Can paper catch screens?

[Mark D Segal]

Yea, forget kozo, silk, uncoated media, linen, etc, carefully profiled with I1 and soft proofed on an NEC pro display, even standard Canson Rag Photographique looks like shit on the display, just a flat muddy misleading mess when "simulate paper color" is checked. It's not even remotely representative of a well crafted print that comes out the other end. And when it comes to black and white, that's worse,  forgetaboutit.

So what's your alternative? How do you get to a "well crafted print"?

I make "well crafted prints" too, and I find the softproofing useful when evaluated knowingly.

[BobShaw]

It would seem that the "golden hour" is maybe an invention of the photographer so that what is captured can fit within their means to provide output.

I would say that HDR was invented for guys with cameras that arrive at the car carpark for a "sunrise" shot as the photographers are leaving.

[JRSmit]

AFAIK present HDR standards are limited to 14 stops (that can be utilised dynamically, according to the technical limitations of the display), up to 6 stops more than omnipresent SDR standard. Camera with 16 bit A/D converter can possibly record 14 stops of usable DR, you can probably record such DR using two cameras, or - hypothetically - some tricks like electronic shutter interlaced bracketing or something alike.

A 14 stops HDR panel, with 4000cd/m^2 brightness and CR equal or bigger than 8000:1 (like HDR47ES4MB) displaying HDR recorded and rendered content may be potentially mind-blowing, 3D-spacious-reality-like looking. The difference might be way more significant than wide gamut or 4K UHD.

The question remains how many stops the human vision can really see, that is process as visible information from 0 to 100. To my limited knowledge of the human vision it masks a lot to turn high contrast scenes into something " visible" . In other words it is not linear, and scene dependent.
I am trying to visualise looking at a " real" contrast scene on a rectangular display in an environment which not even close as contrasty, such as a room in a house. Cannot see how that can be natural, mindblowing yes, but is not like the real thing.

[JRSmit]

Screens are cold grotesque robotic objects. I used to have the argument with the Epson print genus" that hung out here who were really ad photographer computer geeks who were pretending to be master printmakers. They claimed you could "soft proof" a great masterfully done monochrome print in Photoshop and Lightroom with good icc profiling and a good display. I said you couldn't, and all my colleagues backed me up. We spend time looking at paper objects, not glues to our displays because we know they are two completely different things. Yes you can save a lot of time with good soft proofing in color when you use gloss type papers, but when it comes the subtle art of printmaking on matt rag media, soft proofing is a joke. The only thing that really matters is the physical object.

These are two completely different mediums, prints and screens and it is shame that we confuse them as being even remotely related. Billl Gates was trying to convince that prints as objects were dead and all he needed to do was show people reproductions of Ansel Adams and Renaissance painters scrolling through super high-res displays through his house. I bet even Gates gave up on the idea. Screens are just TV, and have nothing to do with printmaking whatsoever. Thank God.

john

Soft-proofing is not about simulating the real physical object, ie a print, but is limited to simulating color and contrast/transitions from light to dark(ie the black & white portion of the image) of the print .

So yes screen (display) and print are  completely different mediums for visualising images. It is not only the visual stimulus, it is also the touch in terms of holding/feeling something physical , the smell, the associations one has with these multiple stimuli.
That is why just looking at numbers means completely missing the whole point.

[Tony Jay]

Late in to this thread.
I think this is a non-question really.

Paper does not need to "catch" screens.
Despite the fact that we can view the same (supposedly) image on both media there is no competition here.
At a dinner party trying to compare the red wine to the pheasant (we do taste both) is likely to elicit a strange response from fellow diners.
IMHO comparing prints with screen projections of images is a similar type of comparison.
Both media can look great with same image but a particular image may look a bit better projected or it could look better printed.

The debate about softproofing, to me anyway, betrays a misunderstanding, and therefore a mistrust of softproofing by those who seek to minimise its value.
Softproofing was never implemented to exactly represent a print - softproofing could never achieve this and was never mean't to.
Properly used it remains an immensely useful tool.

I can appreciate images in either medium and I also appreciate that the differences in the two mediums make a direct comparison moot.

Tony Jay

[BrownBear]

It hasn't come up yet (Or if it has and I read right over it, I apologize), but the "luminance" of screens has become a big part of the viewing experience for most folks when comparing paper and screens. It's somehow "better" if it glows back at you.  I'm certainly susceptible, and I think most of us are.  If you doubt, next time you're viewing an appealing on-screen image, just reach up there and start pushing around the brightness setting on your screen. Or try it from the other end and enjoy a really good print, then view the same image onscreen.  With changes in luminance come changes in how we see.

