Travel Technology - My imagination, my printer, my monitor or reality?

So I have taken a lot of digital pictures recently and had some printed. Ive looked at many more on several different good (I think) monitors. Last weekend in London I went to an exhibit at the Institute of Photography of color photos taken during the depression in the US as part of the Farm Security Administration's work. The prints were from some of the earliest taken with the first color film, Kodachrome. The colors were startlingly rich and deep; much more it seemed than I get from digital. They were so bright that they were almost surreal.

I looked at some of the images on the Library of Congress website and they looked much less rich. Likewise stuff I shoot in digital and look at onscreen or as a print is also less rich. In looking around I have a picture hanging in my home office that is a Ciba print from a K25 transparency. It also has a MUCH richer look than the digital prints.

Is this due to the printer? My Ciba and obviously the stuff in the London gallery were done by a high end custom lab. The digitals I have printed were not. Are there things to improve the digital image if that is inherent in the digital process (Im thinking of something like fractal interpolation to build the image file and then professional printing)? Any thoughts on this? Thanks.

Is this due to the printer? My Ciba and obviously the stuff in the London gallery were done by a high end custom lab. The digitals I have printed were not. Are there things to improve the digital image if that is inherent in the digital process (Im thinking of something like fractal interpolation to build the image file and then professional printing)? Any thoughts on this? Thanks.


Screens vary a lot... you don't say whether you use a CRT or LCD, for the biggest difference, but even within category (and calibration) there is going to be a big difference.

You also don't say what printer you've got, and printers vary even more. Getting good results out of the most popular option (inkjets) requires a good bit of user skill and effort both in calibrating the results and in using the appropriate paper and ink; I've seen a lot of crappy inkjet prints for every good one... but I've seen some incredibly good inkjet prints as well.

For casual printing, color laser prints can be pretty good a lot more easily - and the printer itself is much more versatile for non-photo use; I've got an HP 2605DN. But I've never seen color laser prints from an office-style color laser that are up to dye-sub or top end inkjet prints in terms of the quality of the color reproduction.

The only easy-to-use home photographic-print-quality option I've found is 4x6 dye-sub photo printers - I've got an older Canon model, a CP200, which produces better prints than my local minilab usually does. The cost per print is a bit higher than sending them, but in the same ballpark (around 30c/print if you buy the paper in packs of 108; higher, around 50c/print in packs of 36). Kodak makes a 8x10/8.5x11 dye-sub printer which sells for around $600 I think, and around $2/print... would love to get it, but not economical for the number of large prints I do.

Services like Ofoto-Kodak Gallery/Snapfish/Shutterfly, or your local minilab, can also do actual photo/dye-sub prints from your digital images. Quality varies a lot, but I've been pretty pleased with 8x10s from Ofoto. Obviously, the odds of their quality matching prints from a good custom lab are low, but there are certainly many custom labs now that will do prints from digital. With a good enough digital original, the prints produced should be at least as most good 35mm print film at reasonable print sizes ... with prints above somewhere around 11x14 (or 16x20 depending on your tolerance for low dpi) the detail level suffers even with the highest resolutions available today.

Thanks, let me add a bit of info. The prints have been from Ofoto and Adorama. I have a Canon printer, PIXMA Pro9000 that I just got and havent looked at yet. The screens are either a Mac 17 inch or a Dell 21 inch wide format (probably Sony). It isnt so much the resolution but the color saturation that I am noticing is different.

It could be your camera. A while ago I used a 3MP Nikon, which worked well and the pictures were very sharp, but then I saw the color my friends camera was capturing and I immediately bought the Canon A95 5MP. This camera is a point and shoot, not too big, but not small either. The color and clarity are perfect. I have gotten the same pictures printed at CVS and a photolab near my house. When compared there is no comparison.!! The photolab does a much better job. The color and clarity are much better than what CVS did. Since then no matter where I am I always send my pictures back to that photolab to get printed and I am never diapointed.

I took pictures at the Puerto Rico DO 2 with the Canon A95, check them out http://flickr.com/photos/uva185/sets/72157594498636994/

It could be your camera. A while ago I used a 3MP Nikon, which worked well and the pictures were very sharp, but then I saw the color my friends camera was capturing and I immediately bought the Canon A95 5MP. This camera is a point and shoot, not too big, but not small either. The color and clarity are perfect. I have gotten the same pictures printed at CVS and a photolab near my house. When compared there is no comparison.!! The photolab does a much better job. The color and clarity are much better than what CVS did. Since then no matter where I am I always send my pictures back to that photolab to get printed and I am never diapointed.

I took pictures at the Puerto Rico DO 2 with the Canon A95, check them out http://flickr.com/photos/uva185/sets/72157594498636994/

Im using a Canon EOS 20D with L series lenses, all shots are in raw format. I think yours looked a bit bleached out as well compared to the chromes Im talking about. ;)

The note about the photo lab is valid though. Im now trying to determine if I should interpolate the images before taking a few to Duggel to print.

Im using a Canon EOS 20D with L series lenses, all shots are in raw format.

Nice! How do you like it otherwise? I am looking at getting the Canon 30D within a few weeks.

