The Paper Shuffle - Part One - Lost In Space

If you are an old-school photographer like me you may occasionally be lost - lost on the back streets of  a new suburb at dusk before they put up the street signs, or lost for words at the latest horrible hipster trend...or just lost when it comes to which inkjet printing paper to use.

In the DOD ( Dear Old Days ) of fibre darkroom paper there was Kodak, Ilford, Fujifilm, and Agfa. There were 3-5 grades ranging from too soft to too hard, and there were imaginatively-named surfaces. Most of these were due to commercial imagination and you only ever printed on them once...but you could always fall back to matt, lustre, and gloss and find something for your film image. Single or double weight was a choice you made mostly on economic grounds.

 The advent of resin-coated paper was either wonderful or horrible, depending on whether you had water and time. The surface choices decreased.

Then the inkjet papers came along - and all of a sudden we had to figure out what gsm meant and what a profile was. Most of us still don't know what this is but we faithfully do what the paper makers say to do and generally things work out. I have adopted the sensible approach of letting the printer decide what it wants to do - the same approach I take to the relatives and the cat - and I am satisfied with the peace of mind.

But there's always that desire for a little more science - for a little more precision in the process. It has driven more people than I mad, so I am not willing to engage in the worst of the geekiness, but I have decided to look closely and see what it is that we are being given. I've no lab facilities but I do have a studio and I've decided to see what studio light can tell me about the printing papers that are on offer.

The methodology will be to to use grazing light to skim the papers while taking a macro picture of the surface. I do not expect to see much variation in the smoothness of a glossy paper, but I am curious to see what the pearl and lustre surfaces look like. The rougher and wilder papers are next after that - right down to the hand-laid ones.

I also want to see what relative amount of reflectance the papers send back, though the measurement may prove difficult. Not interested in percentages or numbers - interested in the look of the thing.

Finally, I want to see whether the gsm rating really does translate into a practical indicator for stiffness in the final product. I have long admired the stock that printers use for business cards  and other signage and have looked in vain for it in the inkjet papers. Home-made business cards, fake drivers licences, and eviction notices just do not have the dignity of the ones made on offset presses if they do not have the same crispness.

And no-one likes counterfeit money when it is soggy. I have had limited success with my line of  $ 7 and $ 8 Australian notes despite the colourful artwork and the choice of Australian Idol contestants as figureheads.

This column will publish results in a forthcoming series.

Uncle Dick

I Mean...What's The Point?

Seriously?

 What's the point of taking a picture of these two EIZO screens on the rack at the back of the shop?

They just sit there day after day. They both look the same. They never change. All you see is the same colours on each one of them and they just keep coming up the same every time...the images cycle through and they look just alike. Day after day after day. I mean, what IS the point?

That's the point.

 Explore Eizo range and their Cashback selections at cameraelectronic

Day 2 - Pro Graphics - Screen It Like You Mean It!

Thursday of the 2-Day sale concentrates on the Screens of Our Lives...the monitors that show us the images our cameras take.

Camera Electronics sells only the best - EIZO - and there are at least five of the darn things on the Thursday special advertisement. They carry some healthy cash-backs from the manufacturers to further reduce the price. All the more reason to finally do what you know is going to make your images look and print better.

BTW, there are also smaller items on screaming specials - Colormunki and Spyder Elite 5 screen calibrators, for instance. And the bargain of the day - the Datacolor Spydercheckr 24 small colour chart.

If you are currently editing your pictures on a 1965 Astor television salvaged from the tip, please come in and see the EIZOs and the ancillary equipment. We can promise you a better view of the world.

Twenty Experiments For The Artist

Experimental art is something that breaks the boundaries. So does a Swiss post-bus going out of control down a mountain. Your appreciation of it is related to whether you are above watching it leave or below watching it arrive...

Not all of us are experimenters - some of us are timid, preferring the safe haven of established procedures to the wild seas of new experience. And that is about as much colourful imagery from me as you can stand.

