Digital Printing - What do I need?

[jsrockit]

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Ok, I haven't printed photos from a printer in about 7-8 years (and wasn't that good then). Things have changed and I'm a bit lost after just getting back into photography again. I want to do this right though, so please be gentle with me.

 

I am using a Macbook Pro and Aperture. My camera is the M8.

 

My requirements: 8x10 size is ok... don't need larger for now. I will print both B&W and Color.

 

Is it possible to calibrate a Macbook screen or am I better off with something external? What is the cheapest printer that I should even look at for very good prints? I'm not sure about printer profiles... any help there would be great. Basically, if someone could help me with the necessities to get up and running to make nice prints, I'd be greatful.

 

I come from the wet darkroom era. I've printed Cibachromes, C-Prints, and B&W and was good at all of them. However, digital is new to me and my first attempts 7-8 years ago were not so great.

[haroldp]

If letter size is a usable maximum, a very cost effective photo printer would be any HP using the '02' print engine. I use an 8250 for casual printing.

 

These are 6 color ink printers costing around USD 99.00.

 

They are efficient users of ink, and actually recycle inks used to clear the jets back into the reservoirs.

 

These are approx. $ 10.00 cartridges for which Stapes will give a $ 3.00 rebate for the empty.

 

Print quality is very high, better than 3-4 color printers, but not quite as good as my 12 ink Z3100 ( or equivalent Epson / Canon ) if one looks very close.

 

ICC profiles for this printer are available for free from HP, Epson, and Ilford, and are critical for accurate color rendition.

 

It is also critical to calibrate the monitor that you use for editing.

 

You should set the print driver to 'application managed colors' and choose the correct profile (printer / paper ) in the printing utility (eg: photoshop).

 

I highly recommend Qimage as a printing utility and manager.

 

It gives complete control, and automatically re-rezzes to determined DPI based on final print size. It is also cheap ( USD 59.00 ).

 

I hope this is useful.

 

Regards ... Harold

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[jsrockit]

I'm not looking to go dirt cheap with the printer... I just don't want to spend $1000+... I want my prints to compare to what I'm used to getting in a wet darkroom, color and B&W.

 

I'm in desperate need of help... so, I owe anyone who helps. I just want to do it right the first time.

[jsrockit]

Can I get away with using a Epson R1900 or R2880 expecting really nice quality? I don't want to wrestle with inferior equipment if I can afford to... I'd like the only bottleneck to getting good results to be my skills.

 

By the way, Thanks Harold.

[haroldp]

I am sure that you would find both of these epsons to be acceptable. I formerly used an Epson 2200, print quality was excellent, but since I do not print every day, it would clog it's heads and I expended more ink clearing them than actually printing. HP's seem to be much better in this regard. I hope the new Epson's have solved this problem but I have not personally tried them.

 

In a 13" printer, the HPB9180 using 8 pigment inks including photo and matte black concurrently appears to be a good value at about $ 550 to 600, it has great reviews but I have not used one.

 

My main printer for large prints is an HP Z3100 which is a 24" roll printer with 12 inks including 4 shades of black and a clear coat. It is large, heavy (160 lb.) and expensive ($ 4,000 ) but is state of the art. I am sure the equivalent Epson and Canon are as good.

 

Do not dismiss the HP 02 printers because of their low price, they are 6 ink and print quality is excellent. I use one whenever my size is 8 X10 or smaller.

 

In any case proper calibration of your monitor and using correct procedures, and matching ICC profiles and papers makes a bigger difference than choice of equipment.

 

Qimage with its automatic re-rezzing (600 dpi to match HP raster ) gives me better prints on the $99 8250 than printing with photoshop on the $ 4,000 Z3100.

 

Qimage is windows only, so I run a Windows VM on my mac using parallels.

 

Regards ... Harold

[jsrockit]

Thanks Harold, that gives me more to think about. I'm not trying to be a snob by disregarding the $99 HP... I just want to have one printer that does B&W as well as color really well. I've read that the cheaper printers do color well (and have experienced this), but their B&W output is just not up to par. The HPB9180 looks to be more of what I am looking for with the different shades of black ink.

 

What are ICC profiles?

[haroldp]

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ICC profiles allow a specific printer / paper combination to produce a 'standard ' output for hue, saturation etc.

 

They are essentially the 'delta' between the printers default with a particular paper, and a the 'standard'. Theoretically, any printer / paper combo should produce 'identical' results when each is driven by the correct profile.

 

They are generated by printing a standard target, and using either a calibrated scanner, or spectrometer to read the output and create a 'difference'.

 

While many tools are available to do this yourself, they are usually provided by printer manufacterers for their own papers, and by paper manufacterers for the common printers.

 

Their web sites will usually have them.

 

You should set the print driver to 'application managed colors' and choose the correct profile (printer / paper ) in the printing utility (eg: aperture).

