How long will a particular print last ? That's been a question since the beginning of photographic time.

History
Louis Daguerre is often sited for his invention of the daguerreotype. He took the first photo of a person in 1839. His process was based on silver. Silver is still used in photography, but it is rapidly being displaced by digital sensors for cameras and very sophisticated ink based printers. Despite the huge shift in technology, print longevity still remains an important concern for photographers and their customers.

Black, White and Silver
Silver based prints are still used today for some black and white printing. To ensure long print life, these prints must be carefully "fixed" to remove undeveloped silver halides, and washed to remove the fixer. Done correctly the image left behind is metallic silver. Provided the paper itself is suitable, a proper silver based print will have a long life. The key to this is the stable nature of the metallic silver.

Color, Then and Now
In the past color photography was almost entirely based on silver halide as the light sensitive component. It was however different from black and white photography in that the silver did not form the final image. The final image on film or paper was comprised of dyes. These dyes tended to have short lifetimes in comparison to black and white prints based on metallic silver. We can all relate to finding old and faded color prints.

With the advent of modern inkjet printing one might have expected that print longevity worries would be a thing of the past. But as many of you know, some inkjet prints can fade quickly. The root cause (again), dyes with short lifetimes. Many inkjet printers use dye based inks.

Pigment Based Inks
Pigments are highly stable compounds. They have very high fade resistance. Virtually all paints are tinted with pigments. Pigment based inks for photo printing are a fairly recent innovation. A properly made print using pigment based inks can have a lifetime exceeding 200 years. See www.wilhem-research.com. Epson was the first to introduce pigment based inks to their line of professional photo printers. This caused a sea change among professional photographers. As far as I can tell, the majority of professional fine art photographers are using Epson pigment based printers for their work. I am no exception.

Mike Nakamura
Portland, Oregon
3.8.2010

For maximum enjoyment of your fine art prints, they should be displayed properly. Good lighting will make the print almost jump off the wall. The clarity and color will be superior under good lighting.

A Little Background
One of the qualities of a good print is a high Dmax. Dmax is short for maximum density. A high Dmax gives blacker blacks. It the difference between the white of the paper (ie no ink) and the blackest black that can be printed on the paper which determines the dynamic range of the paper. Too little dynamic range and the images will be washed out. This is very much like looking at something on a foggy day.

What does this have to do with lighting ? Dim lighting produces dim images. Very much equivalent to wandering around in your house with just a flashlight. You can see well enough to keep from running into the walls, but things can get lost in the shadows.

Hanging the Print
The print should be hung at a level that is comfortable for the intended viewers. Direct sunlight as well as high humidity should be avoided. Both may shorten print life. A secondary consideration is the wall color. Most galleries have very neutral colored walls, often white. Ansel Adams felt that a fairly neutral green color in the middle tonal range was perfect. Of course most of us will have other considerations as well. I've found that black frames with white mats work well with almost any wall color.

The Light
The light hitting the print should come from above print and should hit the print at aproximately a 45 degree angle. This ensures that light reflected from the glass will not be directed into the viewer's eyes. The best way to achieve this in most situations is ceiling mounted track light. Fixtures should use small halogen bulbs with built in reflectors. The most common example being the MR-16 bulb. I use Juno Trac 12. A good source is www.laner.com. Juno (www.junolightinggroup.com) now has LED fixtures available for Trac 12.

Mike Nakamura
Portland, Oregon
3.11.2010

Many of my most popular images are panoramic in nature. That is to say the are considerably wider than they are high. Additionally, they are created by combining multiple smaller images. Creating these stitched images is technically and artistically quite challenging, but the results can be stunning. The intent of this article is to provide an overview of the techniques involved and how they are used.

Capture
The first step is the capture of the images which will be stitched to form the overall image. If these initial captures are not done correctly, huge often insurmountable problems will be present in the stitched image. In no particular order here are the important considerations:

Visualize the desired composition. To a large extent one must visualize the composition mentally, as the luxury of seeing the finished image in a viewfinder is not available when stitching.