What's you digital photo workflow? Is it properly color managed from camera to monitor to printer with custom profiles? Have you calibrated your monitor with a spyder/colorimeter? Does any of this make sense?

It didn't to me about 18 months ago. Unfortunately, high quality images don't just come from a digital camera. The digital darkroom has replaced the film darkroom of old (as used, apparently very nicely, by the FSA photographers).

And you can't just drop your photos off to be developed as you could with film, it's a DIY thing. I've learned as much about RAW converters and Photoshop as I have about shutter speeds and f stops. Anything you see published will certainly have been post-processed.

Levels, Curves, black point, layer masks, adjustment layers, contrast, saturation, white balance, luminance channels, LAB, USM, high-pass sharpening, etc., etc., are just a few of the many details of making fine prints. Sadly, it does take a bit of learning. I wish it were easier.

I wouldn't worry about interpolating. I use ZoomPhoto Pro for 18x12 and up, but even my 6.3MP 10D pix don't really need it. It's not the number of pixels, it's the quality.

Here's one of my favorites from a recent trip - http://richs.smugmug.com/photos/118788160-L.jpg

Here it is straight out of the camera - - http://richs.smugmug.com/photos/117107120-L.jpg

Not quite the same pop, eh? That's about 10 minutes of work

(apologies if you already know this. And if you do, dpreview.com is the spot for more in depth conversation on the topic. See you in the Canon x0D forum....)

I second the question about workflow. Are you capturing a .JPG along with the RAW? If so, what do you think of the difference between the two? I'm still learning about postprocessing myself, but I remember being appalled at the quality of unprocessed RAW images.

Edit to say I use a PANTONE Huey (http://www.pantone.com/pages/products/product.aspx?ca=2&pid=79) for monitor calibration

Edit to say top image here (http://www.batnet.com/bogart/peacock/index.html) is untouched RAW out of the camera, the bottom one is the large .jpg of the same image, also untouched.

I only shoot raw and calibrate my monitor. In Photoshop CS2, I let my Canon i9100 manage the color profiles. I also have found, from experience, that I need to tweak the color saturation to get those eye-popping prints that seem to impress my wife. Note, too, that they are not necessarily accurate prints -- just pleasing.

What's you digital photo workflow? Is it properly color managed from camera to monitor to printer with custom profiles? Have you calibrated your monitor with a spyder/colorimeter? Does any of this make sense?

It didn't to me about 18 months ago. Unfortunately, high quality images don't just come from a digital camera. The digital darkroom has replaced the film darkroom of old (as used, apparently very nicely, by the FSA photographers).

And you can't just drop your photos off to be developed as you could with film, it's a DIY thing. I've learned as much about RAW converters and Photoshop as I have about shutter speeds and f stops. Anything you see published will certainly have been post-processed.

Levels, Curves, black point, layer masks, adjustment layers, contrast, saturation, white balance, luminance channels, LAB, USM, high-pass sharpening, etc., etc., are just a few of the many details of making fine prints. Sadly, it does take a bit of learning. I wish it were easier.

I wouldn't worry about interpolating. I use ZoomPhoto Pro for 18x12 and up, but even my 6.3MP 10D pix don't really need it. It's not the number of pixels, it's the quality.

Here's one of my favorites from a recent trip - http://richs.smugmug.com/photos/118788160-L.jpg

Here it is straight out of the camera - - http://richs.smugmug.com/photos/117107120-L.jpg

Not quite the same pop, eh? That's about 10 minutes of work

(apologies if you already know this. And if you do, dpreview.com is the spot for more in depth conversation on the topic. See you in the Canon x0D forum....)

Well, a lot of it makes sense but not much more than making sense. I started using Aperture and there are some features of it I like. I do adjustments but I am pretty new to it and definately have a lot to learn. Perhaps the biggest thing I have to learn is what to focus on. I did a first pass on the stuff I took last December in Africa and got from about 4000 to about 1000 images. Im now trying to process each one of those but even that is perhaps too much while learning. I havent got the discipline/self confidence to pick 20 or thirty and really prepare them for printing. I need to start thinking of the print as the output, not the onscreen stuff. Thanks for the suggestions, see you at dpreview.com ;)

see you at dpreview.com ;)

Try http://photography-on-the.net/forum/ as well. Canon specific. The rate of posting to really too high to follow, but the information content is also high.

I do adjustments but I am pretty new to it and definately have a lot to learn.

This is the best all-in-one overview, in a video format, of the essentials of photo processing that I have found - http://www.radiantvista.com/archive/video_tutorials/6/

There are dozens of other video tutorials on specific topics and of end-to-end processing of a single shot that are very valuable.

Scott Kelby's "The Photoshop Book for Digital Photographers" is probably the definitive written source for photographic post-processing with Photoshop

I havent got the discipline/self confidence to pick 20 or thirty and really prepare them for printing.