We're selling paper. Ilford paper for inkjet printers. Heaven knows we sell a lot of it, because the stuff we sell is standard paper that works pretty much every time.

Oh, you can still fail - you can have horrible uncontrolled images in your computer and send them to your printer in a horrible uncontrolled way and get hideous results. But that is a matter of morality and screen calibration - we sell calibrators and there are people who can teach you morality. Ilford just provides good paper.

The types we sell most of are their Galerie Smooth Pearl and Smooth Gloss. Get within a coo-ee of the right colour management and use fresh ink and you'll never be disappointed in the results. That's a given.

But if you wish to try your eye, luck, and ink on a bit more artistic result, you may want to try different surfaces and consistencies in the paper - specifically you may want to print on matt paper with dedicated black ink. Some images become perfect in this way, but you might need to try it out in several ways before settling on the best choice for you. Here's where Ilford help - they sell a test-pack for fine-art printing and you can see in A4 size what your printing chain is capable of.

The pack has 20 sheets - 5 each of the following:

Galerie Cotton Artist Textured
Galerie Gold Fibre Gloss
Galerie Textured Cotton Rag
Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag

They are all 310 gsm and vary in resolution. Obviously the Gold Fibre Gloss has the finest resolution as it is intended to run with gloss ink  - the others are matt. You can download printing profiles for these easily from the instruction sheet packed with the paper.

5 sheets is enough to dabble a couple of times with tones and brightness and still leave enough paper to produce a series of prints that can be compared one with the other. Every printer eventually has a mental image of what they wish to achieve and this is a good way to show yourself the possibilities on your actual machine. It might not be fine art, but it can be helpful art.

Smile - You Can Make Your Computer Behave With Colormunki

I have no idea how to colour manage my computer. Aside from wiping the screen with a rag dipped in coal oil and making sure the ants are shaken out of the keyboard, I just depend on the colorimeter module that I plug into a USB port to do it for me.

Well, here's one from the X-Rite people that will do the same for you. it is a simple thing to use - load the software into your monitor, follow the prompts , set it to work on the screen in a  darkened room, and reap the rewards of simple calibration.

At the very least it will pt your screen to the same colour every time it is operated - I recommend once every two months - and it is like sobering up on a fine morning.

Alice In Wonderland - The Epson Printers Spin On

I have come to terms with printing my digital photos. Where I used to lock myself into a dim room and slop buckets of acidic bleach around in a tank, I now sit in a dim room and poke away at a computer keyboard. The atmosphere is better and there is no clean-up at the end of the evening.

The price is better too - colour chemistry wasn't cheap and paper could be of variable quality. Agfa in their last year of production had coating-line disasters that we only saw when we tried to process the stuff -and sometimes the disaster continued for an entire box of paper.

Well, the new inkjets make this a thing of the past. If you have a monitor that is anywhere near calibrated...and normal inkjet paper...and a simple program like Photoshop Elements, your printing process can be as simple as opening the image file, press 'control' and 'P' and then press 'enter' two more times. Out scoots a postcard print in 30 seconds and you are done.

This is an extreme example of simplicity, based upon the Epson printer managing the colours of an sRGB file, but it does act as a beacon for those mired in the complexities of colour management and conflicting internet computer advice. My Epson R3000 has been superseded in their range by their Surecolor SC-P600...and I think that they have chosen s silly sort of naming structure for this that will be hard for people to remember...but the simple set-up and operation will certainly continue.

The ink management for the new Epson will be a little more straightforward than with my R-3000. Mine asks me for multiple permissions before it will change from gloss to matte black inks or vice versa - the new Surecolor will assess the situation  and change automatically when needed. Not a big thing, but nice to have.

Anyone who has prints made regularly by commercial houses will benefit from looking into the Epson printers. The example of the single postcard print is extreme - most times we print either a run of postcards or a variety of enlargements. The postcard prices from big department store processing can be low but in some cases I suspect that is commensurate with the quality that is turned out. When you print for yourself, you can print it just the way you want it.

Heading picture: Chelsea Bunz and a real rabbit.

