Month: January 2009

180 or 360 ppi?

I print my fine art prints with Image Print, an excellent RIP.  And I print on an Epson 4800.  Image Print gives you the option of printing at 180 or 360 ppi.  I’ve printed a lot of great looking, rather large photographs at 180 ppi.  A lot of my friends are shocked.  They say I’m compromising the quality of the print.  But no matter how close I scrutinize the prints I really can’t see any difference.

Enter Genuine Fractals.  Genuine Fractals really objects if you try to resize an image to 180 ppi.  The smallest it is comfortable going is 240.  To get it to accept 180 ppi I have to fake it out. 

But the fact that it defaults ot 240 raises all sorts of questions.  What if I resize at 240 ppi and print at 180 or 360?  For that matter, is there a difference between 180 and 360.  So the other day I was printing some 16X24 images and decided it was time to finally ran a test. 

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Great Training DVD

I’m always buying photography books and on the lookout for good DVDs.  I like the books because I can read them at my leisure.  And if they contain assignments at the end of each chapter that’s even better.  DVDs, on the other hand, can be even better because you can see the photographer in action.

But not all DVDs live up to this level of expectation.  Sure, you can get see where the photographers are photographing.  And often you can see what they captured.  But all too often you aren’t privy to what is going through their minds.  Well, I found a DVD that sets the standard.

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A Ten-Step Program for Grad ND Filters

I have a couple of Lee graduated neutral density filters in my camera bag.  I don’t use them very much because I’m kind of an HDR guy.  But the past couple of mornings we’ve had some very clear sunrises and given the location of our home in the Southern California foothills this turned out to be a good opportunity to play around with my grad ND filters.

I discovered a few very interesting things.  I’m just going to provide a checklist here without any illustrations.  Hopefully it will make sense.

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Sharpening

Happy New Year!  This is the first post for 2009.

I get a lot of questions about sharpening so I thought I’d share with you the way I do it.  Let’s begin with the question…,

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