Technique - Printing Archives - John Paul Caponigro

How To Avoid 6 Printing Mistakes That’ll Make You Want To Curse

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Having taught over a thousand people for thirty years, I’ve seen and done it all. Here are the most common mistakes that people encounter when printing their images that you can avoid by simply looking at your files more closely and handling your paper more carefully.

Files

You won’t see this stuff if you’re zoomed out and looking at the whole image. Zoom in to 100% screen magnification. You’ll also miss things if you move around the image erratically. Move through each image one screen at a time and make a systematic quadrant-by-quadrant sweep.

1 – Noise

Too much noise can be distracting, especially color noise, unless you’re an impressionist. A little texture is good and makes images look sharper, so don’t overdo noise reduction, or your subjects will look like they’re made of plastic. Noise is most visible in smooth areas, like skies.

In some cases, you’ll want to reduce noise selectively with layers and masks in Photoshop, for instance, when you want to reduce noise in a sky more aggressively than in a foreground.

2 – Halos

One of the key things you want to watch out for when sharpening is producing halos. Most often seen along high-contrast contours, like horizons, halos are distracting and can make a straight photograph look like a composite. Though it can be done, retouching them is a bitch. So don’t produce them and use lower sharpening settings. If you need more sharpening in areas without contours (and the Texture slider won’t cut it), use layers and masks in Photoshop to sharpen selectively.

3 – Dust In Your File

Those dagnab little dust bunnies. They’re so easy to miss when you’re zoomed out and so easy to see when you’ve made a big print. Even if you keep your camera sensor clean, zoom in and check for them. If you find them, retouch them permanently.

Media

When it comes to media, the mantra is handle with care. This extra consideration will save you time, materials, and money. And it will earn the respect of your viewers. (God forbid that you don’t notice these things until your prints are exhibited.)

4 – Dust On Your Paper

If dust and lint fibers is on your paper while you’re printing, it can act as a resist and later fall off, leaving areas without ink. You can prevent this. First, store your paper in a sealed plastic bag or box. Two, look at your paper in the light and check for dust and lint, and if you see it, blow it off or use a soft brush to wipe it off.

5 – Scuffing

Different than scratching, which gouges the paper surface, scuffing pushes down the fiber of paper and burnishes the particles in the ink, leaving a faint mark that can be seen as a difference in sheen on the surface of the print. Handle your paper carefully at all times, and cover it with a protective sheet when you’re not handling it.

6 – Wrong Side Of The Paper

If you print on the wrong side of the paper, blacks will be weak, colors will fade, and detail will be soft. How do you tell which side is the printable side? One, it’s the side your wet lips will stick to. Two, the printable side will usually feel smoother to the touch. Three, you can feel a slight lip on the edges of the back side where a cutting blade has pushed through the paper.

Pay your files and materials these extra considerations, and you’ll not only make better prints, you’ll also save you time, materials, and money.

Find more printing resources here.

Learn more in my digital printing workshops.

Save Time, Money, Resources With These Printing Checklists

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Have you ever had this feeling?

You’re looking at a gorgeous print of one of your photographs … then you notice a small detail that needs to be fixed, and you know you’re going to have to reprint it. More time, more paper, more ink. Frustration. It’s so obvious when you see it now! Why didn’t you see it before? Save time, money, resources, and increase your productivity and enjoyment at the same time.

Use these checklists to eliminate this problem.

Before you print check your …

File

level horizon

precise crop

shadow detail

highlight detail especially at the edges

midtone contrast

saturation overall and specific hues

white balance casts are best seen in neutrals, flesh tones, and memory colors

noise reduced avoid blurring and artificial smoothing effects

sharpened avoid producing halos

imprecise masking edges misaligned or haloed

imprecise retouching blurry or misaligned or repeating patterns

dust check at 100% screen magnification

softproof make output specific tweaks based on printer profile used

resampling if resolution is below 240 ppi or above 720 ppi

output sharpening compensate for image softening due to dot gain

You can ensure you take all these steps with a consistent workflow.