Which Colour Space Should You Use?

Here's a question to fill those long lonely nights at the camera club as you sit around the flames of the  blazing digital projector and reminisce about cocking a shutter.

Which digital colour space do you need? The old days ( Elvis, dinosaurs, 50¢ hot dogs...) were easy because you got the colour space the manufacturer handed you and were darned grateful for it. If you loaded Kodachrome you got Hollywood colour and paid a premium - if you shot Afga you got European art colour and watched it turn magenta - and if you purchased Ferrania you wondered where the strange smell was coming from.

Now we are generally given the choice of Adobe RGB or sRGB in our camera menu. The first for printing, the second for computer display, is the general tenor of the advice. Follow it if you like, but we earnestly suggest you investigate other alternatives:

1. FinalYEARstudentRGB

This is a colour space that is so dark and grungy that it feels like reading Kafka on a wet night in Pittsburg. The white portion of the spectrum never gets above the luminance level of a boarding house sheet at the end of the month.

2. CAMeraclubRGB

On the other end of the scale is this colour space that constantly bangs the saturation meter needle off the stops like a machine gun. You wondered why the digital projector started smoking? This is the reason. It comes pre-loaded with a sharpening algorithm that actually hurts the eyes to see.

3. Ilford CIBA RGB

This was first announced in the 1956 British Workingman's Socialist Camera Society Annual and will be ready for final release in about 4 months. From Pentonville.

4. FlapoRGB

Distinctive to the Flapoflex range of cameras, this colour space will not work with anything else. If you offend the clerk who sells it to you, it will not work at all. Mind your tongue.

5. soBRG

The sort of colour space that does everything backwards just to spite you. Slide the controls at your peril.

6. WellnessRGB

As a complete contrast, this is a kind and gentle colour space that lends itself to pastels, soft flowers and fluffy kittens. Actually it has no contrast at all - everything looks as if it was shot through waxed paper. A soothing choice if you can stay awake.

7. The New Colour Space

This is the setting that appears on your camera menu a month after you have set up all the criteria and just started to get used to it. It appears overnight with no indication of what it does - the David Carradine of computer programs. If you select it, it will disappear from the menu again.

There, that was easy. Now we can get on to calibrating your memory card for the northern or southern hemisphere. Complete instructions in the next blog post.

Tell Me The Truth - Does This Colour Make My Monitor Look Fat? Spyder...

Still looking at the same screen, are we? The one we bought from Harvey Norman three years ago? The one that has never been calibrated or colour corrected in all that time?

Well, congratulations - you are an adventurer. Boldly going where most of us would never venture. I'll bet you eat meat pies from roadside stalls in tropical countries. I'll bet you pet strange dogs in back alleys. I'll bet you contract marriage in cocktail bars and buy gold bricks wrapped in newspaper.

The rest of us are cowards. We know that the colours in the screens of our computers are a variable feast  - and that leaving the thing unattended for three years is like leaving yoghurt open on the table for the same length of time. Most of us have chickened out and bought screen calibrators.

I chose the Spyder 4 Express since my computer is a stand-alone model and sits in a uniformly dim room - no changing lights. I fire it up every two months and it returns the screen to a fixed normality. Sometimes there is very little correction needed over the period - sometimes considerably more. The program that runs the calibrator shows me a before and after image for each cycle it goes through.

If I was running a series of computers or had weird lighting or strange desires* I would select the Spyder 4 Pro or Elite models. They do more but you have to know what you want.

Watch in the next little bit as we feature these Spyder 4 models at bargain prices. In the meantime, if you STILL have not calibrated your screen, it might be safest to convert everything to monochrome and grow a hipster beard. Then no-one can look at you funny.

* Don't ask. I might tell you.

Colour Management In The Post Apocalyptic Darkroom

Colour management has had a bad rap in the last few years - but if you listen to rap, bad is not necessarily bad.

As digital photographers discovered that they could no longer push the button and rely upon Kodak to do the rest...or indeed put their megapixels in at the chemist and go back in a week to collect the prints...they have had to learn how to set the machinery for themselves.

