Lumière d’Argent

In a word, they work great. Print quality is great, support is responsive, must be excellent… for US-based customers.

After having set up a few galleries, I got an order from a customer in Germany. That felt great! The customer places his order, I get the notification from Exposure Manager, I produce the print files and uploads them and the day after Exposure Manager prints and sends them. More than two months later, the customer is still waiting. Including for the re-print Exposure Manager offered at no charge.

I know Exposure Manager is not to blame, at least not 100%. It appears the problem is solely our unreliable european state-owned posts. It does not make the slightest difference for any of their employees wether the mail arrives or not. And it shows.

I would not write this if it was my first problem with them:

• I had a parcel taking six weeks from the South of France to here (about 900 km).
• The SmugMug test prints took a month to arrive. Of which about 25 days in my local post office.
• Our Luxembourgish posts knows: they subcontract international parcel deliveries to TNT. And when it is for France they advise not to write on the parcel what it is, because it raises the chances of theft by the post personnel. I never had a problem sending.

The only thing I could blame Exposure Manager for is that they did not listen to my advise and sent the re-print through the same way instead of calling DHL or UPS or whoever with global presence. I’d have paid. Apart from that, they always answered my mails quickly and patiently (I can get nasty). The month following the order I got a check from them with my profit. They fully refunded the customer. I did not cash the check but I could have. I have no doubt about their quality.

For me, though, it is back to the drawing board.

Stephane :: Mar.04.2008 :: Printing, Sales :: No Comments »

Among comments I got in different forums after the previous article, some pointed out I could have got even better results had I used a higher resolution. Others said 3200dpi was way above the Epson true resolution.

Well, I must admit I had chosen the 3200dpi resolution because I knew 6400dpi was ridiculous and 3200dpi gave still a manageable file size from a 35mm negative.

So I made some more tests.

I started at 6400dpi and that produces a huge file that shows big square pixels when sharpened. It looks like a the 3200dpi file at 200% on screen. Useless.

4800dpi has the same problem.

2400dpi, when enlarged to 3200dpi shows no detectable difference at 100% Needless to say, it would show absolutely none on print. So, 3200dpi was indeed too much.

1800dpi, when enlarged to 3200dpi shows a loss.

It appears the optimum is 2400dpi with this scanner. Still respectable considering the price and its multi-format capabilities.

Stephane :: Dec.27.2007 :: Printing, Scanning :: No Comments »

The Epson line of flatbeds has been much maligned over the years for having inadequate resolution for film scanning.

It has been gradually accepted they got good enough for medium format but it is still common to read that for 35mm film, one really needs a dedicated film scanner.

I am in the process of going through old negatives for an old series I never really finished. I also put a roll of film in my M6 just for the fun of it. So I am again interested in small format scanning. And what I have is an Epson V750 from my medium format times.

It turns out that scanner is plenty enough for small format scans, provided:

- the intended output size is no more than 16×24″ (roughly 40×65 cm)

- the film is either very flat or held very flat

- the film holder height has been carefully tuned

My old negs have been in files for yers and are naturally very flat. I have tuned my film holder height and I don’t think 35mm is really appropriate for larger ouput than 16×24″. In my opinion, that’s considerably large anyway.

To illustrate my point, I chose what I call a good negative. It was made on tripod with my Leica M6 and Elmarit 90mm on Fuji Acros 100 exposed at IE64 and developed in Ilfotec HC (same as HC-110). The Elmarit 90 is an extremely good lens and any softness we might notice certainly will not come from there.

