Kat Eye Studio

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Going BIG!

I’ve waited. I’ve practiced. I’ve experimented. I’ve made sure I knew how to get my prints to look the way I wanted to before going BIG, as big as my printer can handle. I finally took the plunge this weekend and printed my first 17×22″ print. I chose to print my favorite tree image from Spring Break, The Last Tree.

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Even though I wanted to understand the ins and outs before I printed this big, this print was a bit of an experiment, too. The Last Tree is an iPhone 5 image edited in the Noir app. I love Noir for its dramatic monochromatic effects, but the app doesn’t save full resolution files. The info in the app says it does, but that must apply only to phones at the time it was first released (2011) and doesn’t apply to the newer, higher resolution iPhone cameras. I needed to “upsize” the file to increase the resolution, and for that I used the Big Photo app. I was a bit skeptical I would get anything useful out at the end, but the final file came out surprisingly well-processed.

I stepped up to the big print, printing first on 13×19″ paper to verify the new file would look ok, then printing the image on the 17×22″ paper. I was so excited to see the finished print! It came out great. Doesn’t it dwarf my usual prints on 8.5×11″ paper?

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The next step was framing. I had purchased some 22×28″ frames and accompanying mats (see my resource page for sources), so that I would have a way to present larger prints. The image at left is the final framed print, temporarily hung on the wall of my family room to give a sense of the scale. The final scene is a bit monochromatic, and the print looks surprisingly small given the size of the frame, but I think it could be a great addition in the right location. In this location, I prefer the color of the painting that usually hangs in above the couch (on right).

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So now that I have this print all matted and framed, what am I going to do with it? I’ve no idea! I’ll find a place to hang it in the house, and maybe it will go into an exhibition someday. Until then, I have achieved one of my goals to print as large as I can with my printer, I’ve learned a bit about increasing file resolution with apps and I am ready for the moment I need to print BIG.

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PrintMania!

What is PrintMania! you ask? It was my weekend! This weekend I printed my photographs. And printed. And printed some more. All to get ready for the Corvallis Fall Festival, an art fair I’m going to be participating in a few weeks from now. It’s all part of my great adventure to complete the circle of creating my art through print. This is my first art fair and thankfully I’m in a group booth for the PhotoArts Guild. I can’t imagine how much I would have to create to have a booth of my own!

My plan was to get ready over several weeks before the festival set up on 21-September but events conspired to push me to complete it all this weekend. My lovely brand new printer developed a problem, and so I got a replacement under warranty. I wanted to test the heck out of the replacement printer before I sent the original, intermittently working printer back. I figured an intermittently working printer was better than no working printer, when I had this looming deadline coming up. The replacement printer worked like a champ, so I’m happy with the printer and I’m now ready for the fair! Here’s what I’ve prepared: 40 greeting cards with envelopes, 25 prints matted to 8×10 inches, 10 prints matted to 11×14 inches, and 10 prints matted to 16×20 inches (4 of these are framed).

Having this art fair project also enabled me to really dig and learn a bit more about how I want to present my work. Remember when I talked about printed aspect ratios? Most standard mats in the US have 5×7, 8×10 or 11×14 inch openings. My 2:3 photos can survive the crop for a 5×7 format, but 8×10 or 11×14 doesn’t work for most of them. That means I have to order custom mats to maintain the right aspect ratio, so I tested three different mat opening/photo size combinations for a 16×20″ frame. They are shown below. On the left is an 8×12″ print, the center is a 9×13.5″ print, and the right is a 10×15″ print. All of these maintain the 2:3 aspect ratio of the print with different widths of mat. I could use your opinion, which one do you like best? (If you are interested in checking out the companies I use for ordering custom mats and other materials, see the “Online Services & Shops” link under Resources on the sidebar of the blog.)

I also learned a fabulous new feature in Lightroom 4: Soft Proofing. This feature simulates the effect of printing for the combination of printer and paper you are using, and will show you not only the shift in brightness and contrast but also which colors the printer can’t print. (Monitors can display more colors than printers can print.) This is incredibly helpful to adjust the photo before printing. Between this feature and significantly reducing my monitor brightness (it’s set at 3% for printing!), I get pretty close to what I want on the first print. Soft proofing is still not completely accurate, but it does save on test prints. And the beauty of Lightroom’s virtual copies is I can have a copy of the photo edited specifically for printing with almost no effort. In getting ready for this art fair, I now have “print ready” images that have been edited and tested available for print any time. Nice!