The ones who just post their pictures on Facelessbook or Splatter can get away with less knowledge - the gate demons for these digital infernos tend to strip all hope as well as a great deal of the dynamic range from any image condemned to them. You might as well use your mobile phone, or key ring camera, or toaster...the results will be just the same.

The careful worker who wants to enter club competitions with projected and printed images will need to do much more, and do it right. They'll need to calibrate their camera, monitor, and printer to take into account about 54 factors to allow the scene as seen to be the screen as seen. It is probably not an accident that the words "screen" and "scream" are so close together in the English language, if you get heavily involved into colour management. One wrong setting and disaster ensues.

We can recommend any number of local lecturers who conduct courses on this subject. There are books produced by Focal Press and Epson and Canon and Uncle Tom Cobbly and all on the subject. They will help - particularly the big heavy books. You can stack them on your prints to flatten them.

For those who cannot bring themselves to follow the entire process of training for colour management ( or the requirements to learn to become a fighter pilot...) there is an easier way. Some of the simpler computer programs have the ability to throw their little electric hands up and defer all the decisions onto the printer - they say so right in the instructions.

If this is the case, and you feed the printer with paper made by the same manufacturer...and not the hand-laid unborn beech tree super-art esoteric tissue...you can get a pretty good result. It might not be the same result as what you have on the computer, but at least no-one's hair will be green. An A4 print for a dollar that looks OK.

This is roughly equivalent to putting supermarket film shot on a Konica Pop through the chemist after it has been sitting in the glove compartment of the car for 6 months but do not decry this - art careers have started with less.

Repainting The Shirley - Or Why You Need A Spyder Checkr 24

We're very lucky down here at 230 Stirling Street - someone built us a test target across the street years ago and we have been using it to compare and contrast cameras, lenses, and filters ever since.

It has a broad face of different coloured panels and thin lines placed both in the center and at the margins - you can determine resolution, distortion, and chromatic aberration easily. It is front-lit in the morning and back-lit in the afternoon.

Sometimes there are human figures displayed to enable you to check portrait bokeh - and occasionally a drunk starts kicking in the phone box in front of it so you can practise your street photography skills as well...

Well, we are going to have to recalibrate it - as you can see the painters are in and there may be changes to the reflectance and chroma of the surfaces. This may take some time, and in the interim we may have to resort to that Datacolor Spyder Checkr 24 targets to do the same thing.

Actually, the Checker 24 is a good thing to take everywhere you go when you shoot. Pop it into the lighting that you are going to use and snap a shot at the start of your photography. Then when you are done, snap another. At home, when you are looking at the files you can tell whether the lighting changed and whether you are going to have to make changes to the balance of the files somewhere in the middle.

The Checkr 24 is small enough that you can dump it into any camera bag - if it saves having a client howl that you did not get the red right, it is a lifesaver.

PS: Aren't the portable cherry-pickers a great idea for painters? I want one of the ones on crawler tracks and I don't even like to do painting!

No Need To Be Gloomy - Buy An EIZO

There I sit in my dark little room - drinking. Alone. With nothing but my memories to comfort me...

This would be a very sad post unless you realize that I am writing about sitting in my former chemical darkroom - long converted to a computer and printing room - with the lights down low, drinking espresso and editing photos on my iMac. And happy as Larry.

Well, perhaps not Larry - Moe maybe, or Shemp. Now, I love my iMac, because it is simple to use and I understand where the controls are located. I use it for blogging, surfing, FB'ing, and editing. But it has one small flaw - the screen in glossy and it reflects everything that it sees - including me peering into it*. hence the darkened room - I keep the lights low and diffuse so that I get a little more accuracy in what I see on the screen.

If I was honest with myself I would admit that it is time for a second screen - a dedicated monitor for the editing tasks. The EIZO are the best choice - they have a matte surface that does not reflect the surroundings. They have a warranted 5-year even illumination behind that surface - and their consistency in this is the best in the industry - and they have the correct circuitry to maintain the colour accuracy that you set.