 

It is also critical to calibrate the monitor that you use for editing. The calibration (like color munki or spyder 3 generate ICC profiles for the monitor.

 

The end result of all of this calibration is to have the print look as close to the monitor colors as possible.

 

This is a very simplified explanation, but should get you started.

 

Getting this right (or not) is a much bigger difference than any difference in print quality between printers.

 

Regards ... Harold

[jsrockit]

Thanks Harold... that helps a lot. Now I just need to decide on my printer... many seem to think the Epson 3880 is the way to go, but I'm not really in the mood to pay for that.

[ericperlberg]

ICC profiles allow a specific printer / paper combination to produce a 'standard ' output for hue, saturation etc.

 

Sorry, no. What ICC profiles and colour management in general do is help you maximise the performance of your image creation system (camera, monitor, printer/paper/ink combo).

 

It's not terribly expensive and while a bit hard to grasp at first, its not complicated once you understand what's going on.

 

The classic book in the field is Real World Color Management by Fraser, Murphy et all by Peachpit press and for a technical book its surprisingly readable. Its been rewritten by Jeff Schewe, get the 2nd edition.

 

Here's the situation (in theory, newer kit may have some adjustments). The camera's chip records colours using numbers between 1-256 for red, blue and green. Lets take red. The reddest red the chip can record is given the number 256. The problem is that 256 describes both the reddest red of a high quality chip and the cheapest of the cheap digital sensors. So 256 red in itself is meaningless in terms of what it describes. It just says, this red was as red as I can handle. So the number has to be put into a context.

 

The context is called a color space, specifically a device independent color space which is a theoretical construction including a range of colours and shades. It's device independent because its not connected to any specific device, be it printer or monitor. You know the names of some already, sRGB, Adobe RGB, and maybe you've heard of ProPhoto or others. sRGB is the smallest (fewest colours, mostly saturated colours), and ProPhoto the largest (the most saturated colours) with Adobe RGB being somewhere in the middle. Why not just use one color space model?

 

Think of a balloon. Not blown up. Put a bunch of dots on the balloon with a pen. Now blow up the balloon. What happens? The dots get pulled apart as the balloon expands. In terms of your camera data, if it isn't robust (cheap sensor) then as the data points coming from the camera are stretched to fill the colour space, beyond a certain point depending on the quality of the sensor, you start to get distortions. Gradiants become uneven, colours become exaggerated.

 

With Software like Lightroom this is handled in the background, in Photoshop you have to specify which device independent colour space you want.

 

With an M8, you can use ProPhoto as your independent colour space, the data is robust enough to handle this.

 

Ok, now lets think about your monitor. Like the camera sensor it doesn't know colours, it knows numbers. And your monitor can't reproduce all the colours that your camera can record though monitors are improving all the time. On a practical level this means that there may be very saturated colours in your file that you won't see. Profiling your monitor adjusts your monitor so that it shows accurately the numbers which are fed into it. You need to profile your monitor regularly (once a month for an amateur, once a day for a professional working on critical work) because the monitor's characteristics are constantly changing with use, age, temperature, etc.

 

Better laptops screens are not nearly as good as better desktop monitors. They have smaller colour gamuts and less smooth gradations of colour.

 

The next problem is that your printer can't print all the colours that your camera can record and depending on your monitor it may be able to print some colours your monitor can't display and not print some colours your monitor can display. This depends on the quality of your monitor and the quality of your printer.

 

A tool called Soft--proofing is used to try to get the monitor to mimic your printer so you have some idea of what your print will look like before printing. Saves money and heartache. More later.

 

The prints you make are determined by the ability of a paper to re-create colours and dynamic range. Matt papers have less of a dynamic range than glossies as a general rule but again different papers have different abilities.

 

And then there are inks with each manufacturer of ink having different gamuts depending on the paper their being sprayed onto and the ability of the printer to smoothly spray the ink at the right density of ink without causing blotching or running. These spray patterns are adjusted by the so-called "Media" settings in your printer driver. These are generally set up using the manufacturers papers so premium glossy media setting may or may not be the correct media setting for your particular paper. There's a test you can do to check this called an ink density ramp and many times the paper manufacturer will tell you their recommendations based on the printer you use.

 

Further, each printer, even from the same manufacturer will have slightly different characteristics due to manufacturing tolerances built into the manufacturing process.

 

What ICC profiling does is:

1) Allows each of the devices above to be maximised according to their unique characteristics

2) Allows you to create profiles which help you make the most out of your systems and to soft-proof (saving heartache and money).

 

You need to create an icc monitor profile for your monitor and then a specific ICC profile for each printer/paper/ink combination you'll be printing to.

