Color Management II

When we left off last time I had just gotten my new Epson R1800 printer settled in and printing decently. Now it was time to try out a range of papers and see what we could see.

As usual this is a seriously low budget and highly subjective experiment. Your mileage will assuredly vary. Take it for what it is worth.

I first searched the Web reading up on the various digital photographic papers. In the past I have bounced around between Epson, Crane, and Legion brands. I read reviews and company propaganda releases and compared prices on papers from five or six different manufacturers until I finally decided that for my purposes I would concentrate on the line of papers from Moab.

I’m not saying that these are the best papers in the world.  I don’t know that. I don’t have the time or the money to try them all. Moab is now a division of Legion Paper. One thing I really like is Legion’s new eco-friendly focus. Many of their papers are manufactured using alternative energy and renewable resources. Their prices seem reasonable to me and they produce a wide range of paper surfaces and weights.

So I ordered a sample pack. It came with two sheets each of Entrada Rag Bright 190, Entrada Rag Bright 300, Entrada Rag Natural 190, Entrada Rag Natural 300, Colorado Fiber Gloss 245, Colorado Fiber Satine 245, Lasal Photo Gloss 270, Lasal Photo Luster 270, Lasal Photo Matte 235, Somerset Enhanced Velvet 225, and Somerset Enhanced Textured 225.

For my tests I used the two Entrada 190s, the Colorado Gloss and Satine, the Somerset Velvet, and the Lasal Matte. I mixed in some Epson Ultra Premium Presentation Matte as a kind of known quantity since I have used it for proofing for a long time. I passed on the textured paper – I don’t like too much texture for my stuff. I also laid off the really heavy weight 300s for the time being.

First I just looked the papers over right out of the box. My first impressions were that I liked the look and feel of the Entrada Bright the best. I tend to like bright papers even though they get that way by the addition of optical brightening chemicals. I like the whites in my shots to be really white.

I was iffy on the Colorado papers at first glance. These are supposed to emulate the traditional F type surface of chemical prints. I thought the surface looked a little unevenly coated and I expected a more pearlescent texture.

The Somerset Velvet is a natural brightness and although smoother than the textured, it is still pretty rough.

The Lasal and the Colorado are alpha-cellulose based (think trees), the Entrada Rag and the Somerset are cotton based. I like the idea of using rag papers because they are naturally acid free and made from a very renewable source. (I use cotton based boards for matting my prints.)

I used the image above as my first test. It has some very bright white areas, some deep black and shadow areas, and a subtle touch of green and brown colors that often show up in the subjects that I most often shoot.

I printed from Paint Shop Pro XI. We’ll talk about PSP’s color management later – for now suffice to say I was letting the Epson printer driver handle the color management. I left all the settings in the printer driver the same for each print except that I changed the media type when needed according to the guidelines on the Moab web site. Before any printing, I did a nozzle check to be sure the printer was firing on all cylinders.

I printed the image at roughly 5 x 7 inches on each 8.5 x 11 sheet. Then I spread the prints out on a big table in my office that I use for matting and framing. I left them there for a week or so. Every so often I would look over the prints. I looked at them in natural daylight (I have big windows in my office) at varying times of the day and I looked at them at night under incandescent bulbs. Every once in a while I shuffled them around. I looked up close and I also looked from further away. Sometimes I would take them to other rooms in the house or carry them nearer to the window.

My preferences turned out to be (best to worst): Entrada Rag Natural, Colorado Gloss, Epson and Lasal Matte, Entrada Bright, Somerset Velvet. The Colorado Satine looked pretty much the same as the gloss only I liked the gloss surface better.

So even though I tended not to like the natural color of the Entrada or the surface of the Colorado at first blush, I ended up liking them the best after printing. The Somerset softened the image too much for my taste (I like things sharp and contrasty).  The Entrada Bright wasn’t as rich in the blacks and dark shadows as the natural and it seemed to soften some edges. The Epson and Lasal Mattes looked about the same to me and produced some really nice images for their relatively low cost.

I went back and forth between the Colorado Gloss and the Entrada Natural. The Colorado gave me the best colors – strong, deep, and rich - very sharp edges and good shadow detail. However, compared to the Entrada it lost detail in the mid-tones and sometimes the gloss finished became distracting, forcing me to constantly tilt the paper this way and that to find a viewing angle without glare.

Next I printed this more colorful and more brightly lit image of some rusting metal on just the Colorado Gloss, the Entrada Natural, and the Epson Matte. After a few days looking at these prints I decided that I liked the Colorado best. Again the colors were stronger and edges sharper than with the matte papers and (I guess because this image is brighter without any blacks) there really wasn’t much of a problem with glare on the gloss surface either.

Reviewing the images now as I write, I’m still torn between the Colorado and the Entrada. Both papers have their points. In the end I decided to go with the Entrada as my day to day paper. I felt it would handle largest portion of the kinds of images that I produce and I prefer the rag base. I may pick up some Colorado just to have around for certain images.

OK, so are we any nearer to talking about color management? You betcha. Next time I’m going to get into using it to tweak the images for printing and web display.

MDW

Color Management – Aww, maaaan.

Today kids we are going to talk about taking photographs, printing photographs, and posting photographs on the web – Hurray! That means that we have to talk about “color management” – Aww, maaaan.

If you have ever read the “Captain Underpants” book series by Dav Pilkey, the preceding paragraph should sound familiar.

Now, I like to read to my son for a little while just before bedtime. Our routine is to read a short cute story borrowed from the library and then finish up with something weightier.  After we read through all four books of the Hobbit/Lord of the Rings series twice in a row, I told him we had to try something else for a while. We tried the Narnia series, but he decided they were too scary so for something different (and I mean completely different), we are reading “Captain Underpants”.