It would mean being able to raise the general level of illumination in the room. Of course it would use up a bit more desk space, but the iMac keyboard is pretty small and the Wacom Intuous tablet can be shifted sideways.

And the espresso comes in tiny little cups anyway...

* A startling thing if you are not accustomed to it.

Legless Lou And The Spyder Checkr

I have just added the Silkypix 6 program to my system and decided to take the opportunity to test out the correlation between the Elinchrom studio flash, Fujifilm speed light, and the Fujifilm cameras. It is not that I mistrust or misunderstand what they do - but I am aware that flash tubes and soft box diffusers change with time, and that sometimes the white balance results can be off enough to make later processing a nuisance.

Of course, like all RAW process programs, the Silkypix will allow a considerable degree of white balance change in the file - but the fewer changes needed, the faster the operation. Plus, if I wish to take advantage of the gorgeous jpeg images out of he Fujifilm X cameras, it is as well to be spot-on.

Okay, Legless Lou is there to ensure that I am looking a a standard two-light portrait setup: Elinchrom 500 EL on the right with a standard reflector and a similar head feeding a giant Redwing softbox on the left. ( Note: we have one of these giant softboxes left for sale but you need to be foolhardy and vicious to put it together. I put mine together...) The grey backdrop is there to remove weird reflections.

The Macbeth colour card is there to give accurate repeatable flat colours plus a grey scale. Mine is an old card, but we sell new ones made by Datacolor and X-rite here in the shop. Buy one, even if you don't take pictures - they look pretty and it's good for business.

Any rate, I carefully set it up, made exposure trials, and then lettered a series of paper slips to let me identify which white balance setting was used for each shot. I ranged it from 4200ºK to 6000ºK in the steps that the menu allows in the Fujifilm cameras. Then I shot a series of test exposures plus one at Auto WB.

Clever readers will realise that I was not thinking - the EXIF data tagged onto each exposure had all the detail I needed to differentiate the shots...the pink slips were just extra work.

Okay - shots from the X-E2 and X-100 were taken with the Elinchrom setup and the Fujifilm EF 42 speed light and loaded into the computer. I set up the Macbeth card next to the monitor with my standardised print assessment light on it so that I could see screen and card equally - and ran the series of shots through the Silkypix 6.

I was deliberately trying to find the most accurate of the settings to yield exactly the same balance all the way through. It turned out - for me on my system, mind - to be:

Silkypix 6 "Faithful", standard colour, a little strong contrast...

X-E2 and X-100 plus Elinchrom studio monoblocks...5600ºK

X-E2 and X-100 plus Fujifilm EF 42 speed light.........5900ºK

Note as well that this was done cold sober and before 10:00 at night. If I were to alter either or both of those two conditions, I should not warrant the accuracy of my judgement.

Now, I know the accurate colour base for my shots. Now I can do this:

Play A Game Of Checkrs With Datacolor

I love my colour reference board. I use it in my studio when I am trying to get an exact reproduction of the colours of  model cars. Then I distort the heck out of them with Photoshop Elements, but that is beside the point - I start out clean and clear.

Mine's an old model made by a respected old manufacturer. It was made while Elvis was alive but is still going strong - as it gets stored carefully in the dark between uses*. It cost me a surprising amount of money back then and I am glad it is still going strong - I like to get value for money.

Well, if you would like to get better value than that right now in a colour/B&W reference card may we suggest the Datacolor Spyder Checkr 24. It is made in a lot sturdier material than my old one and in a more convenient size - 5 x 7. You can haul it in any camera bag for a quick ref shot in every new situation.

There is also a downloadable SpyderCheckr camera calibration software and support materials note on the sleeve that protects the panel. Not sure what they expect you to do but all I have ever done is look carefully at the results on the Polaroid/print/screen image and then take appropriate measures. Call it chromatic blundering into the furniture, if you will, but so far it has worked.

$ 65 means you CAN afford this.

* If they had stored Elvis in the dark between uses he might still be going strong too.

