Q & A : Clarity on Printer and Paper Profiling

To submit your question to The Photo Video Guy Q&A just send me an email at ross@thephotovideoguy.ca Just when I think that there may go a week without a question, I am saved by good folks with excellent questions.  This one comes from Denis.

"I hope all is well and you have the time to answer a question that has come up. I watched Scott's "Grid show #113 about printing your own work. They talk about calibrating your monitor and printer with the Color Munki. If you have set up that calibration of both does that interfere with the paper profile that you down load from the paper manufactures? I have been told you need to bring your paper that you want to print on to calibrate the printer. That would mean you would have to do that to each paper you will be using.

I would like to know if that calibration over rides the paper profile. Do you have to use samples of each paper to calibrate. I have been seeing on thing and told another. I am going to allowed access to a color munki so I can calibrate both. I would like to know how this works and separate the myth form the legend  ! ! ! !"

The Scott that Denis refers to is of course, Scott Kelby, most celebrated (deservedly) of web / new media photographic instructors.  I've written and reviewed on the subject of display profiling on multiple occasions with the fundamental answer, if you edit your own work, you MUST calibrate your display.  Denis' question goes to the next level, taking that calibration to the printer.

I believe in printing your images.  There is nothing like a print in hand.  Folks wanting to make their own great prints, know that there are many choices in printers, inks, and papers to use to product final artwork.  Any paper manufacturer that is actually serious about quality printing produces ICC profiles for their papers.  Let's start there.

An ICC profile characterizes the colour space, or input device, or output device according to standards set by the ICC (International Color Consortium).  It's basically a set of rules that say to achieve this colour space, make the following adjustments to the default settings.  ICC paper profiles provide definition on how to get accurate colour representation on a particular printer, with a particular paper with a certain ink set.  That does mean what it sounds like.  For example, I use an Epson 4900 printer.  So only ICC profiles for that printer are useful to me.  If I use Red River Paper's superb Polar Metallic paper, the ICC profile is for that paper, on that printer and assumes I am using the factory ink.  Since serious printers use pigment based inks over the less accurate dye based inks, this becomes even more important because variance in pigments is reduced and archival life is substantially longer.  With rare exceptions, a print made using the manufacturer's ICC profile for the specific paper on the specific printer will do a really fine job, presuming of course that the edits were made on a computer with a calibrated display.

But there are exceptions.  Perhaps you are experimenting with different surface types.  Perhaps the paper manufacturer whose products you use doesn't have a profile for your specific printer.  Perhaps you have tried the manufacturer's ICC profile and it just doesn't look right.  This is when you need to create a custom paper profile for your workspace.  This is more work than you might think but is as accurate as you can get.

The XRite Color Munki Photo does both displays and printers.  Many calibration tools only do displays.  I have personally paid for and used a number of tools for calibration and ONLY recommend products from the Color Munki line.  Other products have produced poor results and display considerable inconsistency.

With the Color Munki photo, you print a test print directly from the software.  It creates a series of patches printed using your printer on the paper you are using.  You then use the Color Munki Photo to scan the patches.  It then does some significant math and you then print a second different test print.  You then scan its patches and the software generates a new ICC profile that is unique to your setup, your printer, your inks, your paper.  At this point, you no longer use the manufacturer's ICC profile, you replace it with your own.

In order to get a good custom profile, you must wait the required drying times specified, as ink setup takes different amounts of time depending on the paper type, and whether it has OBAs or is resin coated (RC paper).  This makes constructing a custom profile a time consuming business.  Once you've built one custom profile, you might want to build one for every paper type you use.  And that's how it works.  The ICC profile you create is only valid for the one type of paper.  You'll use ink and at minimum two 8x10 sheets and about 40 minutes for every profile you create.  In theory you should be good from then on, but professional printers recommend redoing this every time you have a major ink change, and for each new lot of paper.

I recommend keeping a binder of all patch pages and the documentation from the manufacturer on best printer setups.  I annotate the documents to what works for me.  I print exclusively from Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.  The current release offers print proof and final printer brightness and contrast controls.  When I find a setting that works for my printer and a particular paper type, I document that for next time.  I also create specific printer setups in the Print Management function on my Macintosh so the next time I am going to print on Breathing Color Crystalline Satin Canvas roll paper, a single click sets the proper platen height, dpi and other settings.  You can probably do this on Windows too.  I have no idea how and no interest in figuring that out though.

I have printed on papers from Canon, Epson, Hahnemuhle, Canson Infinity, Red River, Moab, IT Supplies, Inkpress and Kodak.  Some are great, some are truly awful, and what works best for me may not be what works best for you.

On the subject of printers, I have printed on Xerox, HP, Canon, Fuji and Epson.  For home based printing, start and stop at Epson.  HP and Xerox do great office printers.  They are not photo printer manufacturers.  Fuji is production level, not for the home or even small business.  Canon should be great and maybe the recent Pro-1 is better, but having owned the 9000 Mk I, the 9000 Mk II and the 9500 Mk II, unless you plan on printing only on Canon branded paper, bypassing ICC altogether and printing from Canon's DPP software only, do not spend one thin dime here.  It's a great system if you stay completely in family. Otherwise it's a nightmare in excessive red.  Canon reps have acknowledged this and their response is use only Canon paper.  Screw that.  I do know that one of my inspirations in printing, Mr. Martin Bailey of Tokyo, uses Canon large format IPP printers and is very happy.  I believe though that Mr. Bailey builds custom ICC profiles for everything.