Anyway, back to color management. If you have read Captain Underpants, you will also know that before I can tell you that story, I have to tell you this story…

A while back I noticed that my aging Epson 2000P printer was not printing up to par. Even though I cleaned the heads and fiddled with it all the time, the prints became lighter and lighter until it was too noticeable to be ignored. I took some drastic void the warranty type measures like pouring alcohol down the nozzles and it got better, but I figured it was time for a new printer.

I decided to stick with Epson printers and budget-wise I needed to stick with a desktop model. That narrowed it down to the R1800 and the R2400. I went with the R1800 because I mostly do color prints and because I’m cheap.

My totally subjective totally unscientific review of the R1800 goes like this. It is a good printer.

The output is better than my 2000P, but not wildly so. The addition of a gloss optimizer is nice for glossy prints as it eliminates bronzing. The 1800 adds a red and a blue ink and both glossy and matte black inks to the original cyan, magenta, and yellow inks. I might be more psyched over the additional inks if my prints were more brightly colored. My stuff tends to have subdued earth tones – green, brown, black, grey, rust, etc. – not a lot of fire engine red or royal blue.

So the printer is fine. The problem is that anytime I change something in my workflow like a new camera, or computer monitor, or printer, I have to spend lots of time fiddling around to get all the parts to play nice with each other and give me output that I’m happy with. A new printer although not greatly different than my last one, means different inks in the printer, different drivers on my computer, and the possibility of using different papers.

I got the printer to print basically like my old one as a starting point. This wasn’t too difficult. Once I updated to all the latest drivers and what not, I pretty much used the same settings in the printer driver that I used on my 2000P and things looked pretty good.

Next I went nuts and decided to crank things up a notch. A new printer with new whiz-bang features should be better and not just the same, right? As Red Green would say, “If it ain’t broke, you’re not trying”.

The new gloss optimizer opens up the possibility of using gloss paper something that I had never been too keen on. However, paper manufacturers have come out with some new papers that I wanted to try – specifically ones that emulate the old sorta glossy F-type fiber based papers from the chemical print days. I ordered a sample pack of various papers from Moab (now owned by Legion). Next time I’ll tell you what my testing revealed.

(I promise this will come around to color management in the end.)

MDW

McIntyre Wild Area

After a couple of weeks away on vacation and family business, I decided I needed to get out to the woods for a couple of days and I wanted to go somewhere different. Around here the dry summer has evaporated most of the streams and the autumn colors haven’t started yet. My usual haunts where I have been walking all my life are getting too well known which brings with it trash, cairns, and graffiti – very disheartening.

I headed down to Pennsylvania to the McIntyre Wild Area near the small town of Ralston.

This place is about three hours from where I live and it took me even longer since the directions that I had were not the best. The key factor is that Rock Run Road does not touch Route 14. You can not find it by driving back and forth through Ralston like I did. You need to turn on Thompson Road, follow it to the back of town, bear left, bear right across a bridge, and finally take a wild guess that the unmarked dirt road ahead is in fact Rock Run Road.

I finally arrived around 4:30 in the afternoon. I had planned to camp here, but there were lots of bright orange signs warning me that it was mandatory to get a permit first. Unfortunately to get a permit meant driving another thirty or forty miles south to a forestry office which I assumed was closed by now anyway.

I decided to just scope out the area for tomorrow’s hike and then find a room somewhere. I drove up to a lookout at the end of McIntyre road. You can certainly see a long way from the overlook, but basically it is just a view of Route 14 running down the valley – not the greatest.

Rock Run Road gets its name because it follows Rock Run, a large-ish stream or a small-ish river depending on how you look at it. This is very pretty. The water is crystal clear. It doesn’t seem to have much pitch to it, but the water runs very fast and there are lots of channels, swirls, and small waterfalls all along it. There is so much water moving so quickly that I had to run up the ISO on my camera to keep everything from becoming just a solid white blanket in every shot.

I also checked out Miner’s Run, a stream that cascades down the hill and joins Rock Run at the bottom. I hear that the top of the hill was a coal strip mine years ago hence the name.

The morning brought typical Pennsylvania fog everywhere, but the sky above promised a sunny day. I parked at the bridge where Miner’s Run passes under Rock Run Road and headed up the hill. The stream is pretty nice. There was a little graffiti early on and some rock cairns at one point, but higher up it was relatively pristine, quiet, and with no one else around, I could take my time and stop often for a bit of reflection.

The higher I went the more I found lumps of coal along the stream. Once up to where the ravine leveled out a bit, it was everywhere. Even parts of the stream bed were solid deposits of coal with the water flowing over them.

The stream goes on for miles up on top of the hill in a relatively flat meandering channel. Eventually the ravine walls pull back opening onto a sunny plain covered with ferns. And I mean covered with ferns. There are fields of ferns running right from the stream bank to the eaves of the surrounding hardwoods. Sometimes they were up to my waist or better and I had to wade through them like water. They grow so thick that I couldn’t see my feet as I walked so I was always tripping over hidden logs or stumbling into unseen holes.

A deer sprang up out of the ferns and bounded toward the wood. It stopped just inside the shadow of the trees and just watched me pass. If I hadn’t seen it run over there, I would never have noticed it standing still as a statue waiting to see if I was heading its way or not.

After a while slogging through the ferns in the hot sun, I decided to head back down stream. I got back to the car with some time left before sunset so I went for another walk along Rock Run. Mostly I could walk along the rocky edges of the stream and wade through the shallows. Once in a while I had to climb up the banks into the woods to get around especially large waterfalls with steep side walls.

Rock Run has rental cabins and campsites along it and they were starting to fill up toward dusk. People were bathing and playing in the water – lots of yelling and splashing. It got to be more like hanging out at the YMCA pool than hiking in the wild so I decided it was time to head home.

MDW