Digital 'contact prints'
2007-07-16 by Sarah Thompson
Firstly, thanks to the people who responded about my lack-of-neutral tone problem with my r2400 ABW prints -- it did turn out to be a flaky light magenta cartridge. Swapping it out helped a fair bit, but wasn't perfect. Then, I moved house, which involved packing everything up, putting it in a truck and driving about 40 miles. On trying again, the prints were perfectly neutral, so I therefore recommend moving house as often as possible as a means of maintaining consistent print quality. ;-) Actually, what I really wanted to write about is some experiments I've done recently. I read a few articles online about problems with the default interpolation algorithms used by both Photoshop and the Epson drivers when rescaling images to the driver's internal 720ppi resolution. I was thinking about doing some experiments with various interpolation algorithms, then it occured to me, why not just print the actual *image* at 720dpi? This means that no interpolation will occur other than that which is purely part of the driver's dithering algorithm. I realise that for many people this would result in prints that are too small, but I am lucky enough that my two cameras have 4000x4000 and 8000x6000 resolution (a Megavision E4 monochrome medium-format back and a Better Light large format scan back respectively). Anyway, I tried it with a few images and was blown away with the results -- the prints (made with the Epson driver in ABW mode, Photo RPM, Epson Premium Glossy) are astonishingly sharp, if anything more so than a large-format contact print (hence the title of the post), with a level of three-dimensionality that I've never really seen before. A (medium-format) photo taken a few months ago in Yosemite Valley from a bridge over one of the streams shows incredibly fine detail in the foliage. I also printed a couple of Better Light images shot in the Mojave desert in Joshua Tree National Monument (roughly letter-size) where every grain in the sandstone of a large boulder was clearly visible. I think these days there is a real push toward ever-larger prints, but some of the best images I've ever seen were actually really quite small by modern standards (I'm thinking here of some original prints by Edward Weston, who was very much into the contact printing approach). Anyway, just thinking out loud, and wondering if anyone else had tried the same approach. [s]