“Making Exhibition-Quality Prints: Tips from a Printer”
Shamus Clisset: It depends on whether they’re shooting digital or shooting film. In both cases, the best thing is to get a really good scan or a really good capture. You can’t make a good print from a bad scan or a bad capture.
We still vastly prefer working from film. Getting a good drum scan gives you the quality to blow up an image to any size and there’s nothing in digital that compares to it, unless you’re going to spend $35,000 on the huge digital backs. Even in that case, I’ve done work with a photographer who was using the 80 megapixel Leaf, and we mixed 4x5 negatives and the digital images he had shot. The sharpness is pretty comparable, but you’re limited. The look of digital doesn’t compare to film. I know that digital is so popular, and we’re dealing with that more and more. People are bringing us all kinds of digital files, and the quality of the files is all over the place.
PDN: Is that due to the technology, or the photographers?
SC: An image looks great on the screen or on their web site small, then they come to us and they don’t realize it’s only really big enough to do maybe an 8x10-inch print of decent quality or maybe a 20x30. Even [with] the Canon 5D Mark II which everybody has nowadays and we’re getting a lot of files from, the biggest print that I’ve done from one of those that I think looked decent is a 30 x40 inch print. Even then you’re res-ing up by 30 or 50 percent, depending on what their camera settings were. So we’re having to work to keep the quality and integrity of the file, by adjusting the texture to make it comparable to something film-like.
Whereas with film, even if you shoot 35 mm, we can do huge 60 x 72-inch prints that look great. You see grain, but [the prints] have that photographic integrity.
When shooting digital, it’s very crucial that photographers shoot RAW. That should be a given, but people bring us JPEGs or sometimes TIFF files. With RAW, you can go back and adjust your settings to get the file to a better starting point. When you shoot RAW, there’s a deeper bit depth. You’re capturing more of the exposure, so you can recover highlight detail, you can recover shadow detail, you can shift up or down the exposure range. Then you import it into Photoshop and you have a better starting point.
We’re especially geeky about this part of it because we do big exhibition prints. If you’re doing a book and your picture is never going to be bigger than that, digital works fine.
The most commonly asked question we get nowadays is: “If I show you my file, how big do you think we can print it?” They don’t know the resolution. I would recommend people find out what the full sensor capacity is in pixels, and then divide that by 200 dpi. That’s what your print size is usually.
For example we recently made some really nice prints from a 5D Mark II. The full native resolution on the long side (5661 pixels) translates to about 28″ at 200 dpi. That’s a 21-megapixel capture. We printed them at 30 x 40 so we bumped it up about 30 percent. They looked great, but as you go larger and you are interpolating in Photoshop, you’re losing sharpness.
http://www.laumont.com/news/laumont-master-printer-interview-by-photo-district-news-magazine/