On the Links page on this site there are a number of sites that can be searched to find information on a whole variety of things - inkjet paper, inks, Photoshop plus loads more. Finding your way through them can be a minefield if you aren’t sure where to start.
You might want to look for things like - the best paper for making prints, the cheapest site for buying ink cartridges and so on. Note that I write these from a UK perspective. So here’s a few answers to start with. If you want me to answer any more - email and I'll see what I can do.
Must you always use the same paper as your printer e.g. Epson printer and Epson paper, Hewlett Packard printer – Hewlett Packard paper and so on?
No. If brand X’s ink jet paper didn’t work the paper company would go out of business. However, what does differ is surface quality, paper weight, resistance to fading, resistance to water/moisture, surface stability, image longevity and so on. One of the best non-brand paper is Olmec – made by ICI in the UK (who also make the paper behind many of the packets you can buy in the shops).
It’s a good quality paper, available in a number of weights and surfaces. Its also cheaper than Epsons. The key point is – try it, find what you like, surface, price etc and stick to it. Nothing will break and your wallet should stretch further.
Should you always use the same cartridge makes as your printer e.g. Epson printer and Epson cartridges?
From my experience the compatibles can be a very cheap way of printing, often a third the price of manufacturers own cartridges etc. Refilling your own cartridges can be fiddly especially for Epson. However, from personal expereince I would use these for my prints and esecially those I would wish to sell.
Some company’s compatible inks will give better results especially for longevity. Lyson is one of these companies but Lyson's position is that they have made a name for themselves by selling archival quality inks and paper systems.They also make compatible inks for Epson and Canon printers. One of their unique selling points is that they have a longer life than that of Epson, Canon. HP etc. and also sell monochrome as well as colour ink sets. The latest inksets from Epson are pigment based and when used with their paper systems offer what would appear to be extremely extended print longevity of many decades. Rumour has it that Lyson make some of the inks that go in Epson branded cartridges!
Compatible refills for your ink-jet?
See also above. There is generally a mixed view on these.
They are considerably cheaper than the equivalent Epson, Canon, HP etc.
Some people have complained of clogging of the print head and some have
complained of differing colour and gamut. I have adverse personal experience
of all these effects
Generally the rule is 'try it and see'. Its probably advisable to use them
when your printer is outside of warranty as some manufacturers have been
known to be a bit stuffy about 'compatible inks' when printers come in
for repair. Personal experience by the author of one particular brand was
not good. They were OK for 6 months and then the inks started to deteriorate
and diffuse into the paper surface causing strange edge effects and odd
colours.
See above. These are inks with a much longer lifetime compared
to standard inks when exposed to sun (specifically UV light), air etc.
When used with the correct paper they can outlast conventional silver based
prints. Epson has a range of printers with 'archival' pigment
based inks so there is clearly a market requirement for these inks.
But what about the normal (dye based rather than pigmente) inks we buy
from Epson etc.? Well sadly it would seem that the best we can hope for
when stored under ideal conditions is a few years before fading
occurs. The effect can be reduced by reducing exposure to direct sunlight
and by blocking out ultra-violet light. This can be done by surface sprays
or laminates and to an extent by putting the print behind glass. But
the good news is that most printer manufacturers are recognising the need
for some degree of permanence that at least approaches, at a minimum, that
of conventional chemical based prints.
Most currently available inks need some form of UV protection to give some degree of light fastness. If you haven't got a UV spray or can't put the prints behind glass then keep them out of direct sunlight.
Having done some basic research on the net there seems to be two main issues relating to image colour and longevity. Firstly, the use of so called ‘optical whiteners’ in the paper. These are layers on the paper to make it look whiter and brighter and sometimes interact with the inks. So different ink paper combinations will often have different colour shifts. Just like chemical colour papers – remember them!
The second aspect is to do with longevity. It is the way in which the paper has been made and appears to relate to the acidity level of the paper. Paper which is ‘archival’ is alleged to be less acidic than that of non-archival paper.
