.......like the cat with 9 lives, it's come home and doing well. I picked-up a few boxes this morning from my usual retailer for paper and ink here in Toronto - CCBC-Club, and when I could finally fight my way through the Toronto traffic back home, I immediately printed my favorite printer test target - the Atkinson LAB page. Three pieces of really good news: (1) pricing hasn't increased; (2) the packaging is improved - they now have the paper in a protective envelope INSIDE the box, and best of all - (3) there is ZERO need to re-profile this paper. The test page came out fine printing with my usual IGFS profile. The other difference in the packaging is on the label - there is a "sticker" that says "WIR certified" (WIR being Wilhelm Imaging Research - the print permanence testing service). To find out what "CERTIFIED" means you need to visit the WIR website (good luck) and read the fine print.
OK, so far quite a blah post - just a bit of good news for all us IGFS users;
so I thought I should spice-up the topic with another bit of news that will surely rattle some readers, and perhaps relieve mental anguish for others! I was above the Arctic last year at a place called Camp Mansfield (Svalbard), and in the neighbourhood there were large pieces of rusted machinery from coal mining activity early in the previous century. Being rusted machinery, it is of course "photogenic", so I made photographs, using a Sony Nex 6 - 16 MP APS-C sensor. The native file size is 4912*3264 pixels, or about 9*13.6 inches at 360ppi output. I was interested in printing a rather severe crop of one of those images, to suit a particular composition from one of those machines that only struck me the other day (not on site, unfortunately). So I extracted this crop in LR, and printed it from LR as an 11*12 inch enlargement, letting LR resample up to 360ppi for the Epson 4900. The result was decent considering the selection is about 25% of the original image area. Then I thought it would be interesting to send it to Photoshop and print to the same linear dimensions with no resampling in Photoshop. (In both cases I used the Output Sharpening for the size and resolution). Hence the Photoshop Image Size dialog shows this crop-photo for those linear dimensions at 127ppi, which some process located somewhere no-one knows for sure would upsample under the hood to the 360PPI needed for the Epson printhead. And I printed it. Then I compared the two results, and I found that I needed to look really, really hard to see any difference. If anything, perhaps the Photoshop output looked a trifle crisper, but we're hair-splitting here. And this image has the kind of detail and subtle tonality that serious differences of outcomes from different technical approaches would show readily. On this basis, I'm beginning to think that perhaps a lot of the discussion about where to upsample can be put to rest.
