Approaching the Scene 027: A Simple Tip for Better Looking Prints

[Music] so one of the questions that I get asked the most frequently is you know I've got a brand new printer I see you obviously have this big giant printer in your videos and you know I've got this brand-new printer I've been trying to print with it how come my images look like absolute dog crap you know and I think that that's the the common first impression buying a new printer getting ready to print your photos you've been really working on capturing the best possible photos and then you go to print and they look dark they look muddy the colors look off it's a really really common problem and in this video I'm going to show you some tips and tricks on how to solve it so I'm Hudson Henry this is approaching the scene for those of you who haven't been watching this is a series of weekly videos that I do every single Thursday and it's really a conversation about all things photographic from post-production to capturing better images in the field conversations with other working photographers and as I said conversation the biggest piece of it is a conversation about photography and creative work so if you have a question a comment don't hesitate to drop it in the YouTube channels comments section I take those really seriously and you know if you want to email me something send them to questions at Hudson Henry comm I look through all of those and at the end of this little discussion I'm gonna talk a little bit about a couple of questions that I got so I'm going to talk about some questions about locations about traveling with family as well as a little bit more on the Nikon Zed 6 which I'm actually filming this with right now so my thoughts on it as I'm using it more and more so jumping in I want to talk a little bit about how you're looking at your images when you edit them I think the biggest thing that happens with people that get into printing is they've been editing on a really really bright screen now you know I've been printing free more years than I'd like to say and I really think of printing is a kind of a parallel art form so you've got you know photography is complicated and difficult to get into and get it figured out exactly how to capture the best exposure the best sharpness all those those those variables that go into making a good image well there's a whole bunch of new variables that come in to editing to print and printing an image and that is the same whether you're sending a print out to a lab like MPEG sorbet photo or even Costco or whether you're printing it on your own printer you know some of those services have better technicians that are going to do color correction and kind of second-guess what you intended to send them but if you're working on an on color calibrated system there's a certain amount of just kind of rolling the dice with how are you editing your images and so I'm going to talk about a simple trick for for making sure that your monitors not too bright and that the colors are somewhat close as well as a hardware calibration technique which is what I use to make sure that my monitor is actually calibrated to emulate what ink is gonna look like when it lays down on paper with one of my printers you know so if you do a tour around my studio you're gonna see a whole bunch of printers I've been working with you know everything from the first original consumer grade printer that was a complete disappointment and I had so much trouble getting prints out of I bought a better printer thinking that was gonna solve it and still found out that my prints look like dog crap they just look like you know excuse my French but you know you get them back they look really really dark they don't look like the vibrant colors that you were editing on screen and I've I've learned over the years how to get a good image soft proofed up on my monitor that's gonna look just like what comes out of my printer and I think the biggest key is having your monitor calibrated right so think about this now that we're all using LCD monitors and a lot of us are editing on laptops a laptop stick a pivot typical screen brightness like a MacBook Pro a modern MacBook Pros screen brightness is about 200 candelas per square meter you know think about that like you're measuring temperature in Fahrenheit or Celsius you're measuring the brightness of your moderate monitor candelas per square meter CDM squared and what we really want to be editing images ad if we're gonna have a final output is print is about eighty candelas per square meter so less than half of that output range I find that to get my MacBook Pro down to eighty candelas per per square meter when I measure it with a color Emmitt it's a just a little hair above halfway turned up for screen brightness and the problem is you're out on an airplane traveling somewhere you're watching a movie people have got their window shades up it's bright as hell you want to see the film so you turn it all the way up then you're exhausted you take some photos you get the shoot done you jump to your laptop you start editing on that really bright monitor well if your monitors turned up really bright and you're editing to taste looking at a really bright monitor you're actually editing your image is much darker than they really should be so you know whether I'm working on my laptop whether I'm working on my my bigger system with my Mac Pro here at the desktop I want to calibrate my monitor before I start editing prints in the first place at about eighty candelas per square meter and a lot of people will ask me well don't your prints look way too bright on other people's screens well you know if you go through my website and if you take a look through the images that I share in general whether it's on social media or in these videos they're all edited at that lower screen brightness so that they'll print well and I've never heard anybody really complain about too bright and image I do see people's images sent to me on my color calibrated system where you know whether I'm critiquing images or giving people pointers on their images or looking at students images and workshops often they're really really dim and that's because they're editing on a bright screen so short of buying a piece of hardware a color imager to hardware calibrate your monitor there's a tip for just checking your monitors brightness there's a website and I'm going to put the link in this video's description called check your monitors response here you know that's the the headline of it it has a whole bunch of test patterns and basically you're just going to look at it on your monitoring you can adjust it a bit so you know to see whether or not you've got the right bit depth of color you should see a smooth transition in this test patch from red to red across the colors of the rainbow and it gives you a couple examples of what might be going wrong if it looks wrong then there's just some simple white neutral gray black test