Explore these color resources for more detail.

Explore these sharpening resources for more detail.

While you print check your …

Printer

orientation portrait (vertical) or landscape (horizontal)

page setup paper size and margins

color management Adobe or Printer (for B&W)

printing profile

media setting precise or nearest paper type

ink MK matte or PK photo black

printer resolution 1440 matte or 2880 photo

Save these settings as a Preset so you can use them again with a single click.

Explore these printing resources for more detail.

After you print check your …

Print

white spots dust on paper before printing

scuffing handle paper with care before and after printing

banding align heads or reduce print speed or make sure data transfer’s fast

microbanding check for nozzle clogs or print speed

local color casts areas check for nozzle clogs

colors faded wrong side of paper

Make sure you view prints in enough light with the right color temperature.

Explore these printing tips for more detail.

Learn more in my digital printing workshops.

12 Things To Look For In Great Prints & Common Problems To Avoid

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Most people evaluate a combination of elements to assess print quality. Find out what they are, how to get them, and how to avoid common mistakes in this new video.

7 Things To Look For In Great Prints & Great Artists Who Make Exceptions

Get The Digital Printing Quick Start Guide here.

Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

9 Ways To Tell If Your Photographs Are Over Cooked

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9 Ways To Tell If Your Photographs Are Over Cooked

Have you ever taken an image so far it gets completely out of control? I know that feeling well. It happens to all of us. It’s not all bad. We have to step over the line to find it. It is better to work hot and then to cool down than play it so safe we never get where we really want to go.

If you find yourself in so deep that you’re not sure where you got off track and you don’t know what to do, use this check list to identify the issue. Then fix it. Even one thing can make a big difference.

Here are some common pitfalls to avoid. (Most of these moves help images; this is just a matter of taking them too far.)

Highlights clipped

You want your highlights to glow, right? But you want them to have detail too. That’s the limit. Paper white is for poets not photographers.

Too Bright

Have you ever felt like viewing an image would be easier with sunglasses on? It’s common to make images brighter while trying to get them to glow. The key lies in midtone contrast. Place it in the most important image areas and darken and/or reduce the contrast of surrounding areas to support it further.

Shadows Clipped

Unless you’re going for gothic or graphic, hold that shadow detail. Areas of dark do make midtones and highlights appear brighter. Better still, handled sensitively these dark areas can hold a unique light at the same time.

Too Much Contrast

Contrast glows, until it makes you squint. More’s not always better. Think of Goldilocks; one of them was just right.

Over-Sharpened

Yes, we tend to think of focussed sharp images as signs of good equipment and good technique. Blurry photographs are a real drag unless the blur in them is intentional. Nevertheless, it’s easy to overcompensate and make images too sharp, completely forgetting about the sensual possibilities of texture. Let those be your guide as to how far to go and not go. (Remember, angels have halos, not horizons.)

Noise

A little bit of noise is not the end of the world. But try not to add more during processing. Guard against it when applying extreme contrast like Clarity and Dehaze as well as when sharpening. It’s not hard to reduce during post-processing but here again don’t overdo it; don’t make your subjects look like they’re made out of plastic wrap.

Posterization

Posterization is nobody’s friend except Andy Warhol. Not working in high-bit color modes and applying strong contrast and/or saturation adjustments quickly causes posterization. Use extra care when you’re working on JPEGs. (Don’t confuse this with a graphics card being challenged to display an image when zoomed in or out; if you don’t see posterization at 100% screen magnification it’s not in your file and won’t print.)

Unnatural Saturation

Don’t fool yourself. If you don’t believe it, neither will anyone else. Often just one or two colors will seem off. When this happens adjust them separately from the others. There’s no reason to limit one color because of another.

Vignetting

Vignetting can be a great way to strengthen the frame and to direct and keep attention in it. As with all things, it can be overdone, calling attention to itself and reducing the contrast of the areas it affects adversely. Monitor lens corrections as the ant-vignetting they apply often goes too far and you end up with corners that are so light they become distracting.