Eyes Wide Open In Tuart Hill

Did goe to the WA Camera Club meeting to judge pictures last night and was greatley entertained.

And did learne something of consequence, as well.

The club sends out their entries in the projected section of their competition a few days prior to the meeting to let the judge see them and to make notes. This I duly did, propped in front of the old email PC at home with a cuppa. I decided the winners and merits on appearance...with no reference to the titles of the images, as is my preference. ( I feel that photography competitions should be looking contests rather than reading contests. )

Then I took my running sheets to the meeting. The images were projected up on a large white wall with a pretty powerful lamp. And they showed up the inadequacy of my home screen. I made a hurried revision to a couple of placings there in the dark before I was asked to report my opinion - it had changed when I saw the images clearly.

Had I been looking at home on an EIZO screen I would not have been in that position. It would have shown even and well-lit versions of the files and I could have confidently gone with my initial judgement. Even doing them on my iMac in my old darkroom would have been better - there would have been less visual distraction from screen bounce.

The average PC is fine for emails, Facebook, and pictures of Grumpy Cat, but nothing doing for fine judgement or good editing.

Lesson learned. Opens EIZO page on computer and starts to read...

$ 1499 In Full Colour - Correct Colour With EIZO

Just printed out an A4 shop sign for the last of the CG242W ColorEdge monitors in stock.

$1499.

If you are fast you can ring us up or zoom in for this - it is a bargain at that price - remember it is one that has internal calibration already so you don't need to buy anything more to keep it on the extremely straight and chromatically-accurate path.

Your images will never look better.

Oh Myyyy....I FInd Out

Well, that'll teach me.

And isn't it always the case - the things that you find out for yourself are the ones that stick with you.

I have been using an iMac and a Macbook Pro for several years, resetting the colour video cards inside the computers with a Datacolor Spyder 2 Express each month, and printing out on Ilford and Epson paper. All good and I've been happy.

Then recently the Spyder 2 Express started to go weird and I replaced it with a Spyder 4 Express. Slightly different routine for the operation, but equally simple to do. I tuned up the home and the work computers last week and carried on blithely.

Today Dom handed me some files that were taken at last night's shop party. I banged them into the Macbook Pro and then out to the shop Epson R3000 so that some of the reps could have  paper prints. Ilford Smooth Pearl 6 x 4 paper.

Wow. Better than before. Accurate colours and NO colour cast. I think the Spyder 4 Express has done something really good for the system. What, exactly, I cannot say. And this on a standard paper.

Note: I also brought back some Fujifilm printing paper from Japan to test it. Only one print so far on what amounts to a super-quality glossy but again it looks as if printing has gotten to a whole new level of accuracy...with no especial efforts on my part.

These are standard goods straight off the shelf here in the shop - with the exception of the Fujifilm paper. I know the business of colour management and printing is said to be hard but this seems easy. Perhaps it is all just hear-say...?

Time To Upgrade With Datacolor

The first time a horse kicks you in the shin you notice it. If it goes on long enough you get used to it and dodge as best you can and then just tend to limp about. But the thing still rankles - and eventually you tire of the sport - generally before the gee does. At this point some citizens haul out a large betsey and old Dobbin is consigned to the glue factory.

So it is with electronic gear. The first glitch is frightening and causes concern but after you discover that you can "cure" it by turning the thing off and on again or banging the side of he box, you tend to just carry on and let it happen.

So it was with my old Datacolor Spyder 2 Express program in the iMac and Macbook Pro. It worked fine for 5 years and then occasionally it would hang up at the last part of the calibrations sequence - the screen would go sort of pinkish and I would have to run it again to get it to go straight through. One day the second run did not cure it and I needed a third one...kick, kick, kick...

Out with the electronic roscoe. Removed the Spyder 2 Express and installed a Spyder 4 Express in its place. All has become better. The new program works efficiently and already recognises what it must do without having to be repeatedly told.

One can only assume that there is a finite life to software, as there is to horses.