[hogloff]

It hasn't come up yet (Or if it has and I read right over it, I apologize), but the "luminance" of screens has become a big part of the viewing experience for most folks when comparing paper and screens. It's somehow "better" if it glows back at you.  I'm certainly susceptible, and I think most of us are.  If you doubt, next time you're viewing an appealing on-screen image, just reach up there and start pushing around the brightness setting on your screen. Or try it from the other end and enjoy a really good print, then view the same image onscreen.  With changes in luminance come changes in how we see.

This is true of prints as well as in galleries like LIK's, lighting is used to create that luminance look.

[Doug Gray]

This is true of prints as well as in galleries like LIK's, lighting is used to create that luminance look.

Yup.  I have experimented with this and the effects can be amazing. You can create the impression of a emissive device like a monitor screen on a print properly illuminated. The trick is to create an adjacent "white point" that is actually neutral gray and control the lighting so that observers are unaware of what you are doing. It thoroughly baffles folks when you turn off the illumination leaving the lower room lighting. Reactions are "how do you do that?"

[Rado]

Yup.  I have experimented with this and the effects can be amazing. You can create the impression of a emissive device like a monitor screen on a print properly illuminated. The trick is to create an adjacent "white point" that is actually neutral gray and control the lighting so that observers are unaware of what you are doing. It thoroughly baffles folks when you turn off the illumination leaving the lower room lighting. Reactions are "how do you do that?"

This is interesting, can you elaborate? Do we have a thread here about how to display prints for the best effect? If not maybe we could start one.

[Mark D Segal]

This is true of prints as well as in galleries like LIK's, lighting is used to create that luminance look.

They also play such games with lighting in the fancier supermarkets so the fruits and vegetables look more warm and inviting than they do once you get them to the cash register. :-)

[hogloff]

They also play such games with lighting in the fancier supermarkets so the fruits and vegetables look more warm and inviting than they do once you get them to the cash register. :-)

Mark, they play all sorts of games with the produce. I grow a garden and produce such as strawberries might last a couple days after picking before they start to soften up. Strawberries from the supermarket are always bright red and last for more than a week...in fact I've never had a strawberry go soft that was bought.

Additives including one's to make the produce look appealing are the norm these days. That is why I grow my own.

[Mark D Segal]

I'm afraid you're right - goodness knows what we're ingesting these days, so growing your own, or the farmers' market is probably the surest way to eat healthier. Like softproofing, there's no perfect fix, but some things are more helpful than others. Happy New Year to One and All.

[graeme]

This is interesting, can you elaborate? Do we have a thread here about how to display prints for the best effect? If not maybe we could start one.

+1, I'd like to learn more about this. ( Possibly an article as part of the 'Back to the Print' series Kevin? )

I saw an exhibition of this painter's work a few years ago at a gallery in Harrogate ( UK ):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Atkinson_Grimshaw

The paintings seemed luminous. A couple of weeks later I saw one of his paintings in another gallery, still enjoyable to look at but lacking the 'glow' that the Harrogate exhibition seemed to have.

[Doug Gray]

This is interesting, can you elaborate? Do we have a thread here about how to display prints for the best effect? If not maybe we could start one.

Well, I can describe what I have experimented with.

I start with a floor standing pole that has a floating plexiglass area for image display of 12"x16" prints and attached flood lamp above. The pole and smaller support areas are blackened. The flood lamp is about 2' above and in front of the image. The lamp is a 3000K incandescent with a beam such that it illuminates the central part of an image at about 4x higher lux than the periphery.

Then I put unprinted paper in the floating holder and take a picture of it stopped down enough to eliminate vignetting. I extract the luminance info in linear space with dcraw and create a matrix of the same size as an image I wish to print. The inverse of this is used to scale against the luminance of the image when printed. The XYZ values from the unprinted, illuminated image are also adjusted to the higher color temp of 5000K. I use Matlab for this as it is quite easy and fast and understands colorspace and tif images.

The photo itself is rendered inside a physically gray (which will look "white") border with an L value of somewhere between 40 and 70 depending on other factors. The illuminated print will appear to have a "white" border yet with a glowing centered area (which can go well above the luminance of the "white" borders. The new, 12x16 image, which includes this border is then manipulated.

The image to be printed is converted to XYZ space then adjusted by the unprinted, illuminated XYZ. Finally, I crosscheck the result to make sure it is within Rel. Col. gamut. This is iterative and a tricky part where a really good dynamic range, particularly very low min L values, pay off and give flexibility.

The final result is a floating image that appears on a white border but has inexplicable, glowing, like features. It also looks perfectly flatly illuminated with none of the floodlight like effect one gets from just illuminating a print with a flood.

This particular setup can produce stunning sunsets where the warmer colors can really take advantage of the large amount or red in the incandescent illuminant.