The software I use is VueScan and I scan the negative in “Image” mode, meaning VueScan jsut tries to show the scanned object. I scan at 3200dpi. I VueScan Color tab, I choose None for the color balance, meaning VueScan does not apply any clipping and anly minimal curve treatment to the file. The result is a low contrast file that I open in PhotoShop CS. I get this as a starting point:

I do some cropping to keep just a fine black border, invert the file to get a positive and apply this Levels adjustment:

I also apply this curve :

And I get a good starting point:

Tonalities with B&W negatives are not a problem for the scanner. Negative films have a DMax around 3 at the maximum, and for B&W that will only happen in case of severe over-development. Any film scanner on the market can easily scan through this, provided the light source is diffused. Otherwise, the Calier effect can produce blocked highlights. So it is not surprising I can get good tonality from this scanner. Well, it might not be good, but it is certainly not the scanner’s fault.

What is criticized is resolution. Let’s see what we have here. I took two details: one from the forground herbs and one from the background hotel wall:

Detail 1:

Detail2:

OK, this looks soft. However, if your screen has 100dpi resolution, like most LCD, you’re looking at a 32x enlarging factor! Let’s apply some sharpening. I applied PhotoShop simple Unsharp Mask Sharpening filter with a radius of 0.7 pixel and an amount of 323%. These value are very much dependent on the picture. Some will take less, other even more. Sometimes two successive milder sharpening are better. Let’s see what our details have become:

Detail 1:

Detail 2:

Now, remember, we are looking at a 32x enlargement. At 16x, we’d have a 16×24″ print with all the sharpness such a print needs and, in my opinion, very close to the maximum practical usage of a small format negative.

I have owned dedicated film scanners and they are indeed even sharper than this. however, with B&W silver negatives, it is a mixed blessing. The increased sharpness tends to produce exaggerated grain. With the negative I used in this example it woould probably not matter that much, but try it with some Tri-X and the dedicated scanner does not look so attractive anymore.

As Colin points out, the new Microtek M1/F1 could very well give us further progress by including autofocus. Autofocus is really what the Epson lacks. The holder height tuning thing is a bit ridiculous.

Another thing I’d like to try sometimes is to develop for much higher contrast. A film like TMax 100 could very well be suited for that experiment. The idea is that the heavy levels adjustment to get the contrast back should also amplify grain. If the neg was of higher contrast, this effect could be reduced and maybe I could get scans with even less grain.

But to answer the question in the title, definitely yes!

Stephane :: Dec.26.2007 :: Gear, Printing, Scanning, Software :: 1 Comment »

I thought ExposureManager used EZPrints for the actual printing. They don’t. I learned from their recent XMas email that they have built their own lab in 2006. This could explain the results are different, and in my opinion better, than what I got from SmugMug.

Stephane :: Dec.25.2007 :: Printing, Sales :: No Comments »

They arrived with an apology from the local Post. SmugMug was not at fault, nor was EZPrint. They proceeded diligently, but there was a mistake done in the post here.

The prints arrived rolled in a tube and the tube was in… nothing. The parcel was just the tube. Nothing happened and the tube appears strong enough to protect the prints, but all in all it does not give the same impression as the parcel I got from ExposureManager. I thought they used the same lab, but they don’t. Also, there is a prominent SmugMug label on the tube, inviting the customer to contact them in case of problem. As I said before, the customer buys from SmugMug, not from me, and is reminded so.

I had ordered the same prints on the 3 different papers. To my surprise, I actually prefer the glossy one to the luster. There is a bigger surprise: metamerism failure. All three papers show a tint under some lighting.

Under natural light, glossy is neutral, matte is slightly warm and luster is green. Under tungsten, luster is neutral and the other two are pink. I don’t notice anything similar with the EM print on luster. They both use Fuji Frontier printers and both use the same Fuji paper, so I don’t know.

All three prints are from the same file and all three were ordered at the same paper size. They are supposed to print borderless yet one of the three has a white border on one side. Precision appears to be so-so. The problem here is that, unlike ExposureManager, SmugMug does not allow for proper separation between the file used for screen presentation and actual print files. Borderless prints are useless for framing! How can’t they understand that?

All in all, this shows amply that SmugMug can not be a solution to sub-contract orders fulfillment.

Stephane :: Dec.25.2007 :: Printing, Sales :: 2 Comments »