Using preflight checklists is a standard practice for pilots and doctors. Though the stakes aren’t as high, they’re a good idea for photographers too. Use this checklist before you share or print images and you’ll completely eliminate Homer Simpson moments. (Doh!) Checking these things will quickly become second nature for you, but don’t let that lead to sloppiness; be thorough. There are enough items to check that it’s easy to forget one or two. But there are so few that you can count them off with your fingers. It’s probably taken you longer to read this than it will to do it on your next image or print. Just scan the bullet points.

7 Things To Look For In Great Prints & Great Artists Who Make Exceptions

Get The Digital Printing Quick Start Guide here.

Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

7 Things To Look For In Great Prints & Great Artists Who Make Exceptions

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Classic prints exhibit sharp focus, extended depth of field, high dynamic range, pronounced contrast, and idealized color.

Reduced dynamic range, often with greatly reduced saturation, sometimes with reduced sharpness, occasionally with vignetting, and infrequently material process artifacts, printed on matte surfaces at small scales classically connotes historic photographic processes.

Half of the battle is knowing how to do something. The other half is knowing what to do. So when it comes to making fine photographic prints, it helps to know what to look for. A combination of elements (and their relationships with one another) is often evaluated when assessing print quality. When you depart from these standards you call attention to those elements, for better (intentional) or worse (accidental). Stack up too many exceptions and technique becomes a deal-breaker. Stack up enough well-crafted elements and technique becomes a deal maker. Speaking very broadly, you could say the goal is to clearly reproduce detail and minimize distractions from it. Let me get more specific.

1 Focussed

The default stance of a photograph is for everything to be in focus; critical focus is achieved (focal plane placed on the most important subject), depth of field is deep (aperture stopped down), motion blur is non-existent (high shutter speed). Blur is seen as an unfortunate product of poor tools and/or technique.

Exceptions

When exceptions are made, to work they need to appear obvious, deliberate, and be repeated in more than one image. Motion blur (from the subject or the camera) may be used to enhance gesture. (See Ernst Haas or Alexey Titarenko.) Selective focus may be used to direct attention away from less important elements toward more important elements. (See Keith Carter.) Soft focus may be used to reduce distracting detail and/or create impressionistic effects. (See Julia Margaret Cameron or Edward Steichen.)

2 Sharp

Sharpening (analog and digital) can be used to enhance focus by making lines and textures more pronounced. Push sharpening too far and an image begins to look graphic rather than photographic. Contours (bright halos and dark lines) may be accentuated unnaturally. Noise may become apparent. Texture may become overly crisp or even brittle.

Exceptions

So how crisp is too crip? That’s a matter of style, which follows intention. There’s a great gulf between Richard Avedon’s (extremely sharp) and Joyce Tenneson’s (soft) photographs. Both use more or less than standard sharpness expressively.

3 Low Noise

Noise is typically minimized. It can be reduced during capture (Use lower ISOs.), editing (Avoid aggressive contrast and/or sharpening.), or output (Use fine printer resolution and ink limits appropriate for the substrate used.).

Different types of images will present different limits. Noise becomes more apparent in smooth subjects and is often hidden in highly textured subjects. You may even elect to reduce noise during post-processing more in smooth areas than textured areas. A lot of noise becomes distracting. A little noise isn’t bad; it often makes an image appear sharper.

Exceptions

Photographers like Sheila Metzner and (early) Michael Kenna have used extreme noise to emphasize medium and create compelling atmospheres.

4 Gradation

Gradation, or the ability to reproduce smooth tonal transitions continuously without posterization, is prized. Harsh tonal transitions quickly make an image appear graphic and sometimes even abstract, reducing the illusion of volume /space and calling attention to contours.

Exceptions

Photographers who have been successful with high contrast photography, like Anton Corbijn and Mario Giacomelli, take it to an extreme.

The Big Overview – The Key Reasons Why Your Tools Matter When Printing

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Prints are produced by not one but many things – a system. You can make better prints if you understand how each of the tools you use to make them influences quality. In addition, you’ll be able to identify and come up with solutions for problems you run into, now or in the future.