drives a series of shades of gray to black and you shouldn't see any color at all there should be no color tinge to those if there is your monitor has some color drift going on you might need to adjust some of the color channels on your monitor then there's a gamma setting gamma seems basically sort of a curve that defines how your monitors displaying mid-tone tones so not the whites not the blacks but the mid-tones and you know traditionally Macintosh users used a gamma of 1.8 and PC users used a gamma of 2.2 nowadays I just sent mind a 2.2 I think that in general monitors and systems are designed around 2.2 is a gamma I have no problem printing with a 2.2 VMS so mindset for 2.2 what you're gonna look at here is you know there's a little square around the numbers and the one that the square kind of blends into the background pattern that's your gamma for me to point to really blends in so I know I've got a good gamut of to point to you and then you've got some brightness adjustments just to see if you're seeing the brightest whites and the darkest blacks and the most did one the one that's the highest most refined is this A to Z chart where you should be able to see the differentiation between y and z and a and B at the at the dark and bright ends of the spectrum respectively and you can just adjust your monitors brightness down if you're not seeing the difference between ABCDE you just start lowering your monitors brightness value and and you should be able to see all of those gradations from A to Z so that's you know a simple way to just sort of check how is my monitor doing as a whole now I think what you want to think about doing if that if you do that and you find you're getting better prints as a result I think that moving up to that next level and buying a color imager is really gonna help so this is an i1 display Pro 2 this is the color rumor I've been using for a number of years now it comes with its own calibration software I don't use that I have a an NEC multi sync 302 W spectra view monitor here a lot of words to describe that thing what it means is it's it's kind of a high grade color calibrated monitor that displays nearly a hundred percent of Adobe's RGB color space it's a wide gamut monitor so I'm going to plug this color imager into any USB port I have one on the front of this external hard drive here that's a backup drive swing it around the back of my monitor and it has a cool little weight that hangs back behind the monitor to kind of keep it balanced and then there's a cover you have to kind of lift this cover up flip it around and it exposes the actual the actual little color Rimet err there and I'm just gonna kind of drape it over the screen don't get it sort of set up here you can often tilt your LCD a little bit to make it sit on their minds tilted just slightly so I can do it because they're locked in on arms in place where I want them so I'm gonna go ahead and fire up this spectra view software that's the software that comes with these NEC spectra view monitors if you buy the eye one display Pro it'll come with the with its own calibration software it'll be really similar so it's gonna open up here I have to NEC monitors so it has the option of calibrating both of them and I'm gonna go ahead and I've got display one this is my main color critical display that I proof prints on and I've got that selected here display one I have both of them as an option here and there are some settings these are the settings that I would have you target with your color emmitt or if you get one one is having the white point set to 6500 Kelvin that's D 65 is another way of saying that so the white points D 65 that gamma we talked about at 2.2 the intensity of the monitor that's another way of saying brightness that's eighty candelas per square meter contrast ratio I just leave it the default and what I go ahead and do is I click calibrate it's gonna fire up that spectra view software and it's going to tell you where to hang your color imager right about there set it right over the top of that thing and when we click continue it's going to create a series of patterns and it's going to basically be reading those with the color imager and automatically calibrating the monitor to get all those parameters set and locked in now if you are using your own version a different software if you don't have a monitor that these monitors these spectra V monitors have built-in programmable let's look up tables which is really nice because the color imager can talk to the computer which talks to the monitor and makes all the adjustments automatically so that you can have a beer check your phone do whatever it is that you want to do while it's happening other calibration software on monitors that don't have programmable Luntz you'll have to go in it'll make take a reading and it'll ask you to adjust maybe the read intensity on the monitor and then it'll take a reading and ask you to adjust the blue and it'll take a reading and ask you to adjust the brightness and the contrast and it'll do exactly the same thing but you'll have to be a little bit more involved in the process that's one of the nice things about this monitor is I can just kick back have a beer read my email and so I'll do that and I'll get back to you when it's done calibrating and boom voila we're done so that's really the trick I think that if you go in and you test whether or not your monitor is actually a reasonable brightness for editing for prints and you do a little printing and you find your prints improve grabbing one of these color imagers and truly calibrating your monitor it's step two and you're gonna find that you're able to soft proof your images whether you're using Lightroom whether you're using im1 whether you're using some other product and if you get the correct profile for your printer and your paper and you software proof how your prints gonna look on that particular paper with that particular ink you're gonna find a tremendous difference in the quality of prints that you get out of your printer so that's just a little tip you know there are some other things that you can that you can learn along the way like being really careful when checking your print at a hundred percent for distractions and for noise reduction and for sharpening and not to over sharpen at the input stage there's there's a lot of tricks I actually just wrapped up doing a whole course on shoot to print for the on one softwares plus photo community so if you're inside there you're gonna see that course pop up if you haven't heard of it you can Google on one plus you'll find I'm a coach year-round in there so if you have questions about this about calibrating your monitor about setting up your monitor to do a little bit better job of approximating what ink is gonna look like on paper feel free throw them on the YouTube channel comments or send me a question at questions at Hudson Henry comm I've had some really fun questions over the past couple of weeks