Revelations

Warning: tech-talk ahead. If you're not someone who owns a printer, or has any interest in printing digital stuff, you should probably follow the diversion sign, and rejoin the blogway one post ahead. See you there: surf carefully.

So, it is no exaggeration to say that one of the great photo-related revelations of my life, up there with the day in the 1970s when I first peered through a friend's Olympus OM-1 SLR – "Then felt I like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken" – was the day in the late 1990s when I first ran a sheet of Epson photo paper through my brand new A4 Epson printer, a little print of a colour negative I had scanned with an Epson flatbed scanner (as you can tell, I was and still am a fan of Epson "peripherals"). As a first test, I'd put a sheet of plain paper through the printer, and was disappointed with the result: pale colours, with no contrast or real black, and badly "cockled" paper. But the result with a sheet of actual photo paper was stunning; I really could not believe how good it was.

People talk of the thrill of first seeing an image come up in a tray of developer, but – for me at any rate – that experience paled into comparative insignificance. Years of righteous struggle in the darkroom had never delivered anything as good, as easily, or as quickly as this, especially in colour. And all in broad daylight! I may actually have done a little dance of pure delight, at least internally. Woo-hoo!

Now, I know a lot of self-styled "photographers" never print their work these days. I suppose if you're only ever going to share work online that makes sense. But, to me, this is like a "musician" who never plays in public or with other musicians. I don't care how good they are: they're not really a musician, they're someone whose hobby is playing around with a musical instrument. It's an old-fashioned view, I know, but I still hold to the idea that the end product of "photography" is a print you can hold or hang on a wall. Which is why our house is full of boxes of prints, most of which will never be held by anyone other than me, or hung on anyone else's wall. Yes, I'm an idiot. So what's new? Besides, check out Richard Misrach's shelves of boxes; true, he does live in a warehouse... [1]

If I say so myself, over the decades I've become quite a skilled printer, able to make an attractive image on a piece of paper that closely resembles or even improves upon what appears on my screen. Getting that printing pipeline right – from camera to computer to printer – takes a lot of time, a lot of ink, and an awful lot of paper. Although nothing like the eternal Sisyphean cycle of torment, expense, and frustration that is the analogue darkroom. Which is why it's the guilty secret of so many of today's born-again film evangelists that, actually, they scan their negatives in order to print them digitally... But who can blame them? To quote Richard Misrach:

Digital has also allowed me to revisit earlier work and bring my analog negatives into the twenty-first century. By scanning my negatives, I can work on a scale and with printing options that were previously unimaginable.
On Landscape and Meaning, p.120

You can say that again, Mr. Misrach. I don't mean to mock anyone who chooses to work with a wholly "analogue" wet chemical process – even some cumbersome, time-consuming, toxic relic of days gone by like wet-plate or platinum printing – but these are surely the equivalent of an enthusiasm for tinkering with vintage cars or flint-knapping. You're making pictures, FFS! Why make it such an ordeal for yourself? Although it's true that this nostalgia for old artisanal imaging methods (and, worse, a fear of and prejudice against new ones) permeates the art world: if you're curious why I think this might be, see my posts Original Print and Original Print 2. 

The point I want to make here, though, is that ever since the day of that first revelation – woo-hoo! – I have made my prints on "proper" photo-quality papers. That is, papers coated with a surface optimised for top-quality inkjet printing, whether glossy, matt, heavyweight, Japanese washi-style, whatever: I've tried most of them over the years. They all have their qualities and advantages, although I've developed a prejudice against the very heavy "fine art" papers that resemble a stiff watercolour paper: they're ridiculously expensive, and behind the glass of a frame any tactile benefit of weight and texture is completely lost. As it happens, for most printing purposes I have settled on the papers sold by Marrutt, who offer a good range of surfaces and sizes (including custom sizes) at a very reasonable price: of these, their Archival Matt is my usual day-to-day choice.

But, in one of those accidents that lead to discoveries, I was experimenting recently with laying out patterns of multiple small images on the front and back of a sheet for folding and cutting into small booklets (what printers call "imposition"). Rather than waste any expensive double-sided photo-quality paper, I was using sheets from a 500-sheet pack of A4 "HP Everyday" plain paper, the stuff I use for printing letters, train tickets, etc., which has no special coating, and is a light 75 gsm in weight. In other words, pretty much the same sort of paper that gave me that disappointing, pre-revelation result.