The best results i.e. long life for archival quality (according to the information around on the net) are to use the 'archival' papers now available from Epson, Permajet, Lyson etc. But you will have to use the Epson, Permajet, Lyson etc. inks for them. Unfortunately you also pay a premium for these inks and papers especially when you compare the 'compatible' inks and cheap end papers. See above.
Overall it depends on how long you expect prints to last. Things are improving but we aren’t yet at the equivalent to chemical print light fastness but then again inkjet printers haven’t had 100 years of product development!
Popular papers are from Tetanal and Olmec. Both give superb results on Epson printers. Don't just try the one from the people who made your printer – for example, HP paper in an Epson printer won’t damage anything. Try it and see. A wide variety of surfaces exist.
Whatever I say, someone else will say this ones cheaper, better etc. However, I tend to start with 7dayshop in Guernsey.
What digital Imaging software should I use?
Everyone says use PhotoShop – why? Adobe PhotoShop system is generally reckoned to be the 'bee's knee's' for the professional? It's expensive, laden with dozens of features only professionals will use, it has a complex not always intuitive user interface. So if someone won’t give it to you for your birthday - its expensive - what are the alternatives?
For around the £60 to £90 mark try Paint Shop Pro or Adobe Elements (a more user friendly version of PhotoShop without some of its more esoteric features at a fraction of the price and now at version 9.0). All of these do layers, have multiple undo’s and whole raft of useful features. The latest versions of Elements (both 3 and 4) also support a range of RAW format files for various cameras. For a free and comprehensive alternative to teh Photoshop camp try GIMP. Its from the Open Source software camp and provides a high degree of functionality but the interface is different fromn Photoshop. (http://www.gimp.org/windows/)
Whatever package you decide to get there are two 'must have's’ in your selection criteria. These are 'layers' and 'multiple undo's'.
Yet again there is no right or wrong answer. The most common printers for amateur use, especially for large format A3 prints are Epson, Canon and HP. All have had excellent reviews.
What film scanner should I buy?
If you are still using film for the taking and digital darkroom techniques for processing your images then you will need a film scanner. Just because it’s the most expensive and made by Nikon doesn’t mean that is the best and all other scanners are inferior – in fact some reviews suggest quite the opposite!
At present there is more choice than ever before. But dedicated film scanners are not cheap. As a rule of thumb if you are going to get a scanner get one that’ll support a scanning resolution of around 2700dpi if you plan on producing images for printing at A3 (some reviewers suggest a minimum of 4000dpi and others are quite happy with 2700dpi technology).
Some of the latest scanners will offer up to 4000dpi but you will pay more!
So what’s available? The most common choices of dedicated film scanners for amateur use are Nikon Coolscan – starting at around £500 or the Canon 4000S starting around £400, both with a similar specification. This appears to knock spots off anything by Nikon in terms of scan and build quality if some of the reviews are to be believed. It is around half the price of Nikons equivalent 4000dpi mode but reviews suggest its scan rate is very slightly slower. But look on the net and do your research.The differences identified by reviewers often seem large but in practice are usually small. Reviewers are paid to make comparisons!
How about Flatbed scanners with film adapters?
The latest flatbed scanners often have film (slide or negative) adapters that take most formats up to and including large and medium format. In many cases, these are at a lower price than dedicated film scanners. In addition the resolution and colour depth of the latest scanners, can often appear to exceed even some of the high end dedicated film scanners. However, reviews seem mixed and quite divided on whether dedicated film scanners are better but… keep reading the reviews. Look for reviews by photographers who use them rather than reviewers in PC magazines.
Arguments:
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For - one scanner for both film and prints, cost.
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Against - speed, quality – no glass plate between film and scanner head.
Is it better to use a digital camera than film?
When I originally wrote the answer to this question the answer was, it's very expensive to get the equivalent (or near equivalent) quality in a digital equivalent of a 35mm SLR. However, with the latest 10M+ pixel Nikons, Canons, Pentax's and Olympus's,, then the necessary quality for A3 prints is both available and affordable.
There are new cameras coming on the market that can use 35mm lenses without any change in effective focal length but they are still expensive. The latest digital Canon and Nikon DSLR with such a fukll 35mm format rather than the usual APS C format capability but it is still eye wateringly expensive.