I Pressed The Print Button, But Why Does It Look Like That?

It looks like that for any number of reasons:

a. It is an autochrome. Made up of dyed grains of starch bound onto a glass plate. With an autochrome any image is a good image and if it has survived the last 100 years without cracking or fungus you have a museum piece.

b. Your print heads are clogged. Run a nozzle check on your epson printer. if the little pattern of checking squares has missing segments, run a head clean cycle. Check again and repeat if necessary. Eventually you will have a full checking pattern and a clean print.

c. You have got a massive imbalance between what you see on your computer screen and what your printer is being instructed to do. Have you calibrated the monitor screen lately? if not, try one of the Datacolor Spyder range of monitor calibrators. Do it regularly.

d. Is your printer confused as to who is in control? Have you given it double instructions with your image programming fighting with the in-built printer control. Choose one. Turn the other off.

e. Is your printer aware what sort of paper you've dropped in it?  You could probably print on sultana bread toast if you set the printer head high enough, but would it make a baby portrait look good? Be sensible with your paper choice and load the appropriate profile into the printer before you start. If in doubt, stick to the manufacturer's own paper.

f. It's your eyes. Visine in each one and a night's sleep. If your image in the mirror in the morning looks as bad as the print, see your opthalmic specialist. If he looks as bad as the print, you may have to be content with life as it is.

Cube Of No Colour - Eat Your Heart Out Rubik

The littlest things can often be the most important. If you are searching for a way to increase the colour and exposure accuracy of your photos, Datacolor have a neat solution to start doing this in the field or studio.

Lots of people start their shooting sessions with a shot of a grey card. This may not sound as much fun as starting them with a shot of rye whiskey, but in the end it delivers a better result. They carry the image of that grey card through the entire capture and computer stage and then look at it on the screen. When they can manage to see the same colour on the screen as in their hand they are on target. If they can carry that through to a finished file or print they are home safe.

I am afraid that this is an over simplification, but it is better than just setting the camera to Auto white balance and hoping for the best. Hope delivers sometimes but never when you are home to sign for it...

Datacolor have made a small cube that has black, white, and grey panels on all six sides. It has a tripod socket on the bottom and a cord to hang it from a Christmas tree on the top. You capture it in your first picture and then look at it in the final computer image, just like the flat grey card - but in this case it is bathed in the scene light from 6 different angles.

There are two extra features that are unique - a silver ball on the top that will capture and display the brightest of the specular highlights that the lighting affords. You'll know what your white-out point is.

Like a Highlander on guard duty, you will also know where the black-out point is - there is a hole on one face of the cube that allows light in but never lets it out again. Like the ATO and your tax money...

In store right now, and the best bet for quick post-production time that I know.

Solving A Printing Problem - Banding

Recently a client mentioned that they were getting a bit of banding on their prints and wanted to know what could have caused it - and indeed what they could do to fix the problem.

My experience is that there can sometimes be micro-clogs in the heads of the inkjet printers that stop the full spray from going through. Sometimes it is a distinct banding, sometimes just a vague lack of definition and/or depth of colour. it is most often seen in dark areas of the print.

The Epson printers have a wonderful set of tools to deal with this. If you suspect the effect in a print, you go into the printer menu and ask for a nozzle check. It will fire the entire set through in a small test pattern and if you see segments of colour missing your suspicions are confirmed.

What to do? Ask the printer for a head clean - it will shake and flush the heads with a bit of ink and then you can re-test. Most times the problem will be gone in one go. You can ask for 3 power cleans in a row, but you have to wait a little between each one so that you do not damage the head.

Most times, if you print one little print each week that exercises all the colours, you never see settling or clogging of ink. Please note that inks do have use-by dates and it is wise to heed them. they do not go mouldy, like the cheese in the fridge, but they can settle out particles.

Please note that is you are getting banding on panoramic photos taken with some of the newer mirror-less cameras you need to set your shutter speed a little slower and move the camera around more smoothly.

If you are getting banding on street photos you are to be congratulated. See attached photos.

Uncle Dick