Essential steps for making a fine digital print

This is my process to produce beautiful inkjet prints. We will cover preparing the images on the computer, setting the parameters for printing, picking the best printer and the most appropriate paper types, and I’ll show how the images are matted ready for delivery.

If there’s anything you’d like me to cover in more detail leave a note in the comments below and I’ll try to put together a more detailed tutorial for you. There’s a video version of this blog post you can view at the bottom of this page.

I’m printing one of my open-edition images – this one is from near Halifax, my hometown in England. The Yorkshire landscape is stunning and I want people to feel the texture of the rock, the rugged terrain and the weight of the sky.

I’d like to print out an 8 x 10 to be installed in a 16 x 20 frame - it gives a lovely wide border separating the image from anything else that is close by on the wall that it will eventually hang on.

 
Fine print of sheep in field near Halifax, yorkshire, england

Fine print of Sheep near Top Withens, Halifax UK.

 

Here’s how the dimensions break down – I have an 8x10 piece of paper, but the mat window has to be smaller else the paper will fall through. So the window is 7.5x9.5 inches for a ¼” overlap. I also like to leave a small gap between the printed area of the image and the matte cutaway, just to make things look tidy. In this case the printed area is 7 x 9 inches to leave a quarter inch gap around the printed image.

Printing

There’s a whole bunch of parameters to set for the printing including the paper size the print area size and the printer profiles so that the program is aware of how my printer treats colors and also how the selected paper is going to affect the colors. I also like to leave a think black border on the prints so that any whites in the image remain separate from the white of the surrounding paper.

I use a color calibrated monitor so that the colors that I am looking at what will be printed and so I don’t have to do any second-guessing or run a large number of test prints because the colors will be pretty much what I see on the screen.

With prints that are for sale we can’t cut any corners when it comes to quality. The printer (canon pro-10) uses pigment inks which are the most archival inks available. I do not risk using lower quality third party inks – I use the manufacturer’s inks which are some of the most expensive liquids in the world.

I limit my paper choices to the most appropriate matte paper and semi-gloss paper. These are top-of-the-line acid free papers - resistant to possible to yellowing overtime.

Once the print is created, the date and the name of the print is written directly on the back of the paper with an archival quality pen and I’ll also write my name there. I’ll also sign the mat but the mat might be replaced one day so writing the information on the print is much more secure.

Matting

I go to the effort of cutting my own mats for a couple of reasons. The first of which is because I like an 8 x 10 to be framed in a 16 x 20 frame and that combination is not easily found in pre-cut mats. There’s also my preference for bottom waiting the mat. That means placing the window higher than center by having a wider bottom boarder than the top by a very specific amount. This is called the optical canter and is an illusion that human brain finds satisfying. Find out more on how I cut mats in this detailed blog post.

The image is attached to the mat using a single piece of acid-free tape at the top of the image. You’ll notice that it is not all the way around the image because the paper on the mat will expand and contract at different rates over time - if they were permanently attached the picture would buckle. Attaching the image with just one piece of tape allows the picture to move independently of the mat.

Framing

I found that people have very specific frame preferences depending on their own décor and tastes. Providing a frame that will be eventually discarded would be wasteful. So instead I deliver matted prints that are ready for framing and this has the added benefit of lower shipping costs.

When I do frame the prints I’m a huge fan of a thin simple black frame. It will never go out of style.

So there’s the final piece. From preparing the image to hanging it on the wall - This entire process is based on the principle of doing things simply and doing them right to make the best and longest lasting print possible.

When to blur the background of a photograph

Everything in focus versus selective focus. 

iPhones versus fast aperture lenses.

Ansel verses Leonardo? 

I would bet most people buy their first serious camera because they want the blurry background that makes a shot look “professional”. Ironically, photographers historically have gone to great extremes to get everything as in-focus as possible. I guess we always desire the outcome that is most difficult to achieve.

How to blur the background

  • You can get a blurry background even with a compact point and shoot camera by using the macro mode and/or getting your subject as close to the camera as possible, and the background as far away as possible.  The camera to subject and subject to background distances are critical

  • For the same camera to subject distance, the wider the aperture (lower f number) the blurrier the background

  • The larger the image sensor, the blurrier the background because the camera to subject distance changes to maintain the same subject size

  • Smart phone software can try to fake the blurred background (e.g. “portrait mode”), but it often easy to spot because focus is based on what the software considers to be the main subject, not the physics of relative distance from the lens

When not to blur the background

Ansel Adams and some of his peers formed a group called f64 - an aperture of f64 was needed to get most things in a landscape photograph in focus, even when cleverly using the Scheimpflug principle. With the large format cameras he was using, blurring out the background was so easy it was considered a nuisance. With landscapes, the long shutter speeds required to use these narrow apertures were not a problem. Ansel liked large format for the ability to develop one large negative at a time, but a smaller negative would have made the camera to subject distance larger and consequently had more in focus.

