The Importance of Soft-Proofing

I’ve had the Epson 3800 for about 6 weeks now, and I’ve already made a few nice prints. I still have a lot to learn about the art of editing and printing, but at least I’ve got the technical difficulties out of the way. I

• Calibrate and profile my monitor about once a month. See here for the troubles I went through, calibrating and profiling my monitor.
• Edit my images in a wide-gamut color space (Adobe RGB or ProPhoto RGB). See here for all the troubles I went through, switching between color spaces.
• Make sure that the paper that I use is compatible with pigment inks. The very first paper that I bought was Ilford Galerie Classic Pearl. I loved the look and feel of that paper, but when I went to Ilford’s site to download a profile, I realized that the classic papers are not compatible with pigment inks. I exchanged the paper with Ilford Galerie Smooth Pearl, which is dye- and pigment-compatible and has the same look and feel, but is about 15% more expensive.
• Download and install a profile for every combination of printer and paper that I use. This was easy, but I had to create an account on Ilford’s site. Why on earth? Why not let me download the profile directly?
• Soft-proof each image before printing. I set the appropriate profile and try out different rendering intents. I usually have to boost contrast and saturation slightly so that the soft-proofed image looks closer to the non-soft-proofed one.
• When printing I let Photoshop do the color management and I choose the exact same settings like when soft-proofing.
• Choose no color management in the printer driver, then set the correct media type and paper size. Default (at least with the German driver) are “Epson color enhance” and A4 paper size. “No color management” is buried quite deeply, so you really have to look for it. And if that’s not bad enough, you I have to change the settings every time I print! Now I’ve created several presets in the driver, and I switch between them with a single click.
• Hit “Print” and wait for the print to come out of the printer. I used to use 2800 lpi and printing took quite a long time. I then read here that there is no visible difference between 1440 lpi and 2800 lpi, made my own test and my prints come out in half the time now. Apparently 1440 lpi has the additional advantage of using 10% less ink, which is very nice indeed!

But today I wanted to talk about soft-proofing. For my first prints I skipped this step and got some unpleasant surprises. I then watched “From Camera to Print” again and read two very good articles by Bruce Fraser (1, 2). These are on Photoshop 6.0, but they are still relevant!

A few days ago I took this nice shot in the hallway in my office, and over the weekend I decided to make a print of it.

Armed with my new knowledge, I activated the soft-proof function.

Incredible! I’d tried soft-proofing before, but this was really extreme! Both relative and perceptual rendering led to these large hue and saturation shifts, and I wasn’t having much luck correcting them via curves or hue/saturation. After trying for about 15 min, I tried saturation rendering and it was almost perfect. Two minutes later I had a print that matched the image on screen very well. Imagine my utter disappointment had I printed without soft-proofing!

Note that I’m not saying that you should always use the saturation rendering intent, but rather that you should always soft-proof and look for the best intent for your particular image. Also note that Lightroom does not support soft-proofing.

Next Step: Web Galleries

Ever since this post I’ve been spending 4-5 hours a week looking through my images: rating, adding metadata, organizing, cataloging and deleting the less interesting ones. This is a difficult, tedious and exciting job, all at the same time. It’s tedious because you have to compare dozens and dozens of similar images — zooming in, zooming out, looking for the image that’s best composed and has the best focus. It’s difficult because you have to rate images consistently, assign keywords consistently and sometimes make a tough decision to delete images which are good, but simply not good enough. And finally it’s exciting because you rediscover your good images from the past.

I’m now almost through with this process, and I’ve erased about 50% of my images. I know that sounds radical, especially when many people say that since disk space is so cheap, you shouldn’t delete any images. Well, I couldn’t disagree more! Keeping all your images not only fills up your hard drive — it also prolongs your back-ups, slows down your browsing software and makes it difficult to find the great image that you are just looking for. But most importantly, keeping most images that you make leads to a decreased self-esteem.

Take my trip to India for example. Even though I’d been deleting flawed and multiple images all along the trip, I came back with about 1200 images. I knew that I’d taken some very good photographs and some average ones, and my first thought was that all images have something special in them, so I should keep them all. As time passed and I showed the images to friends and relatives, I started thinking that they are not really that great. The really good ones were still there, but having to look at 30 average photos in order to see one good one makes for a very low success-ratio. Only about 400 photographs survived my radical clean-up, but when I now open an image directory, I see only interesting, colorful and sharp images. It’s a real pleasure now to point Bridge to a sub-directory and look through the 30-40 thumbnails that it contains. And through my star-ratings I can always filter out the 25 or so top images.

But actually I wanted to write about something else today. Having sorted, grouped and rated my images, I think the next logical step is to update my Web galleries. What you see after that link is, technically speaking, my second attempt. The first one was built purely by hand in HTML, and it was a tedious and error-prone job. The current pages are built around a Flash-plugin called SimpleViewer, which looks quite chic. If I had to name any disadvantages, I’d have to say that it’s flash-based (I cannot modify it and not everyone around the world has Flash installed) and that it loads all large images immediately, even if the viewer never looks at them. But SimpleViewer is small, fast and easy to use, so I could stay with it without any problems.

Recently I saw an exquisite Web gallery, and I’d like to have something similar. This one was generated by Lightroom (which I don’t have), but it’s based on Slimbox and mootools, both of which are free JavaScript scripts, so I could build my own galleries.

So now I’m torn between SimpleViewer and Slimbox. What do you think, which one looks nicer?

Review of Looking East: Portraits by Steve McCurry

Mike Johnston of The Online Photographer (TOP) has published my short review of the great book Looking East: Portraits by Steve McCurry. At first I thought of posting the review here, but the TOP has many more readers, and I felt that it was the more appropriate platform.

BTW, if you’ve never visited TOP, you really ought to. Although Mike occasionally publishes photography news and equipment reviews, his main topics are the Art and Philosophy of photography: learning to see, getting better at expressing yourself, learning the history of the medium and getting inspired by past and present masters. In fact, in the past several months Mike’s blog has done more for my photography than DPreview in about 5 years. But come to think of it, DPreview has little to do with photography anyway…

Orange Abstract

I brought my camera to work today in order to shoot more glasses. This time I didn’t wait until all colleagues had left, so I gathered some funny gazes, but that’s OK with me…

Anyhow, as I was preparing to leave, I noticed the following image in the hallway. I’d already folded the tripod and packed the camera and in earlier times I probably wouldn’t have bothered to unpack them again. Boy, am I glad that I did otherwise tonight…

Pavement Patterns Again

Well, I couldn’t help it — a few days ago I went back to the place with the broken asphalt and photographed it again. I photographed it for the first time about two months ago and then a month later again, but this week was different. I was on my way to work and it was raining lightly, but exactly that rain made me drive around to “my spot.” I was hoping that the asphalt surface might be shinier and thus appear more interesting.

What do you think? Was it worth taking out the tripod and getting wet for this image?

I’m having a hard time deciding if I like the color or the black-and-white image better.

Just so you get an idea of where these images started, here is the RAW image without any manipulations.