A little while ago Melissa printed over a hundred photos through Walgreens.com. We gave them out to friends and family, and we’ve got some sitting around the house here and there.
It finally dawned on me that the same photo looks much, much better in print than onscreen. I have prints of this pelican and this llama sitting in front of me right now. Onscreen the JPGs are pixelated and the colors are uneven. On a glossy print they look fantastic.
So now I’m learning to appreciate prints. I’m also wondering why the prints look so much better and what I can do to improve the onscreen version. Any ideas?
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1.) The chemicals used to make the photo automatically “bleed”, so pixelation disappears.
2.) Backlit LCDs just aren’t very good for viewing certain material. (That’s why e-Paper has been in development by various companies.)
3.) Walgreens automatically “enhances” any picture with some sort of batch imaging program.
There are so many variations in monitor calibration, resolution, brightness/contrast that it’s impossible to really present work as the artist intended to the masses, or even to yourself. A print is the only way for quality control. That, and having your eyeballs calibrated on a regular basis.
[rq=34559,0,blog][/rq]Going Green
I remember from my B&W days some decades back the lesson that B&W film develops at the granular level and color develops at the molecular level, creating the opportunity for more finely grained prints with color.
I didn’t work with color, but in B&W the film and paper choices make a huge difference in sharpness of the final product. For example, Kofax Tri-X is (was? I don’t know if it’s still being made) a “fast” film (400 ASA) and can be “pushed” to 1600 by development method. It has, however, enough grain that at some exposures it’s almost a connect-the-dots image. Plus-X, on the other hand, at ASA 32, was much more finely grained and produced sharper, higher contrast, images.
As I remember, print paper choice was also pretty critical, as was drying method. Drying with image against the drum produced a glossy print, while back of the paper against the drying drum flattened the image.
I’m sure a lot has changed in the intervening four decades since I dabbled in all this, especially on the color side.
Or maybe it’s just that the print-out has much higher DPI than the monitor…
Having just purchased a new Canon point-and-shoot $200 SD1200IS and needing to know how much resolution I wanted, I put it on a tripod and went out to a sunny garden. I shot many settings for size 1600×1200 on up. That’s about the size of my computer screen. The file sizes ranged from 0.8-5.0 Mb. I couldn’t distinguish the pictures! So I’ll probably set it up for the lowest grade. I’ll probably get better pictures if I just take some time to read the manual. For example, leave it always on “continuous shooting” mode (by using low resolution, I’ll always have more memory than I could ever need).
As for prints, I don’t want them. I have too much stuff already.
Alc: I’m thinking it’s either the software they use or the pixel density. Maybe a little of both. I can’t do anything about the latter, but I may need to use better software to up my game. I’ve been meaning to experiment with RAW files using Adobe Lightroom. I just haven’t found the time.
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