Fixing Epson R2400 Print Problems on Mac OSX 10.5

I have 2 Epson r2400 printers at work, they have been a source of frustration for me over the past 12 months, to put it simply they didn't work that well with OSX. I read every article I could find, and methodically tried every combination of print option, but the best I could do was manually set the gamma, brightness and saturation to produce an approximate result. Prints always had inaccurate blacks and were masked by an overlay of grey. I mainly print out of Adobe CS3 and none of the packages produced consistent results.

Finally a real solution has arrived! Adobe has released updated drivers for the r2400 so if you are still having probs with your R2400 and OSX then head over to Epson's site and get the latest drivers, they are dated from August 2008 onwards.

As a side note to Epson while they make great printers their Mac drivers have been awful since moving to OSX and that is a fair while ago now. I have recently bought a cheap Canon A4 printer for general printing at home and it has a much more reliable set of drivers than any Epson driver I have seen in recent years. Looks like its time to say goodbye to Epson for a while. After waiting over twelve months for a proper solution for OSX printing I would have to recommend users look very carefully at the functionality of any printer they ar considering buying, with their specific Software/OS combo before making a purchase. But at the end of the day the problem really boils down to poor development and user support on Epson's part.

The big lesson from this: If a printer is critical to your workflow then find a store that will let you try one out with your system, before you purchase or a store that has specialist industry knowledge about printing photos and graphics.

Getting into 3D

There are plenty of reasons to get into 3D modeling, you might want to see how something would look before it is built, you might want to experiment with game design or you might want to take it on for a challenge. Well I fell into all of these categories and started mucking about with a number of commercial packages but without ever really bonding with one of them.

One day out of curiosity I downloaded a version of Blender, which is an opensource 3D modelling application and well I have been hooked ever since.

If it's free, doesen't that mean its dodgey?
Well that was my first reaction but once I started working through the tutorials and checking out the help forums I realised that just the opposite was true. After putting up with Adobe's pathetic attitude towards developing products for Mac OS (I still can't hide CS3 Indesign in 10.5) I found the positive approach of Blender users to be exactly what I was after. The community has a can do attitude that is developing the software at an amazing pace.

If you are in doubt check out the amazing list of features in the current build of Blender at www.blender.org. The software is capable of anything from basic modelling and rendering through to work that is truly amazing.

What are the good points?
If you are going to invest you time in learning a new program it is important to know what you are in for, so here is my list of things that make this a worthwhile application.

1. It has a great development community and very friendly help forums
2. There is a huge amount of online resources
3. It runs on a range of operating systems
4. It can produce work of the highest quality
5. It has a really efficient interface
6. This program is building momentum!

What are the drawbacks?
1. It is lacking in presets compared with Maya and Max
2. You have to invest time to learn the software (true with all powerful 3d apps)
3. It tends to have a few idiosyncrasies in it's design

Well they are pretty minor drawbacks and Blender is curenty in the process of being rewritten for a new 2.5 version which will standardise many features of the software and make it easier for people to write plugins for. I think this will be a huge step forward for the software.

If you are a graphic artist then you really owe it to yourself to checkout Blender for yourself and decide on whether it is a tool you can get into. Check out the noob to pro wiki book and try out the "modelling a simple person" tutorial right near the start.

If you are a photographer then 3d gives you a crazy amount of control, infinitely variable focal length, adjustable depth of field, incredible lighting possibilities and the ability to move the camera to any angle in 3d space, it can be a great tool for testing out interesting shots and composition or a way of extending those skills into an entirely new area.

I wil get some tutorials happening in the coming months so stay tuned!

Creating a test strip

In the darkroom photographers use test strips to gain fine control over the brightness/contrast of an image. A test strip is a print that has a set of stepped graduations from light to dark that allow a photographer to choose the best tonal range for their final image.

Although inkjet printers today are quite accurate, I find it really helpful to print out a test strip so I can get maximum control over my finished image. In the darkroom printing test strips saves guess work and wasting a lot of paper, so why not use the same techniques for your digital work it will speed you up on the path to getting good prints.

To make a digital test strip here are the steps:

1 Create an adjustment layer for your image, in the above example I used a brightness/contrast layer and set this at the extreme end of brightness for dramatic effect.

2 Option click on the adjustment layer to edit the it, and create a gradient going from black to white. Now you need to make this a stepped gradient, the easiest way to go is to select posterize from the image/adjust menu and set it at how many steps you want in your test strip, between 5 and 10 should be fine. Once you have completed this step, you should have a set of grey panels from black to white (see above).

3 Click back on your image layer and you should now have a finished test strip.

4 Print, assess tones and apply a gray in the brightness contrast over the whole image that looks best to you.

5 Print your corrected image

*In my example i have used the adjustment layer to adjust brightness contrast but you can use it for any of the funtions availabke in the adjustment layer pallette. By creatively combining different sets of gradients and effects you can create a monster teststrip that shows a huge nuber of variations. Givie it a go i am sure you will find it a very useful technique.

