Happy New Year to one and all! The generally accepted “best” viewing bulb for prints are from Solux. They have no peaks in the viewing spectrum, thus allowing an even illuminant. The Solux products are used world-wide in galleries and museums. This post isn’t going into detail about the subject of viewing conditions, but merely […]

The basic reason you see your prints come out too dark is simple: your screen is too bright! I’m not being silly here; that’s the solution to about 90% of the cases (assuming you know how to calibrate a monitor, that is.) The iMac is a frequently cited culprit here: it’s not possible to get […]

Well, first: my pet peeve – it’s “raw” not “RAW” since it merely means “unaltered.” (JPEG is an acronym for Joint Photographic Experts Group, which is why it’s capitalized. “raw” isn’t an acronym for anything, which is why it should not be, but lots of folks-who-should-know-better do it anyway. I have no idea why.) That […]

A friend of mine has some very important photos that he’s having a rough time getting printed to his satisfaction.He’s spent hours on each one, and has each photo tuned exactly as he wants it printed. He worked with an expert to get the image just exactly right. At this point, no changes to the […]

  The 3800 doesn’t have the nice suction feature of my old 4000, which served to keep the paper flat throughout the full path. Specifically, today I was printing an 21 1/2 image on some 17 x 22 Ilford Galerie GFS, and as it came out everything looked great… until the last 1.5 inches. There, […]

  I just had an interesting and passionate discussion with the curator of a museum, on the general subject of art. Now those of you who know me as the photographer ceaselessly spouting “It’s the print, stupid” may be surprised to learn which side I took in the conversation. You see, it began with the […]

“Could not complete the Export command because there is not enough memory (RAM).” I got this when merely trying to export to the web a simple and small image. I have 8 gigs of RAM, and CS4 never had this problem. I won’t detail the screw-with-the-plugins-for-hours agony or any of the rest of the trauma, […]

Unfortunately, updating to 10.6.3 did not correct the problem with V4 ICC profiles for me…. Version 4 ICC profiles still print with a gray border around the image. My solution, as with others, has been to remake my profiles as Version 2. Wish there was better news… Tracy Edit April 1,2010: Today (4 months later) […]

I’m the “buck stops here” guy for putting together the Creative Vision Series Talks for the ImageMakers and Center For Photographic Art. We just had a great talk by Charlie Cramer (www.charlescramer.com). Got to meet Charlie Cramer face-to- face finally, and to rehash “The Anomaly Factory” (you know who you are!) with Bill Atkinson. He […]

Edit March 29, 2010: Unfortunately, updating to 10.6.3 did not correct the problem with V4 ICC profiles for me…. My photos suddenly started printing with great wide gray borders, for no reason I could imagine. I thought nothing had changed… but obviously something had. I tried reinstalling Photoshop CS4; reinstalling the Mac 10.6.2 update; moving […]