It takes a different kind of creativity for a project like this compared to creating and editing the images. It’s been frustrating at times but I’m learning something new for my art, and that’s the important thing. While it’s different than the feeling I get from capturing a great image, the satisfaction of seeing my images in print, all matted, signed and ready for someone to frame and hang in their home, is pretty amazing. It will be fun to interact with the people attending the art fair and see the reaction to my work in person. I can’t wait!

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The Missing Piece

I’ve discovered a missing piece to my photography practice. A piece I didn’t even realize was missing until I began to explore it. But now that I’ve found this piece, it’s clicked into place with such perfection I can’t even begin to describe the sense of completion. That missing piece is print.

The journey of print has been a winding one over the last year. I returned from living in Italy last summer with a desire to figure out how to get some of my newly-created portfolio of images printed. At the start of this journey, I thought I wanted nothing to do with the printing process. I just wanted to find a place to upload my images and have them come to me. None of the fussing with printers and papers. More time for creating with my camera, I thought. At first, seeing my prints this way was fantastic. Just seeing a physical, tangible version of my images was amazing.

Over time though, I began to get a niggling feeling that the prints and the process were not all they could be.

First off, the process of uploading and sharing online was not fitting with me. That someone random could order a print from my RedBubble shop and I had no clue who they were, no way to say “hey, what did you like about that image?” or “thank you for your order” or to even sign the work and connect personally left me a little cold.

Next, I took a portfolio class in March and the instructor had wonderful things to say about my images. But, she said, I needed to learn about print. My black and whites, she said, could “sing” if printed well. I had no idea. So I started looking closer, more critically. And then, around the same time, I received my exhibition print order and was disappointed. They didn’t look as I envisioned in my head. Even though I did test prints prior to the full order and they looked fine, things didn’t translate to all of the images I had chosen. Either that or my internal quality level had changed. There was no time to revisit before I had to drop off the prints so I went with it. But the exhibition prints weren’t as good as they could have been. Lesson learned.

I was at a turning point… I realized I either needed to make a serious effort to find a professional lab and learn how to calibrate with them to get the prints I wanted, or I needed to learn how to print myself. It was an investment of time and energy either way, and it was clearly the next step for my artistic journey with photography. I decided I would learn to print myself.

It’s funny how the right resources came my way once I had made my decision to print. Craft & Vision had released an e-book in January called Making the Print by Martin Bailey. I had it sitting on my computer, ready to read. And then, a few weeks later, a workshop in Portland on fine art inkjet printing for photographers with Tyler Bowley, a photographer and professional fine art printer from Seattle, and Lauren Henkin, a Portland photographer and bookmaker, came to my attention. What timing! I signed up immediately. Both of the resources were exactly what I needed to give me the confidence to begin printing my work. I ordered a new printer* and started on this adventure of print about a month ago.

And what a wonderful adventure it has been…

Where I had struggled with any sort of home printing in the past, now that I had the right information I slid into it with ease. It took very little time to get beautiful prints, so much better than I had been getting. My images jump off the paper! I could make them look exactly as I envisioned. My first experiment (Remember I am an engineer, so there is going to be a methodical approach to this!) has been to try out all sorts of fine art papers with different images to see what I might want to use. Wow! What a difference the paper makes to the print as well.

I’ve tried to capture an example to compare between my online-ordered prints and one of my first home prints in the image below. On the left is the print I ordered online, on the right is the print I made. It was hard to capture the differences with the camera, but suffice it to say my own print was more to my vision. It’s less muddy and has clearer depth and detail. If I don’t like how it comes out, I can tweak it a little and try again.

This weekend I did my first larger print – 11×14″ – to submit to a community art exhibit. While it didn’t come out exactly perfect, it was pretty amazing to see my image large like this, and to know I was involved with the creation of it every step of the way. It’s my image, from concept to print. I set it across from my reading chair and couldn’t stop gazing at it, similar to what I do when I’m working on a painting. I can see a few minor things I would like to tweak with the print in the future, and I definitely would have preferred an off-white mat, but once again I was short on time before the exhibit. It’s all a process of learning. Every step of the way.

In some ways, this adventure into printing takes me back. My father owned a print shop. I grew up in and around printing and paper for as long as I can remember. I’ve always love the feel of paper, the smell of the chemicals. I understood Pantone colors, the difference between serif and sans serif fonts and phrases like “out of register” before they ever slipped into the mainstream consciousness. I knew how to tell good quality print from bad. I always had reams of different types of paper to create with. I loved to play the paper… different textures, colors, weights. I rediscovered a love of design and playing with paper when I started scrapbooking years ago. I’m discovering paper all over again, with my photography.

I think my history and love of paper explains how this is the missing piece of the photography process for me. It completes the circle of the creative process – from seeing, to capture, to edit, to print. Something tangible and beautiful in my hands. Something I can share with others that I’ve created and touched. It takes an image from an idea or a concept to something more real to me. This is my art.