Changing Focus in Your Images

The amazing thing about Photoshop is that there are often multiple ways to achieve a single outcome. After a conversation the other week with an very experienced photographer about creating focus masks manually in the darkroom, I thought why not recreate the same technique in photoshop?

This technique is intended to give you control over de-focussing parts of you image and includes a short discussion about the different blur options available in photoshop.

1. Setting up layers.
Now open a photo into Photoshop CS (you can use this with elements too) and duplicate the layer. To duplicate drag the background layer in the layers palette onto the icon that is a page with the corner turned over.

2.Setting up the maskig layer
Create a new empty layer between these two, this is going to be a masking layer.

3. Creating a contrast layer
Create a contrast layer so you can see where you are cutting.
Make a layer on top of the layers stack and call this green screen
Select all and fill with a bright green
Now move this layer in the stack to second from the bottom.

4. Creating the mask
Option click between the top layer and the masking layer you should now have created a mask, there should be a small arrow on the top layer pointing into the mask layer.

Masking layers are difficult to describe, when there a no pixels on a masking layer, it shows none of the image layer it affects, it there is 100 percent pixels on the masking layer it shows 100 percent of the image. What this means in reality, is that as you paint a black onto the masking layer it will reveal that part of the image. You really need to try this out as it is a trick concept.
These masks are great because you don't do any damage to the image you are only changing the masking layer.

5. Paint in the masking layer to reveal your image
You should now see a solid green screen as the masking layer and it's image above are now invisible. Move to the masking layer and start painting onto the it using a black brush of a good size you should start to see your image appearing wherever you paint. To remove portions of the image you don't want, you simply select the eraser and erase the black on the mask layer.

What you need to do now is roughly isolate the section of the image you want to keep in focus,l in my example you can see the building in the forground. I have kept the edges soft so the image will smoothly transition into the blurred image we are about to create.

6. See the full image
Turn off the eye on the green screen layer to hide it.
You should now have the background layer visible.
Duplicate this layer so you are working on a copy but keep down the bottom of the stack.

7. Defocus the background image
Phew that is all the setup work... now for the good stuff
Select all on the background image copy and apply a lens blur filter, experiment with the amount till it looks good. Adjust the masking of the top layer so it looks natural.

There you have it, masking and de-focussing in one lesson, this is a big step please take careful note of the order of the layers in the images so you can see what is happening.

File Formats For Fussy Photographers

File formats... there are endless discussions in Photography magazines about file formats pro's & cons lets just cut through all of that and get down to some effective simple advice so you can go out and take more photos.

Jpeg - it's simple don't save any of your work in this format unless you are desperate to reduce file size for emailing, web or video work. This format tends to be destructive and to the eye of a photographer produces lower quality images. Check out the above close up of a detail of a power pole, there is a strange ghosting around the pole, this is a JPEG on high quality compression and it looks bad. The main problem with JPEG's is that this ghosting really messes up subtle tonality and the three dimensional qualities of a photo. Don't get me wrong JPEG is a very powerful compressor that is amazingly useful but for photographers compression is the opposite of what you want, ie great images.

... well, thats enough of a rant, if you are going to save a file save it as either:

Tiff - this is the classic file format that has lossless compression can be read by plenty of software and has proved to be very reliable over the years. Save in this and you cant go wrong.

Photoshop - save those stacked & layered documents in Adobe's PSD format for good quality and the ability to edit down the track.

If you are using an image storage application like IPhoto that really likes JPEG's use it only as a secondary program for viewing photos but keep a file of your original uncompressed files as well.

There are other file options that have their good points in specific areas but the above two are versatile and have stood the test of time. Leave all that talk of metadata and bizarre profiling to all those nerdy photography magazines or for people that need to manage a big library of images that is searchable.

Ahoy There! it's Levels Island

In the last article we had a look at what the levels controls do, but in this article we are going to have a look at one of the most common ways of improving photos especially colour images that your camera has given the JPEG treatment.

Welcome to Levels Island! Control L to find the treasure...Often, when you open an image that has been shot on auto or a variation of, you end up with a histogram in the levels settings that shows what looks like a mountainous island rising from the middle of the image. There is often plenty of flat water surrounding this mysterious island. In this case an easy point to start from is to move the black and white sliders onto the start of the island... or as I tell my students move those scurvy rowboats into the shore of levels island! Sometimes you have to drag those boats onto the beach and right up into the sand dunes, find the setting that looks good. Watch your tones carefully, be especially cautious about blowing out the tonal range of the whites, once you have sent them to Davey Jones locker they ain't coming back.

