unit-to-unit variability in photographic gear. Recently I had reason to investigate variability in Epson 3880 printers.

Before I get into this, let me emphasize that these are great printers and Epson is a great company. I've been entirely satisfied with the quality of their goods, and their customer support and warranty on their professional printers is almost inhumanly superb. I will continue to buy Epson printers in the future, along with an extended warranty.

Further, my decades of experience as a reviewer do not give me any reason to think that my results are unique to Epson. I expect I would find similar variability if I looked at any maker's printers. In short, this is not Epson bashing, nor an excuse for such. Diving in...

Last fall my Epson 3880 printer developed a head clog. The heaviest of heavy-duty cleaning cycles did not clear it, so I called Epson support: "No problem, you'll have the replacement printer tomorrow."

The next day I did, along with the prepaid pickup label to return the old printer. Out with the old, in with the new. A quick test showed the tone and color balance were nearly identical to the old printer. I didn't even need to make new profiles. Hurray!

When I looked more closely at the new prints, they looked "grainier." The old printer produced invisibly-fine droplet patterns; I could just see the individual ink droplets in the new prints. Not so "hurray."

After doing my own version of "is it plugged in," I called back Epson support. Got this great technician who knew even more about Mac systems than I did. She suggested a couple of more plugs to check, so to speak. We fiddled around for half an hour, then she shipped me another printer. It wasn't a lot better.

I put the matter on hold for a few months. At the end the last year, I called support again; the fellow I got this time clearly didn't know much about Macs, but he spent a good 90 minutes with me on the phone as we tried to figure things out, even waiting while I made scans of sections of prints and e-mailed to him. He was pretty convinced I was seeing normal product variation, but I wasn't. So, Epson sent me a third printer.

It was a little better than the second, but nowhere near as good as my original printer. Still, I agreed that there was hardly much point in sending me further printers without having some good reason for thinking they would be better.

Me, I'm thinking thusly: I bought this really great printer in late 2010. I got three replacement printers in late 2011 and they all looked worse. Something had slipped in quality control at Epson. A slight timing jitter in the placement of the ink droplets would explain the degraded pattern I was seeing. There are ways that manufacturing can go awry that will cause that.

I put my suspicions forward to Epson. They accepted a packet of sample prints from me, which were shown to the production managers. They still thought it was normal sample variation.

I persevered. I have a private contact inside Epson, someone positioned to make things happen if there really was a problem and someone who knows me personally and professionally, so he knows exactly how careful I am about testing and making these kinds of claims. He investigated my reports and my data. His conclusion was that I had lucked into a "cherry" unit the first time. A random roll of the dice.

I still thought (well, hoped) that Epson might be wrong. I decide to test their conclusion. If I looked at prints from a whole bunch of 3880 printers manufactured at different times and found a systematic variation in "graininess" with time, that would prove that something had changed in the manufacturing process. I knew how to collect that data—crowdsource it to you, my faithful readership.

So now you know what my request four months back for people to make Epson 3880 prints was all about. People came through. I collected 40 respondents, with printer purchase dates scattered over more than a two-year period that nicely bracketed my units. Yes, I know that purchase date is not the same as manufacture date, but it correlates roughly. I had people provide me with their printers' serial numbers in case I needed more accurate dates down the line.

I provided a test file, told folks exactly how I wanted it printed out, and had them send me their prints. I ranked the prints by graininess from first/best to last/worst. I plotted those rankings against the purchase dates, confident a pattern would emerge. I didn't know if I'd see a gradual degradation in quality with time, or a relatively sharp transition when something changed in the manufacturing line, but I expected there'd be something.

Fig. 1

Figures 1 and 2: scatter plots of print quality (by ranking number) vs. date of printer purchase. It's the same data in both figures, the axes are swapped between the two of them because sometimes correlation patterns stand out better one way then the other. In this case, there is no pattern; it's about as random as you can get.

