I’ve been thinking for some time that the walls in my office look bare and need some photography. Then, last weekend, I found a couple of A3 and A2 frames down the side of a wardrobe. That’s when I decided to print two images to frame, and my life became hell.
I couldn’t remember printing from the new Mac Studio, so I fired up my trusty Epson Stylus Pro 3880 (this printer is no longer available, having been replaced by the P800 model) to make a test print. I chose a silk finish paper from my stock because I wanted vivid colours and deep blacks. Ilford Gold Fibre Silk if you’re interested.
The next task on the list was to download and install the ICC paper profile for my printer from the Ilford website. That was no problem, and I was quickly ready to make the test A4 print before committing to printing at A2.
The result was terrible. The print was too cool, had poor saturation, and the shadows were too dark.
I couldn’t figure out where I had gone wrong, so I double-checked everything. The soft proof using the profile I downloaded looked great. I switched off the colour management in the print driver and had it set in the software. I was printing with the same profile and rendering intent I had soft-proofed with, but the print looked nothing like my monitor. I even recalibrated my monitor, which had been calibrated only a few days earlier.
After trying again, I switched to printing using different software, but the results were identical.
Based on this, I wondered if my print system on the Mac was corrupt. This has happened to me in the past, and the only way to correct it is to reset the system; I have written about this in this article. Despite resetting the system, there was no difference.
Eventually, I found a solution: produce my printer profile. I should have done this from the start, but I was eager to make the print, so I used the generic profile from the Ilford website. As soon as I printed using my new bespoke profile, it produced a great print, which is now hanging on my wall.
It’s easy to think that the profile I downloaded from the Ilford website was wrong, but that probably isn’t the case. What I had forgotten was that Ilford withdrew the Gold Fibre paper for a while. It was later reformulated and released under the same name, but I was printing on old stock. It’s quite likely that the results I was producing were from using a new profile with an old paper.
In short, this is probably my mistake, but I won’t know for sure unless I buy some new paper, which I don’t need.
Here’s the photo that I was printing and it looks great on my wall.
It was taken a few years back at the Roaches in the Peak District using a Panasonic G9. I made the mistake of shooting it as a JPEG rather than a RAW file, but I did use the High-Resolution mode, so the image is huge and detailed. It’s a 1/50-second exposure at f/7.1 and ISO200. The lens was a Panasonic 45-150 at 150mm.
I hope you like the image and find something of interest in my tale.
The Lightweight Photographer 
The photograph in today’s blog is one of my absolute favorites from all your work that I’ve seen.
I’m contacting you to let you know that I have linked to The Lightweight Photographer on my “Blogs I read” list on my blog www.alifeinphotography.blogspot.com.
Kind Regards,
Dave Jenkins
Thanks. I’m pleased you like it.
I should have listed my web address as https://www.alifeinphotography.blogspot.com.
Dave Jenkins
Superb photo, and nice read! Thanks! I’m quite curious actually at a few things, since I have never printed photos, but would love to (A2/A1 size): how many MP did you have? Is it detailed enough at 1m viewing distance?
Your post makes me want to give it a try!
Thanks.
Don’t worry too much about the MP, you need to have sufficient pixels on the long edge of the image. If you are printing at A2 you will probably need 22 inches on the long edge which allows a bit for a border. Working on having 300ppi to produce a print quality photo, you would need 22 x 300 pixels on the long edge so that’s 6,600 pixels. There are lots of variations depending on the type of printer and paper but an image of around 6000 pixels on the long edge shold be fine. It would also print at A1 and give a good result at 1m.
My printing experience is quite limited and the printer a very low cost multifunction type. I learned that with this, top quality paper, calibrated monitor, and printer manufacturer ink it is essential to make my own icc profiles. My results are generally on par with friends using more expensive printers and manufacturer profiles. As I’m not a pro selling work this is good enough.
To further compare what I do, I bought a set of sample prints on a range of high quality papers from a well regarded pro lab where I buy paper. That is where things became interesting. Comparing my print to that of the lab “control” , using the lab supplied image, mine was slightly different, as expected, but not by very much. A friend who is an experienced printer pointed out that the difference was primarily in the whiteness of the paper. One was slightly warmer than the other. These were the “same” Ilford paper, so maybe had some batch variation as you had found. I think it may have been Galerie Smooth Pearl.
Thankfully having a fully calibrated workflow has eliminated most of my printing frustrations.
Thank you for sharing this interesting experience. I’m sure your image makes a stunning print.
Regards
Ross
Thanks for sharing Ross. Even a basic printer can produce great prints when everything is done correctly.
thank you for sharing the trouble shooting methodology and i’m glad you got a print that worked well. Thats a pretty good catch to figure out the incomparability due to paper stock modifications.
Printing seems to be the last frontier now with built in camera solutions and external post processing software fix-it-features and enhancements.
I have really enjoyed the printing part at home with the epson 8550 and like not having to turn something on to see my finished products. This phase is as important to me as all the other image capture steps.
thanks again for sharing, john s.
Thanks John.
I love printing and it seems to give the photo more meaning some how.
Gorgeous photo!!
Thank you
Robin, that is a fabulous image. Well done!
Thank you very much.