Busy, Busy....

November was a busy month. It's looking like December won't be much less so. While working against deadlines on several projects, a few days ago I received a print order via my Web site. About the same time I got an order from an existing printing client, to print one of his images. Interestingly, both jobs were for panoramas, although the files to be printed were quite different.

A woman in Connecticut ordered a print of one of my photos of the Mission Mountain range. This was made in January, 2003, on a morning when inversional fog was moving into the valley. It had been a fairly mild winter so far, and the cottonwoods were still in pretty good shape, adding some nice color to the image. I was still shooting film then.

This has always been a difficult image to print. It's a film scan (Fuji Provia F-100), a little grainy to start with. It's also a significant crop, with nearly half the slide cropped out. The buyer wanted a 32 inch (81cm) wide print. I first printed this image with my Canon iPF 5000 for a commission back in 2007. That client wanted the print "as large as you can make it", which turned out to be around 54 inches (137cm) wide. Still, even at 32 inches it is a challenge to sharpen. The image is a little soft, and as mentioned, somewhat grainy.

I sized this as usual in Photoshop, upsampling to 360ppi, bicubic smoother. I used Photoshop's Smart Sharpen and printed several 6 inch test strips, mostly from the right edge of the frame. I wasn't happy with the result. The right-most cottonwood tree, and the fir tree to its left, were softer than I'd remembered from my prints made with the Canon. I have a slightly smaller version of this print, made with the Canon, framed and hangning in a local gallery. I took my test strips to the gallery and compared them to the framed print. Hmmmm.... Pretty close. Perhaps I've become pickier about print quality since the framed print was made (my wife would say that's impossible to imagine).

Returning home, I tweaked the file a bit more and then made the print on Moab Entrada Natural 300, a 17 inch wide roll. To make the print I created a custom paper size, 17 inches x 34 inches. Top and bottom margins: 0.6 inch, left and right margins: 0.25 inch.

The print is perfectly centered. I'd call the print quality acceptable, especially considering the mat-finished paper tends to soften the look a bit, but my work is typically better. When I have some time I'll work on this, perhaps with different software for upsampling. It's possible there's simply not sufficient data to make better prints at this size, but I won't know until I've explored some options.

The second job was quite different. The file was from a client who shoots very wide panoramas. His file was too large for Photoshop's .psd format. He wanted a 34 inch (86cm) wide print. The file easily accommodated 720ppi without upsampling. I printed this on 17" wide Canon Heavyweight Satin 300, the paper I use for most client jobs, and one which this client likes. This required switching the printer from MK (matte black) to PK (photo black) ink. By default the printer does not do this automatically; it requires the press of a button on the machine's control panel. I removed the roll of Entrada, and then printed a nozzle check print on plain paper. This showed clogs in the orange channel. I pressed the button to switch inks. The switch took about two minutes, during which this progress bar was displayed on the printer's LCD. When the progress bar disappeared and the LCD showed the standard "ready" status, I printed a nozzle check. That's when I learned that the ink swap really wasn't finished. Upon setting up to print the nozzle check, the printer made noise and moved the carriage around for over five minutes! I'm guessing it did a head cleaning. Eventually it printed the nozzle check and showed no clogs.

I fed the satin paper (love that roll holder!), set up the print job, and printed. Color and sharpness are perfect.

When printing images from heavier roll papers, the paper curl as it exits the printer is significant. The leading corners of the paper tend to catch on the fabric of the paper basket when the basket is set up to feed paper to the front (that is, spill the paper onto the floor in front of the printer). You can see in the picture at left that the bottom-right corner of the print is hung up on the fabric of the basket. I found it necessary to stand there holding the leading corners to assure smooth feeding of the paper out of the machine. It may have worked fine without my intervention, but I didn't want to risk damaging the print if it hung up on the basket and couldn't feed out of the machine properly.

The alternative is to set up the basket to feed paper under the machine. This would drag the printed side of the paper against the plastic strips supporting the basket. This seems like a bad idea. If the print is long enough it might continue to feed out the rear of the machine onto the floor or, in my case, pile up against the wall behind the printer. Given the design of the paper basket, I think I'm going to be hand-holding the printer's output of large prints. More likely I'll place a sheet of foam-core over the fabric basket, making a smooth ramp over which the paper should slide easily.

The photo being printed is © Stephen E. Ross.

  --Jay