So why did Ansel not use 35mm (or micro 4/3 if it were today) to get more in focus? Because moving the camera changes perspective, and a normal large format lens would have to be replaced with a super-wide small format lens with all the distortions that go with it. In reality, the biggest reason was the size of the negative. Film grain is the same physical size on all formats, so a larger negative dwarfs the grain providing increased apparent image quality.

You probably want as much of the image in focus as possible when:

  • you have a great composition with a defined subject and no distracting elements

  • documenting a scene which might be scrutinized closely by the viewer (think press images and landscapes)

  • printing large and you want to avoid large blurry areas of uninteresting space

f8 on a 35mm camera, along with all elements at a relatively similar distance to the lens, keeps most of the image in focus

But blur can really help you out sometimes

What do Da Vinci and wedding photographers have in common? They think backgrounds should have less detail than the subject. Leonardo says atmospheric perspective naturally removed detail form the backgrounds, and a lot of his portraits had a landscape background. 

The human eye only sees a small portion of the world in focus at any one time, but our eyes scan and send all these details to memory, creating the illusion that more is in focus at once than there really are. 

Modern portrait photographers blur the background for different reasons. The main reason is to isolate the subject, or as an artistic decision (it can make a scene look dreamy). But caution; often this is to make up for other failures:

  • lack of tonal contrast between subject to background

  • poor composition

  • busy or ugly backgrounds

  • or lack of sufficient light

f1.4 on a 35mm camera, with a subject relatively close and the background relatively far away blurs distracting background elements. Notice how the color of the background plant remains a distraction regardless of how much it is blurred.

No doubt - shooting wide open can get you out of all these bad situations at a pinch. 

Artistic decisions aside, should we brute-force these problems away, or think like a proper photographer and use good technique and problem solving skills? Intentionality is key.

You thoughts are welcome in the comments below.

TFP (Trade for Print) tips for models

Crystal Mathis

This blog post is written in collaboration with with Crystal Mathis, a Houston model, nutrition health coach, and author.

The TFP is a useful collaboration which at a base-level provides images for both a model and photographer to use for marketing purposes. Hair and makeup artists, designers and studio owners can be part of this deal too. Literal prints are less common today since the maturation of digital photography, and have been replaced with electronic image files.

I use TFP for many reasons and have met some really cool people along the way.

With TFP there is often a balance in skills, or the collab is initiated by the more experienced party. An imbalanced pairing can still work and produce great results.

Paid work usually happens when either the model or photographer is fully dependent on the talent/experience of the other, or the work has commercial applications for a third party.

Why would you model for free?

To build your portfolio, especially earlier on. By blitzing a number of quality TFPs its possible to get a wide range of images in different styles. That way you can narrow down to what you’d like to focus on.

Its also a great way to see which wardrobe and pose ideas work. I’d suggest treating it like a class - spend a session concentrating on one thing and working on it until it is perfected.

Lastly, you’ll get to see how different people work. You’ll figure out how to get the best collaborations for your needs, and who to avoid in the future.

Why would a photographer work for free?

  • To test equipment, lighting or location in preparation for client shoots

  • To experiment with a different style or pivot to a new niche

  • To create new marketing materials

  • To stay sharp during quiet seasons

  • To network

  • For non-profits and charities

  • To feed the hungry Instagram machine with more images than client shoots provide

There are other reasons which are not necessarily bad, but might not get you the highest quality images:

  • When their portfolio has not reached a mature state

  • When their session flow/method/interaction needs refinement

  • They are shooting for fun with no plan or purpose for the session

Finding a photographer with integrity

Given the likelihood of TFPs being arranged through Instagram, there are some easy ways to check their profile to see which photographers will provide a smooth experience:

  • They have a profile picture of themselves (you don’t want to see a profile picture of a young woman, and then an old man turns up on the day)

  • They have a portfolio of images you like/respect

  • A nice-to-have is a link to a portfolio website so you can see more images and read their bio

  • Remember that the phrase “published” or “internationally published” means absolutely nothing when they have paid for publication, or the publication is a poor quality online-only magazine

  • Listing camera equipment in the Instagram bio is a sign they are very new to the game too. Not a deal breaker if their images are good though

The Model Release

A vital part of the TFP is the use of a model release. Copyright law says the photographs belong exclusively to the photographer. Without a release, a model doesn’t really have any promise to receive them. A release provides the terms of use for the model. The pictures are free, so don’t expect to directly profit from them, but do expect to be able to use them for Social Media at the very least.