one that I really liked was by Maria she asked me what is your absolute favorite place ever to photograph and it's such a tough question I I find myself kind of wanting to cheat and give an answer that I just love that Bob Krist a friend of mine and a mentor often gives which is the next place that I haven't been but I do have some absolute favorites I have some spots that I keep returning to over and over again favorite places that come to mind for sure island scenic I love the island of kawaii right now the North Shore's still closed down because of horrific floodings followed by a hurricane that came through right as they were making road repairs from the flooding and that's my favorite part of the island to have a deep family connection there my grandmother used to manage a resort there for years and years I've been going since I was little and I adore that Island and I never get tired of photographing it Patagonia southern Patagonia both the Chilean side tourists apini and the argentinian side nell shelton and el calafate AR are one of my favorite regions in the world to explore in photograph and I think you could take a thousand trips there and never get tired or run out of new things to see and I'm actually so excited I'm taking a workshop down there this late October early November and I already have a significant group of people it's probably half full already but if you're interested in that hit me up and and and we can talk about reserving one more slot I've got almost all the details worked out before I launch that that's gonna be the epic trip of 2019 other places that I love the best wildlife place I've ever photographed is a place called robando island in Tanzania just amazingly incredible place it's in Lake Victoria in the southern part of Lake Victoria I plan to get a trip organized to that in the next couple of years - it's been a while since I've been there I want to wait for the kids to get just a little bit bigger maybe be able to bring them all along for the whole Safari part of that I've had some questions about how I'm feeling now that I've had the Zed 6 for a little bit longer nikons new mirrorless camera I am so glad that I got the 6 instead of the 7 the video quality is incredible there are a few little nitpicky things that I feel like are missing that would make me really regret replacing my Nikon d80 DSLR with the Zed 7 you know backlit buttons the knowledge of whether I'm moving left or right through images as I'm reviewing when I delete you know with the with the zeg cameras it just goes to the next image even if you were headed backwards through the through the series just little details like that there are some little things the inability to be able to do depth of field preview and lock the fact I have to hold a button down to see depth of field narrower than F 5.6 but that all being said I absolutely love using the camera I think the S lenses that I have are just sublime their incredible lenses the 24 to 70 is the finest 24 to 70 well okay I've used some some nikon's 2 8 24 to 70 and a really great one that Tokina makes as well and image quality is pretty much on par you know it doesn't get as wide an aperture but holy crap it's sharp edge to edge and sharp wide-open at f/4 it's a really really great compact lens paired with that camera the 55 1/8 is really wonderful and the video capabilities of the camera are just lightyears ahead of any of their DSLRs that's what I'm filming with right now it's a joy to use capturing video it's also really nice in the landscape so there are a few things that bug me about it and I think they need to perfect their autofocus a little bit I can't wait for the new firmware update that's gonna add I detect autofocus and see if there's any more real improvements there but but you know a really great camera a great sign of things to come and I would anticipate probably that the D 850 is the best DSLR I ever have and the z6 the the muralists is where all the R&D is gonna go and it's where it should go because the revolutions pretty incredible the fact that I can zoom into a hundred percent through the viewfinder that's diopter adjusted for the fact that I can't focus close anymore I have 2010 vision at distance which is you know I'm so blessed and happy about that but I can't focus close anymore you know I need reading glasses to see close so working with my DSLR I really need to get my reading glasses on to see that screen when I work with the Zed 6 I can just look through the viewfinder which is adjusted to my eye and zoom in to a hundred percent see whether things are in focus and I get focused peaking at the same time it's just it amplifies the available light to give me a nice bright view in darker conditions there's definitely some great things and the fact that I can adapt all my nikon lenses I'm very very happy with it the last question that I got is where is your next trip from John and I am actually getting ready to take off on a vacation I haven't been on a trip that hasn't involved shooting a new photo course or doing an assignment for a client for a really long time and my wife has been reminding me about that so we are taking the kids we're going with some of our kite boarding friends and we're packing up a ton of kite boarding gear kid gear photo gear and we're heading down near the southern tip of Baja to a very windy spot in the Sea of Cortez called el sargento that's right near La Ventana south of La Paz and I will be leaving a week from Thursday for that so a week from when this video airs and you know I intend to take you guys along on some of that trip and talk a little bit about some of the complications that arise when doing photographic work when you've got your family and other interests and things tugging at you so it would be a fun trip and I'm really looking forward to it I'm not going to do that much work so don't expect too much I'm gonna get a kite board hang out with the kids make sandcastles and do some photography too so it's gonna be kind of a three-way split on my time and I'm really looking forward to it so thanks everybody for watching if you're enjoying you know don't forget to hit like and subscribe I'm sure you have if you've watched it to this point already and thanks so much I hope that these tips that I gave you help you get a little bit better print out of your printer you have more questions hit me up you know where to send them thanks so much see you next week you

Channel: Hudson Henry Photography

Views: 10,140

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: printing, digital photograpgy, Rubondo Island, Nikon Z6, i1 Display Pro, NEC spectraview, education, monitor brightness, cd/m2, monitor settings, prints, Photography Class, Hudson Henry Photography, Patagonia, Raw, colorimeter, how to, printmaking, photo training, tutorial, Photo print, monitor calibration, printers, Kauai

Id: DCcFnDUsCXU

Length: 20min 57sec (1257 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 24 2019