That's the first step in my workflow and probably the biggest time saver for me. My RAW converter has a slide show view where I just hit 1, 2, or 3 and it marks each shot with a ranking and moves to the next shot. 1's are the standouts, 2's are the good shots but not the superstars, and 3's are the out-of-focus, toss-it type. I can zip through these at about 2-3 seconds each. Then I only focus on the 1's to really process. From my recent trip, that instantly got me to about 200 of 850. I then filtered those, using another tagging system to get to about 40. The 160 2nd tier keepers received a standard CS2 action of processing and sharpening, with a few hand tweaks. The 40 keepers received the 10-30 minute had processing, with 8 of them getting extensive up-sizing, mask-based selective processing, etc. that probably consume an hour+ each.

That discipline was probably the most important thing I had to find - ruthlessly eliminate the good-but-not-great shots. A year ago it would take me all day to process the shots from one of my kids' soccer games. I had to get each one as good as it could be. But in the end, I only published and shared the keepers anyway. I still have the untouched RAW files for every shot, should I need them in the future. But I never have.

A friend told me once - a poor photographer takes 100 photos and shows you all of them. A good photographer takes 100 photos and shows you 5. No need to spend time on the other 95.

A friend told me once - a poor photographer takes 100 photos and shows you all of them. A good photographer takes 100 photos and shows you 5. No need to spend time on the other 95.


I take much more than 100 shots at a gig, generally shooting at medium resolution and jpg as so far all has been for web use. about 10% of my pictures survive.

I just cleared off 13 out of 16 gig of images of my harddrive this week. backed everything up to an external HDD first and then painstakingly went through almost 6000 pictures. What didn't survive this time 'round got thrown away and the rest got backed up on CD and then removed. So a whole bunch of CDs later and 1500 images surviving on my hard drive out of 4 years of digital photography (considering that just the past 4-5 months I've shot well over 10000 pictures and probably a total of 10000 in the years before that) the survival rate is on target. A few hundred of those are family and holiday snaps and not something I'd show as "look what I can do".

On a different note - I am a mac user and must say that although apperture has more function and things you can do I prefer adobe lightroom and how it handles and store files in proper directories. Much easier to just drag and drop a directory to a burn folder when backing up to disks and also way easier to go though in finder as each directory is named according to what you named the shoot on the import. I'm also quite happy with it's userfriendlyness and the functions it has suits me. I'm dreading the day the beta stops working. ARGH!

/E

Canon 350D and love it!

Scott Kelby's "The Photoshop Book for Digital Photographers" is probably the definitive written source for photographic post-processing with Photoshop



I've got Kelby's book, and I don't think it's the best single choice. It's a decent book, but I think you can do better. If I could only own one PS book, it would be Martin Evening's CS2 book. Then, "Photoshop Artistry". Then, Scott's book. That's if you're just looking for general PS reference. Don't get Deke McClelland's CS/Cs2 book - I found it to be useless compared to the other books listed. Deke's a Photoshopper first and a photographer second. The other guys are photographers first, and Photoshoppers second.

If you're looking at how to get the most out of portraiture in post-processing, I'd recommend "Skin" by Lee Varis, and "PS CS2: The art of photographing women" by Kevin Ames. I haven't played with them yet, but Ames actually gives you some of his raw captures to work with from start to finish.

For Adobe Camera Raw, Bruce Fraser's book is the definitive guide.

Who offers the best price for die sub prints of digital photos by mail or in person. I think wal-mart has poor quality.

Who offers the best price for die sub prints of digital photos by mail or in person. I think wal-mart has poor quality.You might want to look at these:

http://shopper.cnet.com/4566-3167_9-0.html

Dye sublimation printers can be very cheap (some are less than $100) and would probably pay for themselves fairly quickly.

Is there a specific reason why you want dye sub?

I want something that will make the most photo lab looking print quality and last as long as photo paper. I am trying to get as close as I can to photo lab quality without having to go to the photo lab. I don't think wal-mart or walgreens for that matter has much to offer in the way of quality.

I want something that will make the most photo lab looking print quality and last as long as photo paper. I am trying to get as close as I can to photo lab quality without having to go to the photo lab. I don't think wal-mart or walgreens for that matter has much to offer in the way of quality.No mass printer is going to give you that kind of quality. However, you don't need dye sublimation to get it in the digital realm. Canon's photo printers do an extraordinary job -- as good as I used to get in my chemical darkroom -- and claim good longevity. Epson also makes high-quality photo printers that use dyes instead of pigments; Epson claims 75 years plus. You might like to look at these. As a bonus, these printers are available in wide carriage for only around $500 or so, and you can print up to 13" x 19". When I bought my Canon i9100, I got rid of my chemical darkroom and enlarger. I can produce much higher quality with the printer than I could with my enlarger.

One thing, though, is that you need good photo manipulation software (I use Photoshop CS), and you should calibrate both your printer and your monitor.

It's a while since I printed anything, but in the bright southern hemisphere light, I bracket on exposure (well, it's the only thing my Panasonic LX2 will let me bracket on) and usually find that the best picture for screen is the one that was slightly under exposed. I've not thrown away any pictures though, just in case the picture without any exposure compensation (or even the slightly over exposed image) looks better on paper...

I really need to start shooting RAW but I haven't found the time to lean Silklypix (for my LX2) or Nikon Capture NX (for my D40 SLR yet).