Except that, this time, the printed results were excellent. Not stunning – the blacks were not deep black, and there was a very slight lack of contrast overall – but perfectly acceptable, on a par with what you'd expect to see reproduced in a book, say. Crucially, the result was exactly the same on both sides (did I say double-sided papers are expensive?), and "cockling" was minimal and quickly vanished. I was amazed – another revelation! – and actually quite excited by the prospect of printing some small folded items on what is, by any standards, dirt-cheap plain paper.

Now, I have yet to take this any further, and there are several important variables at work. For example, my current printer (Epson, obvs) is a pigment-ink printer, whereas that earlier model was a dye-ink printer. These very different inks may simply behave differently on plain papers. Also, it's possible that the HP paper is coated or in some other way prepared to give better results with inkjet printers, now that most people are using one at home for general-purpose printing. However, this particular paper seems not to be available in sizes larger than A4, so some exploration of the alternatives will be necessary. Sheets of A2 size would be ideal, though I'd settle for A3.

No prizes for guessing which is which

(the bigger print is on a glossy photo-paper which has caught some reflection)

Talking of prints, I was taking a look online at what had made it into this year's Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, and was pleasantly surprised to see that photography is present in a much bigger way than in previous years. There are 194 items listed, 11% of the total show, and in the main it's good stuff, including quite a few items by names from the A-list of "art" photography – Helen Sear, Garry Fabian Miller, Stephen Gill, Terri Weifenbach, and Anna Fox, for example – or by names I recognise from recent books and exhibitions that got my attention, like Mandy Barker or Katja Liebmann.

I may be wrong, but something seems to have changed at the RA. In earlier years I don't recall seeing any photographs at all by "name" photographers, other than those by all-purpose multimedia artists like Cornelia Parker; it feels almost as if they had been invited to submit something. After all, they surely can't have been submitting work for years, only to be rejected, until – finally! – a judging panel had a taste for photography? Or perhaps these are artists who have all, by some synchronistic coincidence, been entered by the galleries that represent them, on the grounds that some exposure at the RA wouldn't hurt? (Unlike their prices... Ouch!) Whatever, it's good to see, and I might even enter something myself next year, despite my resolve – exactly one year ago – to stop wasting time and money on open exhibitions.

The prospects of success are always slim, of course, especially when the competition can be as stiff as this:

WTF? Entered, selected, badly framed, hung, and sold, at £2,200... The mind truly boggles. It's hard to decide whether this means there's hope for us all, or no hope at all... I will never understand this contemporary taste for the cack-handed.

Meanwhile, back here at ground level on planet Earth it occurs to me that people who are struggling with their printing might be interested in a few suggestions on how to get that camera-computer-printer pipeline straightened out. It's basic stuff, but sometimes it's the basics that need sorting out.

Bear in mind that I'm a cheapskate with an aversion to expensive kit. My screen, for example, is an HP 2011x that no "serious" photographer would contemplate using, my Windows 10 desktop computer is approaching its tenth birthday, and I use Photo Ninja for raw conversion and Adobe Photoshop Elements 10 for editing, both of which will no doubt stop working once I am finally forced to upgrade to Windows 11 later this year. I don't solve problems by throwing money at them, at least where photography is concerned.

So FWIW here we go:

• Invest in a screen calibration device: I have a Spyder5pro made by Datacolor but, as they say on the BBC, other devices are available.
• Use it. Even if only once a year, to check for changes in your screen's colour temperature.
• Colour management is a complex area, but I find that letting the printer control it (using its default sRGB setting) rather than the imaging software works best.
• You shouldn't print at less than 300 dpi, but I don't usually resample a file down to 300 dpi when reducing an image in size for printing. This may be mere superstition, but printing at a higher dpi seems preferable to throwing data away.
• I find a quick and reliable way to get a print that is close to the screen image is this (most imaging software will have similar settings somewhere):
• Lighten shadows +11%
• Darken highlights +2%
• Increase midtone contrast +10%
• Increase overall brightness between +12 and +20 (depending on how dark the image is)
• Increase colour saturation +20
• No need to save a version of your file when adjusted for printing like this (it will look horrible anyway): just find the equivalent adjustments for your kit combo and use them whenever you make a first test print. The results will not be perfect, but should be a lot better if your prints until now have generally been too dark with a glum feel to them.

Of course, if you have a similar or, even better, a radically different regime in operation that works for you, I'd be interested to hear about it in the comments. I'm always ready for the next revelation!

Surely some revelation is at hand...

1. Fellow fans of Justified who followed that link may be amused by Misrach's more than passing resemblance, these days, to Wynn Duffy (played by actor Jere Burns). Never watched Justified? Recommended, especially if you enjoy Walton Goggins. Although as I seem to be unable to convince anyone that Bodkin is the best thing currently on Netflix, what do I know?