More on making prints

A couple of weeks ago I mused a bit on why printing is so much fun. It’s also a a challenge. I’m working on a series of photos I made at the Salt River near Phoenix on a blustery day in February. The skies threatened rain, the wind scudded the clouds across the sky so that every now and again the sun broke through, casting light on the landscape. I waited for that light to strike the cottonwoods with their leaf-buds and to highlight the hill behind them —- wet, red rocks and green and yellow lichen —- and all off it set off by the dark clouds. This is what I saw.

In a perfect world, I should be able to hit PRINT and have this image to frame and hang. Not so fast. I’m learning, slowly, things veteran printers have already figured out: the screen (backlit) isn’t the print. The paper I’m using absorbs the ink, and so it softens the image, and so to translate this image onto paper (I’m using Epson Hot Press Bright), I have to brighten, sharpen, and saturate in Lightroom, almost to a ridiculous extent, and then PRINT and evaluate before tweaking and printing again. As my wife said, “You need more red. I need to see a contrast in the values.” She’s right. The finished print, then, is the result of a series of attempts to get it right.

The struggle is real(ly fun).