Commentary # 38: January 2010
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Print Early and Often

January 2010


- by Craig Wassel


Next month’s (actually, March 2010) commentary will not be so much a commentary, but a tutorial on how to perform selective noise reduction on digital photographs using Adobe Photoshop. Selective noise reduction is a powerful Photoshop skill. It avoids image softening and losing detail in areas where noise it is less noticeable and maybe even a little beneficial to have some noise. For example: you may want to reduce noise in a blue sky, but not soften the detail in tree bark. Softening is a disadvantage of noise reduction plug-ins.

But that is for next month, and before then we need to save ourselves from self-inflicted noise neuroticism. That, believe it or not, is why this commentary is about printing.

Once upon a time, there was (still is, actually) this photographic medium called film, and the way serious and casual photographers alike enjoyed their efforts was by viewing prints or projected slides. Now we live in a photographic world that is primarily digital. Although I learned photography on film and in the darkroom, I am okay with digital. I still love film but have not shot any in quite a while, and while I am not a photographer who tries to ennoble himself by writing about how film is “real” photography and digital capture is not, I do feel there are some pitfalls that are the result of looking at our photographs so often on computers and so rarely in print.

When digital cameras first came out their image quality was fairly low. Still, we enjoyed a convenience and exciting instant results we never had. As digital cameras matured, though, many of us got into bad habits with our computer monitors. Instead of using them to enjoy our photography, we started using them to magnify our images to 100% or more. Our noses, eyes, and eyeglasses have gotten closer and closer to our screens, and further and further away from printing. There is even a term for this habit: pixel peeping.

Evaluating image quality on screen like this can be fairly misleading. First, most monitors display between 96 and 72 dots per inch (dpi). Most digital cameras shot at maximum image quality record at 300 dpi. That means there is detail and quality in our images that is beyond what most monitors can display.

Second, why do we take photographs in the first place? Do we take them so we can spend hours zooming in on them on our monitors, and drive ourselves insane analyzing them in 300 x 300 pixel chunks? Maybe some of us do, and at times fine art photographers and others do need to do so. For most of us, though, we really just want to view and enjoy our photos. Watch someone viewing an actual print. Does she/he leave a nose mark behind because she/he just had to know what it looks like from a range of 2 inches? Does she/he walk around with a loupe in case a print comes along that will need intense scrutinizing? Of course not. Most of us enjoy a photographic print from arms distance away or a little more.

This brings me to my third and most important point. Digital cameras have rapidly improved from giving us instant images of rather low quality to instant photographs of very, very good quality. As I said before, though, many of us now have the bad habit of pixel peeping. We want assurance that our newest camera is far better than our previous one, or evidence that our current camera just does not deliver sufficient image quality compared to the latest ones reviewed in our favorite magazine.

Before we decide “very good” just isn’t good enough, though, I suggest we do something else: print. We should print early, we should print often, and we should print at least one every now and then that is large. How large is large? Well, look around your home for the largest photographic print you have hanging. After you print one at or near that size, put it under some good light and step back from it. That’s right maam/sir – I order you to step away from the photograph to a safe viewing distance and enjoy it.

There – how do you like it? Does it look better than you anticipated? If it does, my point is now definitely made and my work here is done. If you are not happy with the quality, then you have some work to do to determine the reason. Don’t be too quick to blame your camera, though.

I don’t print every week or as often as I should or would like to, but it is always a treat when I do. I am always pleasantly reminded of how much better a quality digital photograph looks when printed well at 300 dpi than it does on screen and at 96 dpi or lower.

Now that you have your nice print that you are enjoying from a viewing distance, maintain a reasonable distance and look at the noise. Unless you took the photograph in some very low lighting and/or at a very high ISO setting, that noise is probably not as noticeable as it was viewing it on screen. Even if you move in closer, you are probably going to notice the grain is not as pronounced in your 300 dpi print.

If you feel that noise still needs some attention, though, look for next month’s commentary about selective noise reduction.

" . . While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see . . "

~ Dorothea Lange ~








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" . . . We want assurance that our newest camera is far better than our previous one, or evidence that our current camera just does not deliver sufficient image quality compared to the latest ones reviewed in our favorite magazine . . . Before we decide “very good” just isn’t good enough, though, I suggest we do something else: print. We should print early, we should print often, and we should print at least one every now and then that is large . . . "








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