LensWork Technology Blog

More tablets than Moses

I've said for some time now that the most interesting component of photography's so-called "digital revolution" is not our ability to create images digitally (i.e., Photoshop), but rather the means of distribution of images that are now possible via digital transfer.

We are in the midst of seeing this capability explode even further with the introduction — and now the initial phases of distribution — of a new class of tablet computing devices. First was the iPad, and now we are starting to see a number of Android-based tablets being shipped and gathering user feedback.

Of these, one of the more interesting ones appears to be the ASUS Transformer. The Transformer, like the iPad, is a touchscreen-based portable device ideally suited for the presentation of photographs. Unlike the iPad, however, the Transformer adds the ability to play Flash which opens it up to the world multimedia publishing — and in particular, Adobe PDF documents that include media components. In an earlier post I mentioned how the iPad could easily have been designed specifically to present LensWork. The ASUS Transformer, with its widescreen design and Flash capabilities, could have been easily designed specifically to present LensWork Extended.

It would probably be an exaggeration to say that the iPad is a ubiquitous photographer's tool. We certainly see lots of them around and lot of photographers using them. By itself, it was (and is) an important and popular groundbreaking technology — but a bit expensive and a bit restrictive to satisfy everybody's needs and interests. However, with all these new tablets adding to the excitement of the category, we're starting to see prices come down, features go up, flexibility increase, and most importantly, user experiences influence design and usability. The Transformer is lower priced, with additional features, and an impressive first batch of user reports and thereby seems already to be making waves (unlike the Motorola Xoom) in the emerging tablet market. I'm excited to get my hands on one and see it perform for myself. As both a photographer and as a publisher, I'm very excited and enthusiastic about this emerging technology.

As a publisher in particular, I've been amused by those who predict universal dominance of this technology. It would be far too easy to see this trend and all these new devices as the death of print. It is not; print is not going away. True, print may be struggling a bit to find its new role in the world in which digital distribution will play an increasingly important part. Print distribution of photography will change. It will have no choice. The $100 fine art photography book will find the $10 fine art PDF eBook on a tablet device a formidable competitor. This may not be the death of hardbound books for us photographers, but it is the beginning phases of a publishing and distribution opportunity of unparalleled accessibility for many of us. Ignore this trend at your peril.

Reproductions in LensWork

Over in the APUG forum, David Goldberg asked a question to Merg Ross (whose work appears in LensWork #93) that I thought was a very good one. Here is his question and my response.

As a contributor, how accurate do you think the reproductions are in LensWork? They always look good, but they also look kind of uniform in terms of tonality and contrast range (leaving aside the question of print color, which he's acknowledged can't be reproduced without significantly increasing the complexity of process, using different inks for each portfolio). It could be that Brooks Jensen favors images that have a certain look, or it could be that he's adjusting all the images to his taste or maybe to a range that he knows will reproduce well in the magazine, but may not be what the prints look like--which wouldn't be an unreasonable thing to do, but it would be interesting to know what his priorities are in this regard.

Pasted from <http://www.apug.org/forums/forum56/88652-merg-ross-lenswork-93-a-2.html>

David,

Thanks for asking. As you can probably understand intuitively, reproducing work is a bit of a tricky business. Our goal is always to match density for density. (In fact, we measure this with reflection densitometers both when scanning -- in the case of Merg's prints -- and on press.) It is important, however, to understand precisely what this means.

The problem is in the quantitative measurement of black. Absolute density numbers are pretty meaningless when measuring across various media -- say ink-on-press to toned gelatin silver prints. The key is to maintain the correct relative tonalities. That is to say, those tones that are 50% in the gelatin silver print need to be 50% in the ink print off the press, but these absolute densities might measure differently. In Merg's original prints, the deepest blacks were generally in the 1.98 to 2.02 range. In LensWork, we typically get 2.02 to 2.05. (All measured with the same densitometer. So, some of the tones in his prints are slightly darker (visually and sensitometrically) when compared side by side, but only slightly so. Comparatively to their respective blacks, they measure up well as a percentage of black.

Be sure, however, that there are some variances that simply are beyond control. Tolerances are not pin point precise in the offset printing world. First, the densitometers only measure to an accuracy of +/- 1%, so even in the best of worlds a 50% patch could measure somewhere between 49 and 51%. In the best of worlds. In the real world +/- 3% is more likely to be observed on a really good press like the ones we use at Hemlock.