Fig. 2

Well, a pattern sure jumped out at me. The print quality was totally uncorrelated with time. This is about as close to a random scatter plot as I'd ever expect to see from real-world data. Epson was right. I was wrong.

Dammit.

In both plots I've labeled my current printer and my original printer. Yup, the original printer was considerably better than average while the current one is worse. Ah well.

Mind you, my new one is still a very good printer. Nobody who's ever gotten prints from it has said a negative word about the print quality (including the 750 of you who recently took advantage of the $19.95 print offer). The printer gets high marks. It's just that my old printer got an A+. He whined.

Fig. 3

Figures 3 and 4: high-resolution scans of prints from the best and worst printers in the lot. This is about a 40X magnification; you'd have to stand back 60 feet from your display for the ink droplets to appear as they would in a real print viewed closely.

Fig. 4

Still, the difference in quality from best to worst is considerable. Figures 3 and 4 show very high-resolution scans of prints from the best- and worst-ranked printers. The difference you're seeing there is greater than the difference between printing at 1440 dpi high-speed and 2880 dpi low-speed. In fact, it's comparable to the difference you'll see between entire generations of printers. In other words, the very best of these 3880 printers is right up there with the 4900 printer quality. The very worst is down at the printer quality of the previous generation of printer.

So, what can you do about this? Nothing. What can I do about this? Nothing. But, ain't it interesting!

Getting back to the point of Part I, it's a good lesson in why you should take reviews that peer too minutely into equipment quality with a certain very small grain of salt.

Or perhaps a rather large chunk of halite.

It's one of those random variation things, you know.

Ctein

Custom Printer Ctein's regular weekly column usually appears on Wednesday but was delayed this week because of Editor Presence Variability (EPV).

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Featured Comment by Sareesh S: "This is an excellent article in the best traditions of information-sharing on the web. Thank you for taking the effort and sharing!"

Mike adds: That's what I thought too. Taking Part I and Part II together, this is among Ctein's best articles for TOP. First an informed and judicious discussion of the general principles, then a specific example with original site-sourced research, clearly presented and well illustrated. Kudos to columnist Ctein from the Humbl. Ed.

Featured Comment by Paul Maxim: "I've scanned through all of the other comments and didn't notice anyone bringing this up, but if I missed it, I apologize.

"As a statistician, it occurs to me that something is missing here. While I don't doubt your testing (subjective or not), there's nothing in your published data that shows the 'within printer' level of variability. That is, if you take some of the individual printers and repeat the test multiple times (with independent setups, of course), how much within printer variability do you see? And if you then compare that level of variability with the 'between printer' variability that you've measured, is there a detectable (significant) difference? In other words, is the 'between printer' variability detectably larger than the 'within printer' variability?

"The result of that test will determine what conclusions, if any, that you can draw from the tests.

"I suspect that Epson already knows the answer to that question. And that's why they've said that you're looking at 'normal' printer to printer variability. At least I hope that they know. Otherwise, there truly is a hole in their quality system."

Ctein replies: Ah, good point! For a given printer, printing on a given paper, there's very little variation in quality from print to print or session to session. I can't say for sure there's none, but it's so small that it's smaller than any of the other sources of data "noise" I'm dealing with.

Lord Mountbatten by Bern Schwartz. All photographs by Bernard Lee Schwartz, courtesy of and copyright by the National Portrait Gallery of Great Britain

By Ctein

Ken Tanaka's comment to my column of two weeks ago reminded me that I've never written about my experiences printing Bernard Lee Schwartz's portrait photographs. The Bernard Lee Schwartz Foundation, guided by his widow Ronny Schwartz, has been my largest and oldest printing client; we have a relationship that now goes back 30 years. Sadly, I never met Bern; the relationship started four years after his death.

Bern's work is notable in a couple of respects. Not because he's the greatest portrait photographer who ever lived, although he's head and shoulders above most of us.

What's notable is that he exhibited that level of proficiency in a mere four years of dedicated work: portrait photography was his second career. The Schwartz family owns Sherman-Clay (the piano company). Bern died an untimely death, cutting his photographic career short. It's unusual to establish a major body of work in such a short time.