There are other reasons why you might wish to use film. But this comes back to various subjective differences. Compare a programme that is made for TV where you know video cameras have been used and then compare it with one where traditional film is used. Both are good, quality sharpness etc. but the image is different. You pay your money and take your choice. The other advantages of a digital camera are one body for both colour and B&W. You can get slides made from digital files but good copies are expensive. But of course video projectors are coming down in price so if you want to project slides this is an option but you need around £500+ to get one, at the moment, with good enough quality. Colin Ball's digital Royale projector system uses a projector than can be bought for around £1100+ on its own.
What should you look for? Noise – from cooling fans, this is the same problem as 35mm projectors;Build quality; Cost of lamp replacement – can be several hundreds of pounds – check first but clever electronics can give a 3000 hour life so the cost becomes a little more reasonable; Contrast ratio – difference between light and dark, this should be at least 400:1, the best ones are available with 2000:1 ratios. Two technologies are used. Firstly, those which use LCD technology will usually result in the lower contrast ratio's of about 400:1, but the latest Epsons are a lot better and secondly, the use of DLP technology which uses a form of hi-tech mirror per pixel yielding contrast ratios of 2000:1.
Some recent reports suggest that the colour gamut of DLP projectors is not as good as the latest LCD ones. Some DLP projectors can suffer from the rainbow effect. Some people are more susceptible than others. But they are getting better every day so keep looking and try them out first - if you can.
There are a new range of video projectors just coming out that use LEDs srather than halogen bulbs. Up till now high brightness LED technology has not been as cheap or as bright as halogen. That is now changing. Prices are still high but teh days of the £300 halogen bulb replacement are numbered as the life of these bulbs is many thousands of hours longer than their halogen equivalents.
Don’t forget if you do get a video projector to show your digital slides you can also use it as a TV projector so you can show your DVD films in large screen format a major advantage over 35mm projectors! But watch the screen image ratio. Only the latest will display wide-screen DVD's and the latest projectors for high definition e.g. Blue Ray discs are at the time of writing - not cheap. There are many new projectors out now designed to work with HD sources and fully supported HDMI interfaces.
Turn digital images into slides?
There are a number of companies that do this and they take an image file and with special equipment (the reverse of a film scanner) will write this image onto film.
The image files can be saved onto a CD or DVD for which you will need a CD (or DVD) Writer (these can be bought for your PC from as little as £15 upwards – as of June 2008 prices) and installed in a spare space on your PC.
A good rule of thumb is scan for the highest dpi that your scanner will support at the highest colour depth. For example, a 2720dpi scan with a 36 bit scanner gives a non-compressed file size of around 50Mbytes.
The images can be sent as email attachments and sent through the internet. But many emails systems limit an individual email with file aattcahement to about 10M. However, if you are going to do this, a broadband connection is best as the file sizes are large. If you scan a slide at 2700 dpi and save in the ‘tif’ format with 36bit colour then each image will take up in excess of 50MBytes. You can commpress the files to use jpeg format files to make them smaller but you can lose quality. When sending large files or emails across the Internet a broadband connection is a must. Note that most Service Providers cap teh maximum size of an email to about 10MB. Some are less.
As you know when you scan you create an electronic image comprising a large number of pixels. Each pixel is roughly equivalent to a dot or bit of silver in a conventional chemical film sense. Each pixel has a set of numbers associated with it. These numbers correspond to the colour of each pixel. Typically current film scanners use 24bits for each pixel (or three bytes).
For this example a byte is an 8 bit binary number whose value can be between 0 and 255. For a 24bit colour system this means that the Magenta, Cyan and Yellow components (the numbers describe the colour and brightness of each pixel) can each be represented by values of between 0 and 255. The value of the number corresponds to the amount of the particular colour.
Hence each pixel is identified by a 24bit (three byte number). So a 1Mega pixel image would result in a file size of 3Mbytes if uncompressed i.e. if you use TIF, BMP file formats etc. and not JPEG to save the file).
Click here to see my article on Pixels.