The hardest tones to reproduce and control are at the ends -- the subtlety between 95% and 98% or between 5% and 2% are really tough. We sweat bullets over these and that's precisely why I personally do every press check. Merg didn't mention which print he was disappointed in, but if I had to guess I would speculate the image on page 63 -- Cracked Linoleum. (I hope I'm right about this!) Those subtle whites have to be exactly right or they run the risk of becoming gray rather than a vibrant but slightly dark white. In this case, I think they are a little darker than I would have liked and then the dark images on the next spread depress those highlights a bit more. The whites in this image measure about 11% in LensWork and I would have been much happier to see them about 5-8%. The bleed-through is the kind of on-press effect that is impossible to predict and which I'd have stopped the presses and corrected if we were printing a $100 art book. Sometimes, however, the real world does force compromises. When we did Huntington Witherill's book, for example, we had a few very high key images and we designed the book so that only high key images where on the back side. Even so, we still had to run several tests before we nailed the 1% and 2% highlights perfectly.

So, bottom line, accuracy is of tonal reproduction is our goal, not some uniform "look" that we like.

There is one subset of images that does need to be mentioned in this discussion and that is platinum/palladium prints or matte paper inkjet prints. These media will typically achieve a maximum density of only 1.55 or so. This is quite light for a solid black tone. Off the press, this density would be about an 85% tone. If we were to print these types of prints with accurate densities, the psychological impression would be that they are weakly printed -- they'd look like a mistake. In these cases, we have no choice but to push the darkest blacks in the print to full black (2.05 density in our case) so they look right in relative tonalities and to all the other images in the magazine. In these cases, they are clearly not accurate reproductions, but they "read" right in print. Make sense?

As to the warm tone, this is a different matter. It is theoretically possible for us to print in any tone -- warm, cool, neutral -- as long as we choose inks that can do this. In a magazine that prints in CMYK, they can do this at will, but there is often considerable drift in color shifting and in density. By using only duotones, we can achieve better maximum density and more consistent results -- but at the cost of loss of flexibility. Some photographer's work that comes to us in cool or neutral tones does get shifted to warm tones -- possibly not to their preference. Unfortunately, the added cost of printing in a third ink would so increase the cost of production that it would probably add at least $10-20 a year to the subscription price. Even if we did so, there would also be the problem of trying to calibrate the second duotone without messing up the first one. It's a circle that goes round and round and would be a never-ending process that would inevitably lead to some compromises in quality and risk color shifts within a portfolio.

One example of why we've elected to use a single duotone. LensWork is printed "perfecta" -- that is, both sides of the sheet are printed on a single pass through the press. Imagine the problems that would be introduced if one side of the sheet needed an ink adjustment to get the cool duotones right but there were warm-tone images on that side too. Then on the other side of the sheet, a warm-tome adjustment might be necessary that might alter the cool-tone images on that side. Consistency could be a real problem that would be bothersome -- imagine a single portfolio with tonal shifts half way through. Yikes.

So, warm-tone it is and thankfully photographers like Merg have been understanding that their cool/neutral tone work will be in the magazine as a warm-tone they may never print in their own darkroom.

BTW, here is an email I received from Jimmy Williams that I am delighted to share here. Printing is more art than science and getting it right is not always as straightforward as we'd like, but receiving these kinds of emails from the photographers we publish does have its own rewards.

Brooks & Maureen,

Yesterday we received our copies of LensWork.

The cover immediately captured me. It's perfect. I don't know how you do it. Then I flipped through. The "feelings" I had when seeing the work were exactly the "feelings" I try to capture when I'm shooting. It's exactly the feelings I want for the viewers of my work.

Never have I been so please with the reproduction of my work or the editorial & commentary as I am with this one. You've made my work look the best that I could hope for and you've even managed to make my comments sound intelligent and well thought out. No easy task.

You are both masters at what you do and I thank you.

Jimmy Williams

Sorry for the long-winded response, but I thought your questions, David, was a good one worthy of a full discussion.

Brooks Jensen
Editor, LensWork Publishing

Measuring Density, Part 2

Measuring typically is some sort of comparison to a known standard: here is a standard ruler, there is a widget — let's compare them so we can find out how long the widget is. Measuring density is not quite like this and perhaps that's why it's a little less straightforward about how to do it.

It's still a comparison, but in this case a comparison between how much light falls on an object compared to how much is reflected back from it. We first measure the amount of light that falls on the subject (not an easy thing to do) and then compare that to how much we see reflected back (not an easy thing to do either). In essence, we can think of it as a percentage — although that's not how it's actually stated by a typical densitometer.