Manual focus and manual exposure should be used to minimize unwanted focus and exposure variation between the source images.

A tripod is extremely useful to ensure that the row of images taken is level and not sloping downhill to the left or right. Use a bubble level to level the tripod head.

The source images should be captured with sufficient overlap to allow automated stitching programs to align each pair of overlapped images up properly. In practice an overlap of about 30% is reasonable.

Care should be taken to minimize parallax distortion between different images. There are two viable methods to achieve this. They can be combined to some extent. If all of the subject matter is a considerable distance from the camera then parallax isn't an issue. This could be the case where a fairly long lens is being used to shoot a series of images. If there will be subject matter close to the camera then parallax can be a serious issue. For that situation a specialized tripod head should be used and careful attention to finding the nodal point of your lenses will be necessary.

As with most landscape photography, pay careful attention to depth of field. This will usually result in numerically large apertures being selected, often f/16 or higher. This in turn will result in slow shutter speeds. It may be necessary to use a remote shutter release and mirror lockup for the best captures. Additionally if your tripod allows, you may wish to hang some weight from the bottom of the center post to improve stability.

Stitching
Ok, so if all that went well the next major step is stitching. There are two methods that I regularly employ for stitching. In order of increasing difficulty (of use) and capability they are: Photoshop's built in Photomerge function, and PTGui.

Photomerge is very simple to use, but often produces frustratingly bad stitches. To use it open your source files in Photoshop and proceed to start Photomerge. File/Automate/Photomerge should get you there. I find that Photomerge is useful for previewing what a completed panorama will look like. As you remember it often isn't easy to really visualize the panorama when you are shooting the source images. It's still hard to visualize even after you have the source images in front of you. For almost any serious work I prefer to use PTGui.

With the introduction of PTGui Version 5, PTGui became my favored tool for stitching. The current release is Version 8. Without a doubt this tool provides the best results of any tool that I use for stitching. It has the power to stitch multiple rows of images and can compensate for all manner of various and sundry distortions caused by tilted cameras and distorting lenses. See www.ptgui.com.

Printing
Printing panoramas can be almost as frustrating as stitching them. Printers which accept roll paper are required to print any reasonably sized panorama. Epson makes printers which accept up to 64” wide roll paper. An Epson Stylus Pro 9900 can print on 44” roll paper. Rolls come in 100 foot lengths. That should probably be big enough for you. The majority of professional photographers printing their own work use Epson Stylus Pro printers and Ultrachrome inks.

Good luck in your stitching endeavors.

Mike Nakamura
Portland, Oregon
revised 2.26.2010

How do I make a print that matches my monitor ? The answer, color management. Quite possibly one of the most confusing things that one might face in setting up a digital darkroom, color management vastly improves the quality of printed images once it is set up properly.

What are ICC Profiles
Since the establishment of the International Color Consortium in 1993, ICC profiles have become the lingua franca of color management. An ICC profile describes in essence a translation between the optical characteristics of a device and its digital interface. For example a computer monitor running in 24 bit mode has as its digital interface (in this case its input) 3 eight bit values, one for red, green and blue. It has as its output, light in the form of its display. A printer has of course a print as its output. A digital camera has light as its input and digits as its output. If you are scanning film then the scanner has light as its input and digits as its output.

If you have ICC profiles for your display and your printer then you are getting close. Notice there is no mention of input devices (ie your camera) in the last sentence. An ICC profile for your camera would provide the translation mapping between the light from the scene and the digital output of the camera. This would be of utmost importance IF you are trying to achieve a scientifically known relationship between the actual scene being photographed and the camera output. In many if not most cases this is not true. Captured images will be displayed in Photoshop and adjusted by the artist until the image reflects the artist's vision. Rarely if ever will the resulting print be compared directly to the scene that was photographed. So the important thing is getting the print to match the monitor. There are of course some cases where a match between the subject and the print is required. Reproducing original paintings, or product photography come to mind. In those cases an appropriate ICC profile for the digital camera or camera/film/scanner combination is appropriate. Nevertheless, I use generic ICC profiles for my digital SLR's to establish a starting point that is “close”.