(Bern is not the only photographer to make his mark after "retirement." Bob Cameron, the author of Above San Francisco and a whole series of follow-up books, did all of that work after retiring from the marketing and import business. It's nice to know you can establish your place in the photographic world starting at the point that many people would consider hanging up their working shoes.)

The second thing that makes Bern's work notable was his access; through a combination of friendships, networking, and word-of-mouth, he had the opportunity to photograph an extraordinary array of famous people, from important artists and authors to heads of state. A massive portfolio of decent-to-brilliant portraits of A-list people is nothing to be sneezed at.

Ronny crossed my path in 1982. She'd been unhappy with the quality of the chromogenic prints of Bern's work and was looking for something better. She'd had a dye transfer done of this famous portrait of Lord Mountbatten (if it looks familiar, perhaps it's because it was used on a British stamp) but wasn't satisfied with the results. She contacted Frank McLaughlin, the dye transfer guru at Eastman Kodak, who told her, "There's this guy in California you should try out; if he can't make a print that'll make you happy, there probably isn't anybody who can."

She did. I printed that Mountbatten photograph for her, as a test of my abilities. She was happy. She said she had another two or three dozen negatives she'd like to have printed. Well, that was just the first year or so. She kept selecting more portraits that she wanted done up properly as dye transfers. I ended up printing dyes for her for a good decade or longer. When all was said and done, I'm sure I did more than 150, maybe even 200.

Ronny proved great to work with. She was just as professional as I am, and she appreciated artistic effort as much as I do. Furthermore, she had at least as good an eye for a good print. Sometimes better. She pushed me, and she never accepted a print that she didn't think couldn't be improved upon. I've never worked with another client as fussy as she. I love it.

Printing for Ronny altered my life in other ways. It not only got me out of debt, but when my landlord decided to sell my residence and I had to find new living quarters, Ronny advanced me enough money on future work to allow me to buy a house.

After nearly a decade the flow of new negatives petered out. It wasn't that Ronny had become dissatisfied with my efforts or that there weren't many more portraits deserving of fine printing. I think she simply got burned out. She was the force that turned rolls of exposures into a solid body of work. She'd sort through hundreds of individual frames of film to find the one that she thought best embodied a subject (she knew the subjects as well as Bern did and was usually there for the photography). She figured out the crop that was the most effective composition and sometimes even made recommendations on how it should be printed. She became the primary artistic force after Bern's death (I have a personal suspicion she was a major one before that; I consider this work to be jointly hers and Bern's, no matter who pushed the shutter button). She may very well have put in more time over that decade editing and selecting the photographs as I spent printing them.

My relationship with the BLS Foundation continued at a low key level for another dozen years. I'd hear from them a couple of times a year, maybe. Then they developed a series of new initiatives to distribute his work. As president of the Foundation, their son Michael had the primary duties. (Ronny is alive and well and active; she's just got other things to do with her life. She is still the final arbiter of whether a print looks right or not when Michael and I are uncertain.) At first it was several dozen more dye transfer prints. Then, starting five or six years back, we began to move into digital.

It began with the portrait of Ann Jenner shown below, the negative for which was in such poor shape that I couldn't pull a decent print in the darkroom. I suggested we try a digital print, combining my skills both as a restoration expert and a fine digital printer.

This is the best dye transfer that I could make from the negative.

This is my digital print from the same negative.

The results were wonderful. We started doing more and more work as digital prints, and that finally took over from dye transfer entirely. All of us involved are firmly of the opinion that Bern would have just loved this new technology; we feel like we're getting results that are so much closer to what he must've been after when he pressed the shutter.

Since then, major projects I've been involved with for the Foundation have been scanning and archiving hundreds of the best negatives, preparing all the images for their website, making prints and preparing digital files for the large body of work that Foundation has donated the British National Portrait Gallery and the Hoover Institute and, most recently, printing for two exhibits in Israel sponsored by The Jerusalem Foundation.