*Before you ask “What printer did you get? How did you print?” I want to be clear that I am not going to make any specific comments on printer hardware or brands here on my website, nor am I planning to give specific technical instructions on the printing process. There is plenty of information available online on inkjet printing for photography.

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Exploring with a Camera: Printed Aspect Ratios

We’re doing something different in this new Exploring with a Camera theme. For the next couple of weeks, we’re exploring what happens to our images when we go to print them by exploring Printed Aspect Ratios.

If you are like me, you take many, many images and print very few. One of my goals upon returning home from Italy has been to get some of my favorite photographs printed. I had no desire to print on my home printer, so I was seeking printing solutions that were simple, high quality and would allow me to focus my time on the capture of images rather than the printing of images. It’s going pretty well… I’ve had postcards and greeting cards and canvas gallery wraps printed so far with reasonable success. I’m still experimenting, but one key piece of information that is critical to successful third-party printing is understanding aspect ratio. It is important to understand how the different aspect ratios of standard photo sizes affect your final printed image.

With this exploration, we’ll take a look at the aspect ratio of standard sizes and what that means for our carefully composed photographs. In the US, the standard photo print sizes are 4×6, 5×7, 8×10, 11×14, 16×20 (all units in inches), highlighted in the table below in blue.

There are four columns in this table: The standard size in inches, the approximate size in cm (for my non-US readers), the aspect ratio, and the long side divided by the short side. What does it all mean?

I’ll just use the standard 4×6 size as an example. A 4×6 photo has an aspect ratio of 2:3, that means that for every 2 inches on the short side, there are 3 inches on the long side. (You may also see the aspect ratio for a 4×6 as 3:2. It’s the same thing, no matter the order of the numbers.) When you divide the long side (6) by the short side (4), you get 1.5. This means the long side is 1.5 times longer than the short side. This simple number, the long side divided by the short side, gives you the information to quickly compare the aspect ratios. The higher the number is above 1, the more rectangular the shape of the photo; the closer to 1, the more square the shape of the photo.

Here is a graphical example of the different aspect ratios and their relative shape differences. You can see the 2:3 aspect ratio is the “longest” rectangle with the long side divided by short side at 1.5, while the other aspect ratios move more and more toward square. I’ve included a 1:1 (square) aspect ratio for comparison.

Why do you care about all of this? Well, if you are like me and you compose your images carefully, you care a lot about how the final image looks, whether on the computer screen or printed. If you carefully compose and crop for one aspect ratio, and then print in another aspect ratio, the visual impact of your photographs can be dramatically different.

Camera Aspect Ratios

Aspect ratio starts with your camera. Depending on the type of digital camera you are using, you will have a different aspect ratio at the time of capture. Digital SLRs, based on 35mm film, have an aspect ratio of 2:3. Point-and-shoot or consumer digital cameras, however, have a more square aspect ratio of 3:4. That means if you take a photo in a point-and-shoot camera and then have it printed as a 4×6 print, you are going to lose some of the photograph because of the aspect ratio difference. Conversely, an image from a dSLR printed at 4×6 will come out as composed in the camera. The 2:3 aspect ratio of the dSLR camera matches the 2:3 aspect ratio of the 4×6 print.

Examples

Nothing helps more than a few examples, so let’s start off with my lead in photograph. Since I’ve been revisiting Greece a little bit this week, I pulled this image from Santorini as an example. Here it is again, in the 2:3 aspect ratio:

If I want a 5×7 print, that’s an aspect ratio of 5:7. Some of the top and bottom of the image has to be cropped off:

That’s not too bad. What about an 8×10 print? That’s an aspect ratio of 4:5:

It still looks ok, but compare the 4:5 aspect ratio (last) with the 2:3 (first). There is a different feel. The shadows of the gate are cropped and the image is much more square. When you have space around your subject, as in this photo, there is room to crop for different aspect ratios without significantly affecting what the image conveys. When you don’t have the space for this cropping, however, aspect ratios can make a bigger difference in the final image.

Consider one of my favorites from Torcello in the Venetian Lagoon. I cropped this very tight in camera, it came out nicely balanced to my eye.

If I wanted to print as an 8×10, I would crop to the 4:5 aspect ratio. Look what happens when I crop as best as I can, keeping the most important information. The greyed-out portion is what I would lose in the image with this crop:

I think the image has lost some appeal. Where the brown of the brick at the top matched the brown of the pavement on the bottom, framing the composition in the first image, that framing is lost in the 8×10 crop. The image does not have the same impact when cropped with this aspect ratio.