 

Paper manufacturers do supply "generic" ICC profiles which are approximations for any given printer but there's enough variability to individual printers even of the same model by the same manufacturer that "custom" ICC profiles are worth having if you care enough to buy an M8.

 

Basically you'll be sent a file of several hundred or a few thousand colour swatches with instructions on how to turn off all colour management in your system. You print the file with the colour swatches on your printer using the paper and ink you want to use and after letting the paper dry you post it to the profile maker.

 

The profile maker uses a spectrophotometer to scan the colour swatches. Since he/she has the original file that you printed out, the scanned colour swatch data can be compared in accuracy to the original data. Lets say swatch number E21 is too red, ie, the spectrophotometer reading of the swatch printed by your printer/paper/ink combo is more red than the original data intended. The software the profile maker is using then generates a table which adjusts for this inaccuracy. This table is the ICC profile.

 

When finished (and there's built in redundancy in the system to double check accuracy) the profile maker sends you the ICC profile which you put into your computer following instructions.

 

So from now on, what you have is a printer with a specific paper/ink combo which will (more or less) correctly recreate any specific colour sent to it, at least as far as your printer is able to do using the chemical characteristics of your chosen paper and ink.

 

You can also use this ICC profile for soft-proofing as explained here.

 

Learn to use colour management and it will make your printing life easier. Get a few custom ICC profiles made for your favourite papers by a reputable profilemaker (they're not expensive).

 

For more info go here and scroll down to colour management.

 

All the best,

Eric

[ericperlberg]

PS, You generally get what you pay for. With monitors you're concerned with the colour gamut the monitor can reproduce (usually around sRGB, the best ones can show more than Adobe RGB), the smoothness of a gradiant (blue sky for example) and how well the monitor can cope with adjusting it to make it accurate. High end Eizo, LaCie and NEC models are the best but not cheap. All 3 make plenty of crap monitors for stock brokers who stare at numbers all day long so don't go by manufacturer alone.

 

Same with printers. How accurately do the mechanisms creep along, how good is the ink delivery system, what range of colours can the inks reproduce, etc. I think there's many posts in the archives on this. I use an aging Epson 2400 and an M8/M8.2. Up to A3, when I show my work to professional artists and print makers they have been very impressed and frequently wonder if the camera was a medium format camera. The Epson 2400 is long ago replaced but the equivalent model should give you a price range to work in whether you choose an HP or Epson or Canon is down to details.

[Chroma project]

Ok, I haven't printed photos from a printer in about 7-8 years (and wasn't that good then). Things have changed and I'm a bit lost after just getting back into photography again. I want to do this right though, so please be gentle with me.

 

I am using a Macbook Pro and Aperture. My camera is the M8.

 

My requirements: 8x10 size is ok... don't need larger for now. I will print both B&W and Color.

 

Is it possible to calibrate a Macbook screen or am I better off with something external? What is the cheapest printer that I should even look at for very good prints? I'm not sure about printer profiles... any help there would be great. Basically, if someone could help me with the necessities to get up and running to make nice prints, I'd be greatful.

 

I come from the wet darkroom era. I've printed Cibachromes, C-Prints, and B&W and was good at all of them. However, digital is new to me and my first attempts 7-8 years ago were not so great.

 

 

Michael Reichmann has a good teaching on that particular topic *from camera to print*

 

good luck.

[haroldp]

Paper manufacturers do supply "generic" ICC profiles which are approximations for any given printer but there's enough variability to individual printers even of the same model by the same manufacturer that "custom" ICC profiles are worth having if you care enough to buy an M8.

 

 

How this actually works internally is way to complex for this forum, and is not needed by most.

 

Eric is correct that custom profiles can be more accurate, because they account for more specific variables.

 

For myself, and I believe for many others, my colors do not normally have to be precise, they have to be credible, and manufacturer profiles are usually good enough for that. Only you can decide where you are on this.

 

If I were producing adverts where for example a fabric had to be the right color, than all possible rigor would be applied, including daily custom profiling.

 

In any case , don't let the apparent complexity deter you from proper color management. You are infinitely better off with manufacturer printing profiles than with no profiles at all, in which case results wil be truly random.

 

I have the equipment and technique to generate my own printing profiles, and I do so when the work is very critical, or I am using a Paper / Printer for which manufacturer profiles are not available.

 

We are all agreed on the basic steps:

 

1- Calibrate your monitor. It is true that real graphics monitors have a much larger gamut than typical LCD screens. Most LCD's cover 72-75 % of the NTSC gamut. Most graphics monitors cover 120-130 % of NTSC gamut ( approximating adobe RGB). In any case, you get get much better results calibrating the monitor you have, than with any monitor uncalibrated.

 

2- Operate in a consistent color space. Most shooting for print use Adobe RGB ( I do ), but Prophoto is a larger gamut and many serious folks use it. SRGB is usually used to match monitors for display. If shooting RAW, you can decide this at RAW processing time.