So, the relationship continues. One client shaped my career as a custom dye and digital printer, through the remarkable support of Ronny and Michael. Lemme tell ya, every artisan should be so lucky as to have clients like that.

Ctein

NOTE: The BLS Foundation does not sell prints. Prints of works that are now owned by the National Portrait Gallery of Great Britain can be ordered through their website.

Ctein's column appears on Wednesdays.

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Featured Comment by Ken Tanaka: "What a personal coincidence you should mention Sherman-Clay! While visiting San Francisco in April I snapped this huge neon sign, certainly somewhat of a relic, while strolling to dinner one evening.

"What a terrific story, Ctein. Of course Bern Schwartz's story is remarkable. Not only did he have talent as a photo portraitist (I understand he had some rather exceptional instruction) but he was able to gain access to so many celebrities. How'd he do that?

"But the story of your 30-year relationship with Schwartz's work and family is equally remarkable. Time and again I encounter stories in the arts world where one person—a teacher, a collector, a gallery owner, a museum curator—made a profound difference in the trajectory of an artist's life. I know there is a guiding moral to this story for young artists and craftspeople...but I'm not sure what it is.

"Thanks very much for sharing this personal story with us, Ctein."

Featured Comment by Paddy C.: "For me, Ctein, one of you most interesting recent articles. Thanks for sharing. And that restoration job on the Jenner portrait looks amazing."

By Ctein

One of the interesting (because it was unexpected) results of the educational print offer of a few weeks back was that people thought I invoked extraordinary measures to come up with a good print of that photograph. Not even close. I worked with a level of care and attention to detail and meticulousness that most people wouldn't muster, but that's a different thing. In that respect, I am unusual, and that's why I get paid for what I do.

But the measures themselves had nothing extraordinary about them. They're just the kind of things that any more-than-routine printer should be doing.

Good printing is not accomplished merely by getting curves and color balance and saturation correct. That's basic, like figuring out the right exposure and paper grade (or filter pack) in the darkroom.

One step above that is local tone correction—dodging and burning in. It's always amazed me (not in a good way) how many printers don't do that, in the darkroom or out. The majority of photographs I've printed over the past 40 years, and that's many thousands, have been improved by some amount of local correction. Frequently, it's very slight and very subtle. But it's not the norm for a print to be better with none at all.

If you don't have that under your control, you're not even a competent printer. If you are, you're competent. You can be trusted to turn out a good journeyman print.

Note: In each of the following pairs of photographs, the "before" version is what I get from my default settings for Adobe Camera Raw prior to making any adjustments to the photograph. The "after" version is what I use to make my finished prints; it isn't optimized for viewing at small resolution on a screen, but you'll get the idea. To put it another way, the "before version" is what the camera saw, and the "after" version is what I saw when I made the photograph—and what I wanted in a print.

Before (above) and after (below): The most important change to this photograph was a lot of dodging and burning in. Human beings are really good at ignoring large-scale variations in brightness that cameras see all too clearly.

What is it take to move beyond that level? Just as in the darkroom, it requires some real understanding of the limitations and quirks of the media (both film/sensor and print) you're working with. That leads me to three tools that are part of my standard printmaking toolkit. Some variation on these ought to be part of yours.

1. Local contrast enhancement. Simply, you can do it with a mild dose of unsharp masking or you can do it in a much more sophisticated way with plug-ins like Photo Wiz's ContrastMaster. What you can't get away with is not doing it. Digital prints tend to come out flat, with poor separation of fine and subtle tonal differences. I don't know why, but I've observed it to be broadly true. The delicate nuances that are there in the original file, whether it comes from a digital camera or a film scan, don't get rendered well in the print. You need to make that tonal separation stronger in the file or the print will look duller than it should.

Before (above) and after (below): The near-setting sun produced a grazing light that brought out wonderful textures in the building and provided great contrast in tone and color between the building in the sky. I made adjustments that emphasized sharpness and fine tonal detail.