Here is another example, this one with more space to work with. The negative space on the left of this 2:3 aspect ratio image below serves to put the focus on the bicycle to the right.

Now, with a 4:5 crop if I wanted to do an 8×10 print, see what happens:

While there is space to crop and I don’t lose vital information in the subject of the bicycle, the final result does not have the same impact. As the aspect ratio moves toward square, the off-center subject moves more toward center and the image loses the dynamic feel. It would look ok on the wall, but not as good as the 2:3 aspect ratio.

One quick example with my point-and-shoot camera, which has a 3:4 aspect ratio. I carefully framed the image in camera, and I like the way it turned out.

If I wanted to print this image as a 4×6, the image would need to be cropped 2:3, like so:

This image still works when cropped, because of the symmetric nature of the photograph. A little information lost top and bottom does not impact the focal point of the tree-lined path.

Beware Bleed and Wrap

Now that you are starting to see the impact of aspect ratio, I’m going to take you one step further and discuss “Bleed” and “Wrap.”

In printing, “bleed” is the amount that gets trimmed off at the edge of a print. Printers are not able to line the printing exactly to the edge of the paper, so what they do is print slightly larger than the final size and then trim down to size. The parts of the image that “bleed” further than the final size get trimmed off. Typically this is only a few millimeters, but that can matter. In the case of my Torcello image above, the branch of the tree on the right side that just touches the edge always gets cut off, even when I print it with an aspect ratio of 2:3, due to the bleed. It is just too close to the edge. I wish I had the same image with a little more space on that right edge for printing purposes but I don’t – I cropped it too close in camera.

With the advent of gallery wrap canvas prints, you also have to be aware of the “wrap” factor. If you like the look of the image continuing around the edge with a gallery wrap, you need to consider whether you are losing the visual information in your focal point as part of the image wraps around the edge. I’ll use a recent print of my favorite little flowers as an example. Here’s the original image:

I printed it as a 16×20 (aspect ratio 4:5) gallery wrap with the image wrapped around the edge. Here’s the best I could get for composition in the final image, once the wrap was taken into consideration:

Look how much visual information is lost! While it has impact on the wall due to the size and color of the print, the dynamic nature of the paper cones popping out toward the viewer is lost. It is not what I intended in the photograph.

Some printers offer options when ordering gallery wraps to address this, either by mirroring the image on the wrap, or adding a white or black border. Being aware of the effect of the wrap and printing bleed, and planning ahead for it, can help your final printed images come out as you envision.

What to do?

Now that you understand a little more about the impact of aspect ratio on your images, you can see why many professional photographers choose to print, mat and frame themselves. Not only can they control the color of their prints, but also the sizing of the print and the final presentation.

For most of us, however, we don’t have the resources to take all of that on, either in time, money or equipment. That’s where being aware of the impacts of aspect ratio and bleed on our images comes in. There are many options for printing, so as you decide to print with a company, take a look at what size prints are offered and what their software allows you to adjust as you order.

Here are a few things you can do on your own, to control the aspect ratio impacts:

  • Be aware of the different aspect ratios in printing, and the effects of bleed and wrap, when you go to print.
  • Know the aspect ratio of your camera. Is it 2:3 or 3:4? How does that effect the images you capture? Do you have a preferred aspect ratio for cropping after capture?
  • Consider your final use as you compose in camera. If your composition is perfect straight out of the camera, will you be able to print it in your desired format? Consider taking an additional image or two, leaving some extra space around your final composition, should you decide to print in a different aspect ratio later.
  • When you print, crop for the aspect ratio you are printing. Don’t let the printer randomly decide how the image is cropped to fit the aspect ratio. You can do this in your post-processing software or you may be able to specify the crop in the ordering process, depending on your printer.
  • Find a company that prints the aspect ratio you prefer using. For example, many online photo printers have prints available in the standard 3:4 format of point-and-shoot cameras. Since I use a dSLR and prefer to crop 2:3, I’ve found RedBubble.com a good option since they base all of their prints off an aspect ratio of 2:3. I don’t have to worry about aspect ratio, just bleed.

Let’s Explore

Now it’s time for you to go off exploring on your own! Take a look at your archive or go out shooting with aspect ratio in mind. Here are a couple of ideas to try:

  1. Take a favorite image or two and crop to different aspect ratios. What happens to the impact of the composition as you change the aspect ratio?
  2. It’s the holiday season, why not try printing yourself? Pick a photo or two and have them printed for gifts. Greeting cards and postcards are a great gift idea, so is a nice matted or framed print.

Come back and link in, letting us know what you learned in this exploration. Do you have any tips to add? Let’s hear them!



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