I’ve written whole articles on each one of these components (Follow this article with the individual ones you’d like more clarity on.), nevertheless, rather than having to piece all of that information together, I find it’s also useful to have a broad overview of how the whole system works.

Here’s a quick survey of why each element of a printing system matters.

Camera resolution – dynamic range – bit depth

Lens sharpness – low distortion – few artifacts

Editing Space saturation

Bit Depth gradation

Software color – detail – composition

Monitor accurate preview – saturation – brightness of white

Printer ink – size

Ink black – saturation – longevity

Paper whites – materials

Printer Profile accurate color – graybalance

Light how well you can see

I’m currently testing the Fuji GFX 100

100 mp / 14 bit / ISO 12,800 expandable to 102,400

Camera

resolution – dynamic range – bit depth

A camera’s chip determines how much detail it can render with three primary characteristics – resolution (sharpness), dynamic range (shadows and highlights), and bit depth (gradation). More is better. It’s easier to throw away what you don’t need than create it.

Among several lenses, I favor the Fuji 32-64mm

Lens

sharpness – low distortion – few artifacts

Good lenses are sharper, better lenses maintain that sharpness edge to edge, while the best lenses also produce beautiful bokeh (depth of field blur). Good lenses are also free of distortion and artifacts like chromatic aberration. Fixing these things in post-production can sometimes be arduous and at a certain point impossible.

Prophoto is bigger than Adobe RGB and sRGB

I edit in ProPhoto RGB

Editing Space

saturation

Pro-Photo RGB can hold all of the saturation your camera can capture while other standard editing spaces cannot. If you use one of the smaller spaces (like Adobe RGB or sRGB) you may lose and not be able to produce that saturation.

Read more here.

I edit in 16-bit

Bit Depth

gradation

16 bit’s thousands of shades of gray don’t give you more separation in prints. Printers can take 16-bit data but they can only print 256 shades of gray. Editing in16-bit eliminates the possibility of producing posterization (which can produce harsh graphic transitions and/or noise).

Read more here.

I use Adobe Lightroom Classic and Photoshop together.

Software

color – detail – composition

You can pretty much change anything about the way your images look … for better or worse.

Good software lets you be more precise and go further. Better software does it more easily without cutting corners.

For traditionalists, it’s shadow and highlight detail, midtone contrast, color clarity, sharpness and reduced noise.

For non-traditionalists, it’s the ability to produce unique color palettes, special effects, and composites.

Read more here.

I use Epson’s P900 and 9000

Printer

ink – size

A printers manufacturer determines which ink set you’ll use.

A printer’s series determines which of the manufacturer’s inkset you’ll use.

A printer’s model determines how big you can print.

Additionally, a printer’s head also impacts speed.

I use Epson’s Ultrachrome HDX ink

Ink

black – saturation – longevity

The ink you use has a huge impact on print quality and longevity … but to see what it can do you need paper.

Read more here.

Ink & Paper

black – saturation – longevity

Together, ink and paper determine …

Black

The black of the ink and the white of the paper set the limits of a print’s contrast ratio.

No matter how much ink you put down on some substrates you won’t get a blacker black and each substrate has an ink limit, which is the maximum amount of ink that can be put down before detail starts being lost.

Saturation

Good inks and paper coatings produce more saturation in all colors.

Longevity & Durability

Some are more archival than others. (Visit Wilhelm Research for reliable data.)

I use Epson’s Legacy Fibre and Legacy Platine papers

Paper or Substrate

whites – materials

Substrates determine an image’s white (where the ink doesn’t go) and so contrast ratio. A brighter, bluer white is more versatile, but may or may not be as archival.

Only paper (or substrate if it’s canvas, plastic, metal, wood, etc) can give your images a look and feel. It’s first and foremost about the physical characteristics of materials including things like reflectivity and texture.

Read more here.

Photo papers have greater gamuts than matte because of their blacker blacks.