2. Deconvolution sharpening. Simply, there's Smart Sharpen in Photoshop, with a radius of a few tenths of the pixel and the percentage set to taste. Complexly, any of several plug-ins, like Topaz Lab's InFocus. If you're trying to produce a digital photograph with the best and most nicely-rendered fine detail, and you're using a Bayer array camera, this is pretty much a must. (Can't speak to non-Bayer array cameras; never printed from them.) There is a genuine improvement in sharpness and fine detail buried in those Raw files that deconvolution sharpening can dig out.

3. Noise reduction. It's the counterbalance to the previous two tools. Both local enhancement and sharpening increase noise at the same time they improve fine detail, gradation, and texture. Noise reduction, on the other hand, tends to suppress precisely those image attributes. Many digital files (and film scans) are improved by just a whisper of noise reduction, no matter how great the camera is. A lot more digital files need it when local enhancement or sharpening are coming into play.

Before (above) and after (below): To turn this photograph from what the camera saw into what I saw, I needed a certain amount of dodging and burning in but far more important was bringing up the large-scale tonal variations so that they would separate and print well.

Combining all three of these in different measures gives you broad control over the characteristics image. You can get reduced noise with no visible sacrifice of fine detail and texture. Or, you can get substantially improved sharpness and detail with no significant increase in noise. Or, you can split the difference and get a photograph that has lower noise and better sharpness at the same time.

Before (above) and after (below): This photograph got "the works"; everything in my basic toolkit was important to making this photograph work as a print: Proper dodging and burning in, local contrast enhancement to bring out the gorgeous ripples in the water I had seen, proper sharpening to bring out the details in the seals and make them stand out against the water, and noise reduction to get rid of the increased noise from the previous operations.

None of this is heroic; none of it is exceptional. It's the norm for good digital printing.

No mincing of words: this is what it takes to be better than run-of-the-mill.

Ctein

Ctein's weekly column, which usually appears on Wednesdays, is a day late this week through no fault of his own.

[Note that the illustrations are only approximations. Real corrections would have to take size into account, as well as the big jump between screen and paper, and the TypePad blogging software has an effect on how illustrations look that is impossible to compensate for precisely. Finally, your monitor and its calibration might change what you're seeing relative to what Ctein—or anyone else—is seeing. —MJ]

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Richard Tugwell: "I bought one of Charlie Cramer's prints from TOP a while back—quite beautiful. I see he has an interesting and in-depth article on tonal adjustments using Lightroom 4 over at The Luminous-Landscape."

Featured Comment by Ned: "In my opinion this is an area where books, videos and other training techniques just don't cut it. I don't even know what a good print looks like, which is why I purchased Ctien's Micro 4/3 print. I don't like to print because I know it will be a piece of crap."

Mike replies: Sounds like you might be a candidte to become a client of a custom printer. Don't forget that there are numerous photographers, now and in history—including some of the greats—who let other people print their pictures for them. It's how Ctein makes his living. Perhaps his best-known client was the late rock-and-roll photographer Jim Marshall, but he prints for many other clients as well, some of whom are quite famous. Years ago I made my living as a custom printer too—and many of my clients at the time never made their own prints.

Remember this picture?

It was taken by Peter Turnley at Voja Mitrovic's retirement party, and shows Henri Cartier-Bresson and Josef Koudelka good-naturedly begging Voja not to retire.

Featured Comment by Ed: "Mornin', Ctein, great read as ever. To me printing is about effort and the ability to reject (no matter the cost). In a German documentary I saw Gursky at work at Grieger (one of the best digital print shops on the face of this planet). He was making a test print...2 meters 60 cm by .5 meter. Just to check local contrast, after he rejected a full print of 'Hamm Bergwerg Ost.' If your print does not provide what you want, tear it up—it is a painful, wasteful, yet very important part of the process of learning to print. And looking at examples like the ones you provided, well, that may make people wonder about their skills (and their preferences), but, hey, you don't get 40 years of experience overnight."