Great Output Magazine Excerpt

“Realities of Digital Printing”, written for Great Output magazine for an article by Harald Johnson. (Jan/Feb. ’04).

MYTH: Buying a Great Printer Makes You a Great Printmaker.
Notwithstanding all the marketing hype from every equipment maker out there, it just ain’t going to happen! There is no push-button solution to high-quality digital output; it takes time and experience. Los Angeles fine-art printing consultant and UCLA digital printmaking instructor Andrew Behla explains it like this: “An eye for color, a knowledge of color theory, and an understanding of the digital imaging process are the foundation blocks for making successful prints. In addition, utilizing color management and developing Photoshop wizardry are two other important resources needed in the printmaker’s toolbox. So, what is the most useful tool to have? Ultimately, it is your eye. Developing your own visual sensibility and effectively using your printmaking tools to facilitate the process are crucial. A music producer once summed it up for me like this: ‘It’s not the gear, it’s the ear.’ The art of digital printmaking is found in the eyes of the printmaker.”

Here are more myths and realities that were submitted by Andrew for the article by Harald Johnson:

MYTH: I don’t need an ICC profile to get an accurate print.
You have the freedom to print however you like. Make a print, for example, and then go back to Photoshop or the image editing software of your choice to make a correction based on what you see in the print. You can also correct “on the fly” with the print driver’s color correction tools. Nevertheless, to get the most accurate results you should use an ICC workflow where each ink/printer/paper combination has its own unique ICC profile, or print space.

Think of the ICC profile as a translator that takes the image you have on your display and translates that to the most accurate representation your printer can muster. (You did calibrate your monitor, didn’t you?) Without a printer profile you are shooting in the dark, wasting time, ink, and paper. (But I’m sure this makes the printer manufacturer happy with the consumables you will burn through in your quest for the perfect print!)

If you want to get to the next level in printmaking, consider using an ICC workflow with an ICC printer profile. Although this seems technical and time consuming to setup, it is really the opposite. Once you have established a good ICC workflow with the appropriate print space, you will find that what you see on your screen really IS close to what you get on your printer. At the very least what you have in your file will be closer to what you see in your print.

With an ICC workflow in place, you will gain more freedom to work on the actual images without constantly guessing, “How will this look when it’s printed?” You can utilize “soft proofing,” or the ability to make color and image correction decisions, based on what you see on your monitor. You can also utilize Photoshop’s soft proofing option under image, setup, that allows you to simulate your print space on screen. In these respects, you will be closer to creating your art more intuitively and with less struggle and false starts.

MYTH: With a calibrated monitor, I will be able to perfectly simulate my prints on screen, or soft proof them.
Wait, a minute, I thought I would be able to soft proof my images and not have to spend as much time making prints to determine how my image looks? Yes, you can simulate your printed work with your display, but keep in mind that your display and your printer use two different color spaces or theories, therefore each displays color in unique ways and with different qualities.

The transmission of red, green and blue light through a monitor to create an image represents additive color theory. Think of your eyes receiving this light directly, and the greatest amount of red, green, and blue light shown simultaneously creates the brightest white your display has to offer. However, print color theory is called subtractive color theory. With printers, the brightest white, or paper white, is achieved by subtracting all ink so that the white of the paper is allowed to show through. Light is then absorbed on the paper and reflected back to your eyes that receive the color information. Can you see how the light reflecting from a print differs from the monitor’s immediate transmission of light? This is the main reason why a monitor’s display of red, green and blue color space is much wider than a printer’s cyan, magenta, yellow, and black color space.

Although your calibrated monitor can help you represent what you see on paper, you shouldn’t become attached to this form of output, as the physics of the two color spaces will never be the same. We can use soft proofing and monitor calibration to help us in printmaking, but ultimately, the proof is in the print.

MYTH: The best place to start in your reproduction of fine art is with a large format, good quality transparency.
Most artists shoot transparencies, or slides, of their art as a means to preserve their work or to show galleries. While this a legitimate format in which to archive one’s work it is not necessarily the best format for creating a fine art print. Think of a slide as one generation removed from the original, and artists often find that the quality of their slides is not good enough to use for the type of high resolution scan needed to support a print. The poor quality found on slides can come from the grain of the film, uneven or mediocre lighting, inaccurate color or casting, or the artwork being out of focus.

If you want to have the most accurate print, wouldn’t you want to go to the original artwork to capture all the brush strokes and details? Enter Dave Coons the founder of Artscans in Manhattan Beach, California (artscans.com). Dave has built a scanner that can scan your artwork directly giving you a digital file that will be the most accurate translation to print. The problem with scanning a transparency is that the scanner uses the film’s emulsion as the source for the scan, and the film’s emulsion contains dyes that have a different color space from your original artwork.

Another reason to use Artscans is that they will scan your image as a “raw” file, without any particular color space attached to it. This allows the scan to be repurposed for whatever form of output you desire including web, offset and fine art color spaces. An artist can request that their artwork be lit from one direction or both sides. By having your artwork lit from one side, the nuances of the brush strokes can be revealed, and a three-dimensional quality can be maintained in the final print. By having the artwork lit from both sides, the scan will be perfectly even from edge to edge, no small achievement if you’ve ever attempted to shoot a slide of a large original accurately.