making the digital fine print

Yesterday evening I headed into the city to meet up with Clover to print our photos for reviews this week. Neither of us had ever used the printers at uni before. I didn't have enough money to buy inks & paper so Clover said I could use hers, and next time she can use mine. Incredibly generous.

However, the evening did not get off to a great start. When I got into the city, I realised that I left the slide of megan at home. 40 minutes in the other direction. So even though my 5:30 class was cancelled I still didn't get there until 7:30, but that's what we had originally planned so that was ok.

When I arrived I couldn't find a slide holder for any of the scanners. Kelvin (what would anyone do without him!) told me to just remove the piece of film and pop it into the 35mm film holder. Brilliant. Open Nikon CoolScan and hit 'preview'.

And that's when I realised I had no idea what I was doing.

It's not like I don't know anything about this stuff. I was just blank. I've got a shitty memory, haven't scanned film for a long time (oh, how I love Raw), and I really had no idea what resolution, size, etc to do everything, let alone what order to do it all in. I popped on the net and downloaded Shane's notes on workflow from a recent class. It wasn't the solution to all my problems but it made a big difference just to have some sort of instructions to refer to; even just to jog my memory. I had much less confidence than I was expecting.

I scanned it in at 16 bit, resolution of 240, the same as the other file I was using from the 400D. I mainly just did some exposure adjustments before trying to clean it up a bit more in Photoshop. And then, again, realised I need to give myself a big refresher course in Photoshop and digital imaging. Which is why Shane recommended this references list for us. After a few hours of preparation in Photoshop, Clover and I built up the courage to print our test strips. I opened the file on the desktop by Les about printing. It was like a walk-thru for CS2 but we were now using CS3 so the interface was different. We couldn't find the same dialogue boxes but basically followed the instructions as best we could. I printed my test strip. It was incredibly fast. And then I realised, again, that even though I felt reasonably confident this time, I had no idea what I was doing. The print looked terrible. It had lines (like when your print heads are dirty), but these were brand new inks, and the last person to print was Kelvin; he would have told us if there were any problems to look out for. I was convinced that somewhere I had forgotten to apply the Ektaspace profile, or perhaps I should've been using the Illford Smooth Pearl profile... but Clover ran a test strip and got the same results. The colours were completely fucked. I kept having flashbacks to this cubish shaped series of colour spectrums that Shane showed us last year when explaining colour profiles. And how if you don't sync everything up, you can potentially shave a very big chunk of your colours out, and force them into being something else. Just extremely bad, sickening.

We didn't know what to do. We looked on the fine art photography site for help. We looked around the DD looking for the notes that were up around the printers last year. We found them... there was a blown up versions of Les' walk-thru, and some info on custom profiling. We then searched the computers for clues... we searched every option in Photoshop, over and over. Or so we thought.
I had already admitted defeat by the time clover realised that we needed to tell Photoshop to colour manage for us, but to make sure to tell the printer not to (as well as tell the printer about what surface we were printing on and which option of quality we would like). And somehow we realised that those options were in the dialogue box after the one we'd assumed to be the most important. I think that was because in Photoshop's dialogue box, the last option you can take is to hit 'print'. But later I realised it actually said 'print...', which in essence means, 'print with options'. I feel like such and idiot in retrospect but I really just assumed that it would be best not to mess with anything in the printer dialogue. But I have to remember I'm traing to be a proffessional, I cant get anywhere being intimidated by little dialogue boxes!

Well I've definitely learned a few big lessons. Which is the point of uni... but the biggest is that I really need to get these big time-consuming things out of the way much earlier in case of any other big lessons I need to learn. My prints didn't come out exactly as planned... some resizing issues came up when we finally began printing. I'd saved my images to A4 size with a white border... but I forgot the printer wouldn't know that my white border was nothing, therefore didn't exceed the printable area. Next time I need to know what the size of the printable area is! Obviously! But everything like this is obvious in retrospect, so I guess in that respect it's very helpful. I'm not likely to forget in a hurry. So, Clover and I had finally finished up. Her prints were really incredible. I was really happy for her (and I won't deny it, jealous!) But then we realised the clocks were wrong, due to the delayed change to daylight savings, so it was actually more like 4 am... I was too tired to care anymore. But then something good happened. We were walking down Bowen Lane, when I noticed a lot of paint cans in a construction dumpster. I've recently started cleaning out my garage to make my own digital studio. I would probably have finished by now but I ran out of paint. And money. But now I have paint, and got to saved a bit of extra landfill going to waste! Thanks, RMIT!