I recent ran across someone who didn’t understand what a raw file is, and had it confused with an image file. So, let’s take a quick look at it. Perhaps you’re old enough to remember the Weston Lightmeter: It had a “photovoltaic cell” (don’t panic) which is simply some goop which when exposed to light […]
Printing a correct color target for custom profiling Here is how to print a target of patches, for use in creating a custom color profile. (Note: this requires that you either have your own spectrophotometer, or are printing a target sent to you by someone you hired to create the custom profile for you.) A […]
While dark environments, such as Apple’s Mojave, or the default settings for Photoshop & Pixelmator Pro, may look fashionable, they are terrible for editing photos. Why? Because they screw up your ability to see tones properly. Using a dark background will trick your mind into producing a print that has clogged up shadows, and is […]
When “good enough” isn’t: canned paper profiles In my business (making prints for museums and galleries) the usual prebuilt paper/ink profile, often described as “good enough” really isn’t. Instead I make my own profiles using X-Rite’s i1Publish Pro 3. If that applies to you as well, here are some tips: Printing on expensive paper […]
Let’s say you’ve just made a print of your latest image, but how do you know what it -really- looks like? You would not take a flashlight and cover the end with blue cellophane, and shine it on the print, because it would trash all the other colors. To get a more rational view, you […]
When “good enough” isn’t: canned paper profiles In my business (making prints for museums and galleries) the usual prebuilt paper/ink profile, often described as “good enough” really isn’t. Instead I make my own profiles using X-Rite’s i1Publish Pro 3. If that applies to you as well, here are some tips: Printing on expensive paper is, […]
Well, I have good news, bad news and sorta between. The good news is that now I know why some user-saved custom printer presets fail spectacularly in MacOS Ventura and Sonoma. (Failure: user saves a paper type, print speed, sheet size, feed type and so on under a special name as a new preset. However […]
Hello There does seem to be a bit of confusion, or at least uncertainty here, and as usual, a lot of it comes from not using the correct words for your intended meaning. (Or, I just misread what I ran across here… ) -Regarding your monitor, there is ***calibrating*** AND there is ***profiling***. (These […]
16-bit or 8-bit images for printing? I make fine-art prints from digital files. My basic information sheet notes that the best prints are created from 16-bit images, like TIFFs, and a wide color-space, such as AdobeRGB or ProPhotoRGB. One person who got my information sheet was kind enough to write back, and explained to me […]
Some folks think that because when a 48 MP DNG is loaded into Lightroom, and it’s all extremely dark, that’s because it’s underexposed. Nope. The image is dark because raw images are 1.0 gamma aka “linear gamma”. In other words, there’s nothing wrong with the DNG; it’s supposed to look like that. Here’s how to […]