People ooh and awe when they first see this but I have to make sure they don't see it with the flood turned off first. When you turn off the flood and people see what the print looks like illuminated by diffuse room light they can't believe it's the same thing. It really is somewhat startling to me and I understand the math and physics behind it. To most it just looks like some kind of magic.

It's really just something I just experimented on the side out of curiosity.

[deanwork]

Yea the title of this post is so funny to me. I couldn't help but think my problem is just the opposite.

My alternative is to expect nothing from soft proofing matte prints. Right it can get you in the ball park for hue and contrast but it's often misleading. My real reference was about the "simulate media" button which is so far off as to be completely unusable for matt rag prints or anything subtle for that matter.

My solution is to look at prints, not screens, something that I see students hardly doing at all. They have often been trained to make their prints look like their screens rather than the other way around.

I think we as humans, not just printers have been conditioned to think of screens as where the world exists.

We just got  the Chromecast app last week for viewing movies and youtube and such. Loaded on it are all these great nature photographs from around the world. For the first hour or so I thought they were so beautiful, so saturated and high-res and all. Then after a little time I realized they had no character at all, everything looked the same. That is the problem with screens and our conditioning of imagery through them.

Digital photo is so far behind audio for instance. I have a guitar am that is solid state the reproduces analog tube amps exactly, even the old timer jazz musicians are amazed. They also have digital guitar emulation software that makes my Stratocaster sound like my Gibson archtop or an acoustic guitar or a bass. We are so far from doing that in printmaking, it is so crude when it comes to emulating fine are media it's not funny. So, for matte media I pay very little attention to the screen. I look at prints very carefully and ignore the screen for the most part completely for monochrome.

[Rado]

Thanks Doug, that's really fascinating. As far as I understand it there are two things going on there - 1) using a gray border to boost the perception of lighter colors in the image and 2) evening out the illumination of the lamp based on the blank paper photograph. Have you tried them separately - i.e. only gray border or only compensating for the illumination? If so what were the results? How large is the gray border compared to the actual photograph?

[Doug Gray]

Thanks Doug, that's really fascinating. As far as I understand it there are two things going on there - 1) using a gray border to boost the perception of lighter colors in the image and 2) evening out the illumination of the lamp based on the blank paper photograph. Have you tried them separately - i.e. only gray border or only compensating for the illumination? If so what were the results? How large is the gray border compared to the actual photograph?

I've found evening out the illumination is helpful. Otherwise it is immediately apparent that the print is illuminated by a spotlight and then people see the brighter areas as resulting from illumination rather than the print appearing self luminous. So having a border that appears "white" and is quite even adds to the effect.

I haven't done any extensive work w/o removing the illuminant's uneven effects. I think others have had some luck doing so. I'm kind of a perfectionist.

[Doug Gray]

I'm thinking of dusting this stuff off. My experiments with this are about 4 years old now and I've learned quite a bit more about color science in the meantime.

It turns out prints are excellent at this because the chromaticity of ink (a subtractive tech) gets larger as the print gets darker. At least up to a point. If you look at the xy chromaticity instead of a*b*, which is independent of brightness, you get far more colorful results using hyper-illumination. Look at a gamut cross section at L=25 on a good glossy printer.

Also, look at the Mac Adam limits of reflective surfaces to see how the gamut could expand using super-luminance techniques.

[luxborealis]

These are two completely different mediums, prints and screens and it is shame that we confuse them as being even remotely related. Billl Gates was trying to convince that prints as objects were dead and all he needed to do was show people reproductions of Ansel Adams and Renaissance painters scrolling through super high-res displays through his house. I bet even Gates gave up on the idea. Screens are just TV, and have nothing to do with printmaking whatsoever. Thank God.

I don't think anyone is confused about the two media. However, you are correct in screens having nothing to do with printmaking. But, just for a moment, think back 20 years to remember how awful inkjet prints were compared to gelatine silver prints. Maybe in 20 years we will have paper-like display screens.

[Mark D Segal]

............My alternative is to expect nothing from soft proofing matte prints. ............
My solution is to look at prints,  So, for matte media I pay very little attention to the screen. I look at prints very carefully and ignore the screen for the most part completely for monochrome.

So this must mean that you have fined-tuned your mind so that when you look at the screen unaided by softproofing you kind of know what adjustments need to be made to obtain the printed result you are expecting, and/or it may require several trial runs before you've crafted the perfect end result.

I know exactly what you mean by the effect of triggering "Simulate Paper White". Depending on the quality of the reverse table in the profile it can exaggerate the extent of dulling down to be expected from the printer. But knowing that, I find it easier to trigger it anyhow and slightly under-adjust relative to what it would otherwise have me do to eliminate the muddiness completely. I find this a more reliable approach to minimizing paper waste than using no softproof. But we all have our various approaches that work for us.