Here’s an example of the model release I use:

Also, expect a reasonable number of images, and them to be delivered to you in a timely fashion. For example, my one hour TFPs generally produce 10 final images delivered within 7 days. Not getting images from a shoot is unfair and should not be tolerated.

Safety

Importantly, the number one rule is to be safe. There are thousands of really cool photographers out there, so there’s no need to take risks with someone if you see any red flags.

  • Study their images and decide if they are to your taste. You can tell a lot about a photographer’s personality from their portfolio.

  • You can DM people tagged in their photos for a review/reference of them

  • Bring a friend or relative to the shoot

  • Be confident to set boundaries, ask questions and be respected


TFPs are fun, can be hugely beneficial for everyone involved.

Have a plan, and communicate effectively to make sure all parties get great images they can use.

Comment below to share what made a TFP experience awesome, or what to pay special attention to.

How to restore damaged old photographs

Before I describe how I restore old photographs, I’d like to make two important points:

  1. Cherished photos are best printed out. Your hard drive or phone is a graveyard for memories, but a shoe-box of prints in the closet is like treasure.

  2. Take good pictures of the people around you. Take bad pictures. But take pictures. A bad photo of your friends and relatives is much better than no photo of them.

The scan

Scans are great for repairing and sharing, prints are great for archiving.

Scan on the best scanner you can access, but remember that the original photos can be re-scanned in the future on better hardware. Negatives, small or very large prints can be scanned using a digital camera on a copy stand rig. The camera method is much faster than a flatbed scanner and also has the advantage of using the maximum resolution regardless of the original print/negative size. Read more on this method in my blog post on reproductions.

Remove and dust from the negatives/prints with a blower. Its easier to remove duct now than to spend time cloning it out digitally later.

Give the files suitable names, but even better is to create metadata tags with the approximate image date, location and the names of the people in it. This will make searching for the image a breeze in the future - well worth the time investment.

The software

If you do not deal with digital photographs on a regular basis (end even for those who do) I cannot recommend any subscription software. The core tools you will need are a way to invert negative images to positive using curves or an “invert image” function if you have negatives (but if you only have prints this isn’t a must), clone or stamp tool, and a way to selectively change colours in the image, as opposed to altering colour globally on the entire image. Photoshop Elements, Affinity Photo (which is excellent), or even GIMP are perfectly fine. If you have access to Lightroom, this will also work and make batch editing of large numbers of photos easier.

The crop

Always place the prints in exactly the same position for every scan, that way you can crop them all in one batch action at the end, if desired. You can crop the image to its exact frame, crop into the image for a better composition, or just outside of the image to ensure all data is preserved. Remember that a lot of software will permanently crop a JPEG or a TIFF (destructive editing) so be careful with your decisions. Better still, make a copy of images you will creatively crop into for composition purposes. Using layers in PhotoShop or Affinity is non-destructive so you can worry less.

The crop can also include rotating the image to remove unintentional tilts of horizontal and vertical lines (e.g. leveling horizons). An advanced method is to use a transform or perspective correction tool to straighten a photo. As much as I love doing this with my new images, I’m careful to kill the character of an old image with excessive adjustments.

Basic edits

Brightness and contrast should be your first port of call to get the image ready for restoration. You want to see as much detail in the shadows and highlights as possible without clipping the blacks and whites. A lot of these decisions are to taste, but excessive or clipped dark or bright areas need to be avoided.

Pixilation can be an issue with old scans. The example picture of my parents above was scanned more than 15 years ago on a low-end scanner. Its hard to mitigate, but you can use a small amount of blur or denoise to soften the pixel edges. I often make a mask so that eyes and mouths remain sharp, whereas large flat blocks of color get more treatment. You want to avoid a plasticky over-smoothed look.

Colours

A colour calibrated monitor is a nice-to-have for colour work, but you can get pretty far without one. Remember that most monitors are designed to have a blue-tint to fools us in to thinking it is brighter than it its. If you correct colours by eye on a blue monitor, your images will print in a more orange tone than you expected.

A first step is to find a part of the image that is supposed to be neutral (a white table cloth, grey suit, black shoes) and click it with a “White Balance” color picker. This will remove the colour cast from the entire image. Try picking multiple places to see which give the most pleasing result.

Global colour adjustments are tricky because old images fade in different ways. In color negatives, even new film has a purple tint in the shadows. If you corrected for this globally then the highlights will go green, so it needs to be handled delicately. Either split toning can be used (add green to purple shadows and purple to green highlights) or detailed work using a Hue-Saturation-Lightness (HSL) adjustment on an adjustment layer.