 

3- Use printer profiles matching your paper / printer, out of the printing application, setting printer drivers to 'application managed color'.

When using manufacturer profiles, be aware of the printer's paper settings that were used to gen the profiles. If you make or get custom profiles note all of the settings that were in place when printing the target.

 

 

These steps will get you to 90%. If you need more, than by all means go further.

 

In any case, this is much easier than it sounds (even I can do it),

... enjoy.

 

" perfection is the enemy of excellence "

 

Regards ... Harold

[jsrockit]

Cool... thanks a lot all. I think I'm feeling better about jumping in.

[ericperlberg]

I built ICC printer profiles professionally for about 5 years which may or may not mean anything but I had a lot of satisfied customers who would say things like, "thank goodness, you've changed my life". Of course I didn't have anything to do with it, its just that their system needed a custom profile.

 

To add to what Harold has said, I would start by downloading the paper manufacturer's ICC generic profile for your chosen printer. NOTE: one reason to buy a popular printer in any price class is that many manufacturer's will offer free profiles for it. They clearly try to hit the bulk of the market but at some point the effort to produce an ICC profile for every printer is too expensive to justify. They get charged hefty fees (10s of thousands of dollars) to build generic profiles that they distribute for free.

 

My recommendation is to initially follow Harold's advice, start with the free profile from the paper manufacturer. If it works for you, great. How well it works is up to the manufacturing variances mentioned in my post above.

 

If you're still not satisfied then get a custom profile built. It's not a question of being overly picky or being a professional trying to match the red of coke to a printed advert. It's more up to how close your specific printer is to the "typical" printer the paper manufacturer used to build their profile. For some unknown proportion of people the generic profile is "good enough". For some other unknown proportion its not "good enough". You'll just have to experiment to find out and so logic dictates you try the free option first even though you shouldn't have to pay more than $25 per custom profile.

 

I no longer build profiles so I'm not angling for any business.

 

Eric

[jsrockit]

I will get a custom one done later for sure, but will start with a generic one...

[minhhich]

ONe more thing, If you get an ink-jet, make sure you use the dedicated ink, do not buy those cheap one of ebay, the ink is to dense, and it with break your printer, I experienced it with my epson R360 A4 printer.

 

The Apple screens are pretty accurate. However if you need it to be very accurate then I suggest you to buy a spyder + an External Monitor as it is almost pointless to calibrate a laptop LCD

[etrigan63]

Agree with all that has been said above. I have an HP B9180 & Canon W6400 (older 24" printer). Qimage in a Parallels VM (Windows 7 x64) is great for single prints at an excellent price. Works with both of my printers as long as you select the proper paper profile. I use ImageNest for batch printing multiple prints to the 24" printer. Different from Qimage in that it specializes in minimizing paper/ink waste.

 

Monitor calibration is an absolute must in this scenario. Spyder3 Studio and ColorMunki Photo are excellent and can profile printers too. A Huey Pro can do monitors/projectors an is a bit cheaper ($129). All three also monitor ambient light, but only the ColorMunki and Huey Pro auto adjust the monitor for conditions. The Spyder just complains that the lighting in the room is off and you need to do something about it.

 

The 24" Apple Cinema Display is a very good middle-of-the-road monitor. HP's DreamColor displays are awesome, but need a DisplayPort equipped Mac to power them to their fullest (10-bit direct display - no color remapping like in the Eizo/LaCie/NEC monitors).

[jsrockit]

OK, an external screen is out of the question right now. However, I see many people state that, while not ideal, you can calibrate a laptop screen. Is this not true?

[ericperlberg]

OK, an external screen is out of the question right now. However, I see many people state that, while not ideal, you can calibrate a laptop screen. Is this not true?

 

I don't know why people say that, perhaps they'll explain their thinking. A tune-up on your 1960 Trabant won't make it fast like a ferrari but it will get the best performance out of your Trabant.

 

Of course even among laptops some displays are better than others. Even the best laptop displays (say a MacBook Pro) can't display the range of shades of colour in your image file (especially the more saturated colours), won't show the smooth gradations in broad colour fields of a better monitor, it won't have the dynamic range your file probably contains (esp if you have an M8 which I think you mentioned you have) but calibrating/profiling it will "tune it up".

 

As I said above, if your file has a red of 62 and your laptop monitor produces a red of 59, creating a monitor profile will help your display show 62 or at least 61.5 rather than 59. It will be more accurate within its own limited capabilities.

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[roguewave]

Are there any special issues with printing B&W in these regards. Do the ICC profiles for papers/printers work the same for B&W as color? I'm getting set to purchase an Epson 3880 (when they become available) for making prints of some of my B&W work. Although I enjoy making wet prints and love the silver, I'd like an alternative solution as well. Thanks, Ben