A simple Imaging workflow for a digital darkroom
In order to organise the way in which you might approach digital imaging – at least from the scanning through to printing - it’s helpful to treat the different steps of the process individually.
This may seem like the bl*****g obvious but breaking the whole digital imaging process into three stages makes the whole process a lot easier to get to grips especially if you are just starting.
1) get the image e.g. from a camera, scanner, file on disc etc..
2) manipulate the image e.g. in PhotoShop
3) print the image
These are in ‘short hand form’ based around PhotoShop.
Open your Colour image - Image/Mode/Greyscale and discard colour
If you start with a B&W image - Image/Mode RGB - Image/Adjust/Hue_Saturation
Try Hue 44 and Saturation 36
Apply Gaussian Blur 0.2 pixels
Filter/Sharpen Edges
Add Noise of 8 to give image some grit
Reduce brightness by -10 and raise contrast 15
Eyewire at www.eyewire.com/tips give new tips weekly - mainly on Photoshop.
Colour
to Greyscale conversion
Conversion of images to greyscale (mono) from colour images can result
in mixed results. Midtone reds, greens and blues do not convert well in
Photoshop giving a flat (low contrast) appearance. It is suggested that
by you adjust the colours using curves.
Each photo is different so experimenting is needed.
Start off with a colour image - adjusting each curve, but only well within
the 4 centre squares so as to preserve detail and tonal range.
Try moving the curve upwards in the cyan channel to increase colour density
in the shaded areas and also for greens.
Decrease brightness by moving the curve downwards in the magenta and yellow
channels, and increasing the brightness in the black channel by moving
its curve upwards for more overall contrast.
When now converted to greyscale you usually get a punchier result
for B&W printing and also for tritones as well.
An alternative to this is to use the Channel Mixer. This gives the same
effect but by means of slider control.
This an update to the earlier FAQ. Do you need to use PhotoShop? the answer is if you are a professional or semi-professional photographer with a digital workflow then the answer is almost certainly - yes. As an amateur - well the answer is possibly but not essential.
Amateur products include - around the £50 to £100 level depending where you buy them:
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PhotoShop Elements 9.0
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Corel Paint Shop Pro
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plus several others
Some Free alternatives.
This is not an exhaustive list as there are many others around. A really good free software package that is as good as Elements and Paint Shop Pro and many say is a lot better and almost as good as PhotoShop is The Gimp. Its a free download and is 'open source' software. Click here to goto the GIMP site then follow teh download links for your operating system e.g. Winows, MAC OS etc.
One other free software package worth a look is Paint.net. It is a major update from the original MS Paint software. Could be worth a look. Click here to go to the site.
A lighrter weight one thast worth a quick look is Picasa from Google. Its a free download and is an excellent basic product that can do manipulation, create galleries, upload photos to an on-line gallery etc.
So do you need PhotoShop? Don't buy it with the excuse 'you must have it to be a good photographer'! The learning curve is steep, its very expensive (£500+ for CS5) unless someone else pays for it!
6M pixels will give you an A3 print with stacks of room for cropping and expanding. (e.g. Nikon D50 DSLR). More pixels (currently at least and the technology is improving) often give poorer noise in the shadows and lower dynamic range. Having said that 10M pixel sensors for DSLRs are pretty good and are probably better than the original 6M sensors. But the latest sensors used in teh Nikon D7000 / D5100 range offer superb results with very low noise floors and excellent dynamic range plus impresive (and usuable) high ISO ratings in excess of 6400.
What you do have to watch for is the push for numbers of pixels in compact cameras. The marketing mantra is more pixlels is good and even more pixels is better. Is a 10M pixel compact better than a 6M pixel compact. Well - the first question I would ask is - how good is the lens and what is the dynamic range like - never mind the pixels. But how often do you see that in the brochure or get told that by the salesman? If you only want to make a 6" x 4" enprint a 1M pixel sensor will do!
The sensors of compact cameras are a lot, lot smaller than DSLRs and if you read the reviews, noise performance is usually poor around the 200 to 400 ISO upwards area. Whereas even the venerable Nikon D50 only really starts to show poorer noise in its 1600 ISO setting and thats easily removed by some of the noise reduction software available.