To learn more about making great prints yourself I recommend a couple of resources.  First is Martin Bailey's Making the Print eBook available at Craft and Vision here.  It's wonderful and will set you back all of $5!  For more depth and detail, the "bible" on the subject is Jeff Schewe's book The Digital Print available below through Amazon (and please buy through the link to help support The Photo Video Guy).

Thanks to Denis for the question and don't hesitate to be the next question answered here on The Photo Video Guy.

First Prints : Breathing Color Crystalline Satin

I'm one of those photographers who thinks that a photo is only truly complete when it becomes a print.  There's something very special about holding a piece of art in your hands, a tactile experience very different, and in my opinion, superior to seeing it on screen. I was recently listening to an interview with Tokyo based wildlife photographer Martin Bailey and he was raving (again) about Breathing Color paper and canvas.  I went online and tried to place an order as they only sell direct, but when the company got back to me, shipping was going to be more than the cost of the paper.  I live in Canada, and I guess sending stuff from parts of the USA is akin to launching a rocket to Mars.  That's not true for Red River Paper, they process orders and all the costs are included at excellent pricing, but I digress.

A tech support person at Breathing Color advised me that Amplis in Canada sold their paper direct.  Amplis has an online store so I went to it.  No Breathing Color.  It only appeared on the Dealer secure site.  I wrote back to Breathing Color and told them their Canadian option seemed broken.  The same young gent contacted Amplis and I was contacted in short order by Phil Neilsen and Pat Cameron.  Phil sells for Amplis.  Pat is on the order desk.  Both were very helpful.  Pat processed my order and I picked it up, with only a couple of hiccoughs, the same day.

I ordered five 17" x 20' trial rolls.  The new metallic paper was not in stock but the others were so I collected them.  Lyre Canvas, Crystalline Satin Canvas, Vibrance Matte and Optica One were my selections.  This morning I had some time and so unloaded the default roll of Epson Professional Premium Lustre that I typically have queued up in my printer.  After loading the roll of Crystalline Satin, I set to making some prints.

I love the Epson 4900 but it has its quirks.  Single sheet canvas handling is one of them.  Once I got the roll loaded and feeding properly, (more challenging than it should have been), I read the insert that came with the paper.  Breathing Color not only supplies setup instructions for Windows and Mac for their papers, they include screenshots to help you out.  Of course the screenshots did not match my world exactly, but there was more than enough information to create a printer preset for the roll of Crystalline Satin.

One of the other things I really like about Breathing Color is that when you go to download their ICC profile for a paper, the download contains all their ICC profiles in a single package along with an aliased installer to make installing them completely painless.  Every other paper company SHOULD learn from this simple and very customer-centric step.

Lightroom 5.2 was used to make my prints.  Two shots were in colour, shot on a Canon 1D Mark IV with the 100-400 and 1.4x teleconverter, the first of a giant panda and the second of an african rhinoceros.   The third was a scan of a 4x5 TMAX 100 negative shot with a Nikkor 210mm on my Sinar P that I had processed earlier this week.  I thought it would be nice to try these different subjects on canvas.

Despite a first time feed error, once I unloaded and reloaded the canvas, the Epson 4900 did the job I bought it for.  It produced great prints in a reasonably timely fashion.  I liked very much that the ICC profiles worked flawlessly with Lightroom's proof print function and that I could see what the prints would look like before printing.  I have had issues where this did not work properly with other vendor's ICC profiles.  I keep my displays calibrated using a Color Munki Photo so I got out what I saw on screen after allowance for reflective textured media vs backlit display.

The canvas is very thick and Epson advises not to use the built-in cutter for canvas on the 4900.  I set the printer for no cut, and learned how to advance and then withdraw the paper once I cut it with an X-Acto after each print.  The 4900 does a great job of prepping the roll and my not straight cuts caused no issues with the next prints.

Once the pigments had dried for a while, I sprayed each print with Hahnemuhle's spray canvas protector.  You have to do this outside unless you want to go on a coughing jag.  Once the varnish was dry enough for handling, I took a tip from friends Kathy Constantinou and Simeon Tse and mounted the prints on foam core.

My usual response to printing is to frame stuff, but I had done an experiment with mounting a Moab Metallic Pearl print on foam core and I liked the outcome very much.  I have not yet bought gallery mount kits for canvas, (next week, Amplis has some great kits), so I thought, what the heck?  I sprayed the back of the canvas with 3M photographic spray cement and then placed the prints on the foam core.  I covered the print with parchment paper and used a rubber roller working from the centre out to lay the canvas down on the foam core and roll it flat.  It worked surprisingly well, so a big thanks to Kathy and Simeon for their initial coaching.  Once the glue had set up a bit, I used a steel straight-edge and the heavy X-Acto to trim away the excess foam core.  I bought a self-healing cutting mat at the Currys Art Supply store and it's perfect for this kind of work.

The canvas looks awesome.  Colours are bright, gamut is excellent and the canvas texture is very appealing without degrading the image quality in any way.  The black and white print from the Sinar looks stunning on the canvas.  I spent a lot of time making the shot and while there is always room for improvement, I love that I can see ten zones in the image.  Canvas is the perfect media for this kind of work.

I have not yet tried the other Breathing Color papers, but my first experience with their Crystalline Satin has been awesome.  They make a really fine product and handle the software end better than most paper companies.  Now that I know the trick to ordering the paper in Canada (call Pat at Amplis direct), I'll buy more in the future.