Last week I had a print job unlike any I'd done before. The client isn't a photographer. I'd printed for her late last year, a photo made by a friend. For this job, she wanted two prints that same size, about 22 inches (56 cm) wide. The picture is one that had appeared in a local newspaper two years ago. Like many newspapers, this one offers for sale prints of pictures that appear in its articles. Unlike other papers, however, they apparently don't sell prints, but provide a jpeg from which the buyer can make (or have made) prints. Sounds weird, but I didn't ask for details, so I don't know the whole story.
My client doesn't have a computer, instead doing everything from her new iPhone; she sent the jpeg to me from that. The picture, while very nice, was a tiny jpeg at low resolution, under 100K in size. There was no chance this would up-sample with acceptable quality to the desired print size. I found I was able to resample the file only to about 10 inches (25 cm) wide before things started to break down. I explained what was happening, and that I'd need a larger file if she still wanted a 22 inch print (she did). The client said she'd contact the paper and then get back to me.
Last week she did. She had a new file, about ten megabytes, to send. She said her phone wouldn't open the file. And no wonder; what she sent me was a .dng! The file hadn't been processed. The smaller jpeg had been cropped from a much larger frame. Clearly I had some work to do, and since the client was paying for it, I was happy to do it.
Using the small jpeg as a guide, in Adobe Camera Raw I cropped the .dng and then made the necessary adjustments. In Photoshop CC I completed the work and found the image resampled pretty well to the desired size at the 7900's 360ppi.
I made the two prints on Epson luster. Another happy client.
It had been about a week since I'd last printed anything. The printer behaved perfectly.
--Jay
