the last word

This afternoon I grabbed an easel and both stacks—glossy and matte—of the Nighthawks pictures. I set up the easel in a room with lots of diffuse daylight and went through the photographs, comparing the two versions. The first thing I noticed was that I’d gotten the editing right: the images looked quite similar. In fact,… [Read More]

While I was printing the matte pictures, I edited the glossy versions. It didn’t take much. Mostly I added a little contrast-enhancing S-curve that strengthened the midtone separation at the expense of the shadows and the highlights. When printed on the higher-Dmax glossy paper, the midtones looked a little dark, so, if the highlights would… [Read More]

This morning, I opened the collection of Nighthawks images that are tweaked for matte printing and printed them out, one to a page, on a laser printer. I spread them all out on the bed and went through my stock of 17×22 Nighthawks pictures, pulling out the ones that matched the laser-printed ones. I didn’t… [Read More]

I got up this morning thinking about printing two more of the PhotoCalligraphy series. I turned on the printer and made tea while it did its thing. When I pulled out the paper, my heart fell. The scrapes were back. Refusing to panic, I checked the platen gap. It was set to standard. Turning off… [Read More]

When I posted yesterday, I had just gotten my first 17×25 print out of my Epson 3800, and it looked great. I was stoked. I printed another. Uh-oh. The print had little whitish horizontal marks in the black background at the top part of the image. The marks didn’t go clear across the page, but… [Read More]