I use Epson’s profiles

Printer Profile

accurate color – graybalance – gradation – shadow and highlight detail

A good profile can be more than getting a good match with your screen. But it can be more. Poor profiles can cause color shifts, reduce saturation, produce posterization, and even lose shadow and highlight detail.

If you’re using Epson profiles for Epson papers, you’re in good shape. Epson makes great profiles for their papers. But if you’re using a third-party or hand-made substrate you need a good profile. Don’t assume that the profiles you download from websites are good. Test them. If they’re not great, get a professional to build one for you. Or, build your own.

Read more here.

I use Solux 3500K lights

Light

how well you can see good results

Event the best print can’t be seen in the dark. To be seen well, good prints need good light.

Think about three things …

1 Use a generous amount of light. Not so much light that it creates eye strain but use a lot. Good prints glow when they reflect light but they need enough light to create that glow.

2 Use the right color temperature. If you can’t control the light people view your prints in, assume it’s warmer than 5000K (most people prefer warmer light, like 3500K) and make your prints look good in a similar light.

3 If you really want to dial in the color for your exhibits (or your clients) recommend a full spectrum light source (like Solux) that doesn’t make one color look more saturated than another and so preserves the color relationships you produced in your prints.

Read more here.

It takes some initial research and testing to find the tools that are best for you but once you settle on a system of your own you only occasionally have to repeat this and only for specific components. It gets easier because you have a baseline. All you have to do is ask how much better can the new gear do and is it worth the cost and effort?

Meanwhile, if you run into issues (like my blacks aren’t black enough or my colors aren’t saturated enough or I’m losing detail) you’ll know which pieces of your system to tweak to get better results.

Read more on Color Management here.

Read more on digital Printing here.

Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

12 Classic Mistakes We’ve All Made Trying To Make Better Prints

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Plus 7 Extra Go To Printing Resources To Help You

Face it, we’ve all done it, that is overdone it, when we’re trying to make great prints. As important as it is to learn what you can do and how far you can go, it’s also important to learn how far not to go and why. You learn what to look for as well as what to look out for. These trials of error can be beneficial. You’re sure to learn a lot when you make mistakes. And we can learn from each other’s mistakes as well as our own. One of the many benefits of teaching printing for over twenty-five years is that I get to learn from my mistakes and from many other people’s too. There are some classic printing mistakes I see made time and time again because the approach is correct but the practice has just gone too far. If you’ve never made some of these mistakes, I recommend you make them – once.

Here are some classic mistakes I see so many people make when they’re printing – and the cures.

It’s Too Light

You want your print to be more luminous so brighter’s better right? But your image ends up looking washed out. The solution is to lighten the highlights more than the midtones and shadows. It’s a specific kind of contrast you won’t get with a Contrast slider but you will get with a Highlights slider or even better with Curves. You might also darkens shadows slightly. It’s the apparent contrast between highlights and shadows and in the midtones that will make your images glow. Most prints on average are weighted darker than middle gray so that their highlights will pop.

Whites Without Detail

So once again you’re chasing lightness and you push your highlights too far eliminating detail. There is a limit to how far you want to go and you just stepped over the line. Pull back. You can move in that general direction just don’t go so far. Don’t push the Whites slider so hard and pull your Highlights slider down a little, plus remember that you can get a second pass of Highlights and their neighbors Lights with Curves. You want highlights to have full detail and to be bright but not so bright you feel like you have to squint to see the picture better.

Whites Touch The Frame

Sometimes you have exposure that don’t have much (or any) detail in very bright areas. This is particularly problematic when they touch and break the rectangle of the frame. If you’re not going to clone detail into those areas, go old school and “fog” those areas, that is print them slightly gray. Using a brush lower the Whites slider (maybe the Highlights too) to build up some density without texture and restore the frame. You don’t need a lot, just enough to make the frame coherent, keeping the eye from wandering out of it and minimizing the distraction. Alternately, in Photoshop you can use a Curves adjustment layer and lower the white point slightly, then readjust the rest of the Curve to keep all the other tones glowing; paint on the mask to isolate this effect.