I know it's a silly analogy but editing photos in Photoshop should be a fun, creative process... so you Land Lubbers once you have those boats into the shore start experimenting with slowly adjusting the position of the midtone slider. This one is delicate so be gentle and remember it's start position is 1.00 in the panel below the slider.

When you set your levels properly it should almost be like a fine haze has been removed from your image, its a simple but effective technique. Check out the difference in the above photos it has compressed the dynamic range slightly but has yielded stronger colour and clearer tones.

Don't forget command+L for levels. Make this one of your first stops in Photoshop and you too will find the buried treasure hidden in your photos on levels island!

Adjusting Levels - White Treble Black Bass

In my work flow I always do some adjustment of the levels of an image. levels gives you a look at the histogram for an image which is always good to check out. There was a dance track in the 90's called White Treble Black Bass, I am not sure if they are fans of adjusting levels in Photoshop but it is part of a handy analogy.

• The levels command is like the graphic equaliser for your stereo but for an image.
• The Blacks are on the left, the whites on the right
• The left slider controls at which point the colour rolls of to Black
• The right slider controls at which point the image rolls off to white
• The middle slider determines where the 50% midtone is

Below the histogram is a second set of sliders called output levels, these are limiters. Where the left one is set determines the darkest tone that will appear in the image. Where the right slider is, determines the lightest tone that will appear. Experiment with the controls to try it out, this slider isb more for limiting tonal range in final print or for production offset printing where solid blacks or total whites can be problematic.

Set the black and white sliders first then set the midpoint, remember you are looking to increase tonal range and increase the clarity of the image. Setting levels can make a huge difference to an image and is often the major difference between a straight out of the camera shot looking pretty good and really good.

Putting the grain back in

When you look closely at a digital photograph you notice that the tonal structure is really smooth, at magnification the image becomes hard to focus your eyes on. I find that this is a negative quality of digital for me, the grain in film based work seems to help your eyes to perceive the three dimensional space that an image is trying to recreate.

It sounds crazy but adding noise to the image actually helps to define shapes and give the image a more robust look.

There are software plugins available that can do this for you or you can also find hi-res scans of film grain available on the net. These scans are of a continuous mid tone gray from a piece of film and give you a fairly authentic looking grain structure on your digital image. To apply paste the grain on as a new layer and then set the layer to overlay mode. Now experiment with the opacity slider to get the result you are after.

To see the results of this you need to print to a really high quality printer and/or fairly large but as always the results are dependant on your imagery and you own personal style.

This is all a bit of a DIY approach and that is the fun of it however if you want to get quick high quality results then Alien Skin Exposure Plugin really delivers on simulating film without the fuss, but it is a piece of software you need to use a fair bit to justify the cost.

Using Adobe RAW in CS3 Photoshop

When you have your shots downloaded to your computer, use Adobe Bridge to browse to your Raw images and double click to open in Photoshop.

The file will now open up in the Raw plugin which is standard in CS3. On the left panel adjust the exposure control to put the pic where it starts to look good. Use a combo of the controls to get the image looking natural. All the controls are well labeled and do what you would expect.

The histogram on the top of the controls provides a great way of checking out the detail and range of colour in the shot. If you are not used to looking at a histogram then work off the image. The histogram shows the spread of tonality across the image, you would normally expect it to look something like a mountanious island coming out of the sea, large dips or holes in the island can indicate a potential problem with the image. I will go into more detail on reading histograms in a later post.

If you want to convert to Black and White then there is a great set of tools that allow you to alter the way colours convert to greyscale. Remember all of this work is non destructive. Take you time and approach it just like you would working in a darkroom. This is a critical time in getting your image right.

Trust your eyes... if it looks good then you are on the right track.

If you want a dramatic sky then try pulling down the blue slider until you are happy with the result.

Once you click ok (or option click ok to make a copy) you will head into Photoshop ready to push things further.

Exposure Tests Using RAW

Do you over expose, under expose, or trust your light meter when shooting digital?

In the good old days when I was shooting B&W film I pretty much always overexposed a stop or two. After doing my research on the web it really was time to get out in the winter air and start testing for myself. There is a complexity in assessing exposure in that you have to manually adjust each raw image to get the best look out of it. I don't go for super Ansell Adams style tonal range, I just like to aim for a photo that matches my own personal aesthetic.

In the above shots I bracketed +2 to -2 and ran them through Raw in Photoshop, and assessed the results for myself to my own aesthetic. I recommend this is how you approach this process. Go out do some test shots yourself, then process to get what you consider to be the best and compare.

Digital Cameras are great at handling tonal range in the highlights but struggle in the low light areas, so overexposing seems to provide an excellent balance of detail in the shadows and detail in the highlights. If you like a bit of contrast and some moody sky try overexposing 2 stops... it works for me.

Next I will have a look in more detail at processing photos in RAW.