Obtaining ICC profiles
Obtaining generic ICC profiles for your printer is normally fairly easy. A generic profile is a profile that on average matches other printers like your printer. Unfortunately, because of production tolerances a generic profile might not be a good match to your specific printer. Generic profiles may be provided by the printer manufacturer. Often they are included on the disc supplied with the printer or downloadable from the manufacturer's website. In addition some paper suppliers provide generic profiles for popular printers. Note a different profile is required for each paper/ink/printer combination. If the generic profiles work for you (that is provide satisfactory print to monitor matching and more importantly provide good prints) then you may not need custom printer profiles. If the generic profiles leave you wondering whether things could be better, you might want to try custom profiles. Custom profiles can be obtained in two ways. If you only need one or two I recommend using a someone like Cathy's Profiles at www.cathysprofiles.com. You print a test image consisting of many different color patches following very specific instructions and send the print to Cathy. She uses a variety of equipment and her expertise to generate a profile for you. She then emails you the resulting ICC profile files. As of this writing the cost per profile is $40. There are other web based providers and you may have local providers in you area. If you need many custom profiles, you may elect to make your own. There are two approaches to this. The lower cost approach uses a scanner or a scanner like device to read a test image that you print. An example of this approach is available from www.colorvision.com. The other approach uses a sophisticated and considerably more expensive device know as a photo spectrometer. Gretag-Macbeth (www.gretagmacbeth.com) provides systems based on a photospectrometer. It is my opinion that exhibition quality prints require custom profiles made with photo spectrometers. I've invested in Gretag-Macbeth Eye-One Photo for my work.

Monitor profiles are almost the opposite situation. There seem to be few if any generic monitor ICC profiles. My opinion here is that you MUST generate custom profiles for your monitor(s). Fortunately this is much less expensive than generating printer profiles. Something like Eye-One Display will do the job quickly and easily. For monitors a colorimeter based instrument will be quite adequate to generate profiles. The color filters in an LCD monitor or the phosphors in a CRT monitor are chosen to fairly closely duplicate the eye's response to color. Furthermore monitors do not depend on reflected light. Pigments and dyes used for printing are quite another story, being both dependent on the viewing light and not necessarily being good matches for the eye's spectral response. Hence the need for spectrometers instead of colorimeters.

Once you have ICC profiles the remaining requirement is an application that is ICC profile aware. Photoshop and Capture One are two applications I use which fulfill that requirement. Photoshop is of course used for the bulk of image post processing. There are two primary areas where you will setup Photoshop color management. The first is accessed under Edit/Color Settings (at least on Windows machines). If in doubt use Adobe RBG (1998) for the RGB working space, set RGB Color Management Policies to Preserve Embedded Profiles, and to ask about Profile Mismatches and Missing Profiles. Unless you'll be doing something with CMYK, Gray or Spot you can ignore those settings. The second area where the correct color settings must be applied is in the Print with Preview dialog box under the File/Print with Preview menu. Here you want to check the Show More Options box and set under Color Management the Source Space as Document. For Print Space set Profile to match the name of your hopefully custom printer profile. Proceed to print, making sure your printer driver settings reflect the conditions that you used to make your profile and enjoy the results.

Capture One is used to convert RAW camera files to something Photoshop understands. Most often this will be a tiff file. To make this conversion it employs an ICC profile for your camera. As mentioned before for most users a generic camera profile will be sufficient. Sources for generic camera profiles are the camera manufacturer or independent suppliers such as Etcetera Consulting. Note if you are shooting JPEG instead, the camera assumes some sort of ICC profile equivalent to create the JPEG from the internal RAW sensor data. I highly recommend that all serious work be shot in RAW.

An excellent color management reference is "Color Management for Photographers"; Rodney, Andrew.

Mike Nakamura
Portland, Oregon
revised 3.22.2010