Faded parts of the image can be selectively saturated. Red skin can be selectively unsaturated.

Dust/scratches

Restoration work has the same goal as image retouching - to remove distractions. With restorations, the aim is not necessarily to improve the image, rather to get it back to its original level of quality.

Most dust spots can be removed with a healing tool. Use a new layer, call it “healing” and make sure it is set to sample the layers below it. Larger patches of scratches or other damage may require use of the stamp cloning tool to copy pixels from a similar, but intact, part of the image to the damaged part.

Final touches

The image already looks closer to life than the original did, no longer having color casts or distracting damage. You can add some sharpening, but careful not to re-ignite any pixilation.

Export the file as common JPEG or TIFFs, at a reasonable quality. When you’ve spent a lot of time restoring an image, you might want to save a native file for the software you are using so the layers are preserved and can be re-adjusted in the future.

And print your photos.

Contact me if you’d like help restoring or printing your old photos in the Houston area.

Unconscious conformity - the trap of default camera settings

When we get a new camera, especially digital ones, we often change various parameters to make the cameras “ours”. A couple of examples: setting back-button focusing; turning off the focus confirmation beep; picking RAW output rather than JPEG.

The default image orientation of the Olympus FT is in portrait, so the majority of images end up being taken that way.

But what about all the things we don't change? Or can't? As much as different cameras appear to be designed very differently, there are some common traits that make a lot of photos very similar. A lot if this applies to film cameras, too.

Image orientation

I find it very interesting that when I use my 35mm Pen FT, most of my shots are shot vertical. The images are exposed this way in order to fit 72 images on a usually 36 image roll of film. Same for my iPhone. Notice how people take vertical orientation videos on their phones? It looks awful when viewed on a computer or TV, but the phone is intuitively held that way, and they look acceptable when viewed on the device they were taken on (and most pictures will never leave the phone anyway).

We can switch things up by consciously turning our camera 90 degrees, or switching our image capturing devices for certain situations. I often use a Hasselblad 6x6 film camera for portraits because the square frame doesn’t demand an image orientation decision.

Aspect ratio

A 35mm frame is in the ratio of 3:2, and is the final resting place for most photos. It is interesting that we feel compelled to fix the aspect ratio even when we crop. Medium format digital sensors currently provide a closer-to-square 6:4.5 ratio. You can see what these aspect ratios look like in the blog post I wrote comparing sensor sizes.

Shooting film opens up some alternate restrictions. Some medium format cameras like the Hasselblad 500 shoot in a square format. Some dedicated panoramic 35mm cameras exist, such as the Widelux. Changing the aspect ratio can be refreshing, and can completely alter the feel of a composition.

Ironically, the beauty of digital photography is that we can manipulate images in an infinite number of ways very easily. From square format to super-wide stitched panoramas. It is just hard to pre-visualize these things when the viewfinder is always selling you 3:2.

Of course, aspect ratio and cropping go hand in hand. The image orientation should serve the image. The final use of the image is important here - where will it be displayed? Imaging a great 16:9 composition filled with the subject, but then it needs to be cropped square for Instagram!

One reason most people avoid custom aspect ratios that work for their specific image is that they might be difficult to frame. This is easily solved by custom cutting a mat to fit within a standard frame size, such as cutting an 8x8 hole to mound in a 16x20 frame. I describe this simple process further in this custom mat cutting blog post.

Man waling in Oculus in New York

A long 16:9 or a 3:1 (shown here) aspect ratio is really useful to convey a cinematic sense of space. This crop works great for web-page headers or a custom framed print in a long hallway.

Colour

With film, choosing between colour and black and white is a conscious decision. With digital, most cameras shoot colour out of the box and so most images stay that way. 

With digital, it is claimed that “best practice” is to shoot in colour even if you want a black and white final product. Reason being that you can control the tones of each colour individually when making the conversion.

The problem with using a color photo for a final black and white image is that monotone requires a decision at the moment the shutter is pressed, not days later on a whim. Reason being that a satisfactory colour photo may be pleasing, but if each hue is at the same brightness then it will lead to a very flat black and white conversion. Then we spend hours trying to make it look good, or worse, expect a photoshop plug-in to do the work for us. A good black and white photo needs tonal contrast from the get-go. If you are interested in black and white photography, I suggest you immerse yourself in it for a period - you’ll be looking for different things than you would have with a colour mindset. Film might be the best way to do this as you will have to commit to black and white as soon as the camera is loaded.

 If you have ideas on default ways of thinking that hold us all back, please leave your thoughts in the comment section below!