Rather than percentages, density is expressed in logarithmic terms. If 100 units of light fall onto an object and it reflects 1% of it back, we would say that it's density is 2. In practice, the scale of reflectance density runs from 0.1 to about 3 or less. The blackest black I've ever measured is 2.45 which is roughly 0.5% reflectance.

But, here is where we find our first complication. The stated "optical reflectance density" of an object will vary depending on what wavelength of light you measure. Some densitometers measure only a vary narrow range of color; others measure the full spectrum. So, you and I might measure the same patch of black and report different readings for its density if we are using different machines. This is why density measurements reported on the web, for instance, can be so misleading. Unless you know how the measurement was made with which kind of densitometer, you really don't know anything when someone reports a density measurement.

The second complication is one of understanding, particularly for us photographers. If I tell you a certain gray tone has a reflectance density of 0.8 on the printed page, what shade of gray is that in your Photoshop file? In Photoshop, we measure the "density" with the eye dropper tool which reports to us either an RGB value or (if we set the tool to report K values) a percentage number. Comparing these to the numbers in a densitometer reading is like trying to measure a musical tone with a tape measure.

Before we resolve this, we need to know precisely what Photoshop is telling us. Actually, the K number is nothing more than the RGB number translated to a percent of black. (To change the way Photoshop is reporting the eye dropper tool, use the tiny triangle fly-out menu just below the eye dropper in the Info panel. Hold down on the fly-out and you'll see lots of options.) In the Photoshop world (8-bit, anyway) the scale of black to white runs from 0 to 255 (which is 28 = 256 shades of tone). When Photoshop reports a shade of gray is 50%, it is reporting that the luminance value of this tone is half-way between 0 and 255, a luminance of 127. You can find any luminance value in terms of the 256-step scale by simply multiplying the converse percentage by 256. So, a 14% patch (one that is 14% of the way to full black) is a luminance value of 220. (1.00-.14*256 = 220.16). In the screen captures above, note that none of the three color channels is actually 220; it is the luminance that is 220, a sort of average mix of the three colors. Close enough. But neither RGB 220, nor 14% are numbers that we use in the densitometer.

We need a translator.

Enter a couple of pairs of scientists. First, a guy named Murray and a guy named Davies got together and developed the Murray-Davies curve — a translation for converting density measurements into percentage of reflectance. This mathematical formula was later modified by a couple of other guys named Yule and Nielsen into the "Yule-Nielsen optical dot gain curve." (You can't make this stuff up. Just in case you want to torture yourself with math, here is more.) There are densitometers that have the Yule-Nielsen curve built into them so you can actually measure density and the machine reports back a Photoshop-type percentage. Now we're talkin'.

So, we have two ways of expressing density — the density number itself, and the Yule-Nielsen percentage. We use density to state how black is black — useful for comparing, say, the maximum black of a gelatin silver print to the maximum black of the ink in a book. We use the Yule-Nielsen percentage to compare, say, the tonality of a middle gray tone on the printed paper to the same area of tone in the Photoshop file. This way we can know if our printing device is accurately reproducing what's in the Photoshop file or whether it is warping the tones in the printing process.

There is lots more theory to go into, but not really necessary in the world of the pragmatic photographer — unless you want to. So, class dismissed for now.

In the next post on measuring density, I'll share some practical experiences I've had with measuring density and some thoughts on the tools to do so.

Measuring Density, Part 1

It's been a flurry around LensWork-land the last few days — deadlining LensWork #88 last Friday, launching our new website day before yesterday, and yesterday the press check up at Hemlock. And in the midst of all this we are starting the final video tests for the new Visual Workshops. I feel a bit guilty about not adding a new post since the 17th, but whew! I'm looking forward to taking this weekend off and starting the printing of a new photography project of my personal work.

Speaking of the press check, I was razzed yesterday at Hemlock for being the one and only customer who ever brings his own densitometer. This may be true, but I must admit, I'm still surprised how any serious photographer can neglect this most important tool.

As photographers, we live and breathe tonalities. We may strive for an emotional and fuzzy concept called "life" in our photographs, but we do so with technological means that are numeric and precise. We measure light with our meters, exposures with our histograms, Photoshop eyedropper readings in our digital files, Zone calculations for our analog negatives and prints — you name it — we are measuring, number-crunching, precision-driven artists. Why is it then that we don't regularly measure how black is black?

I suspect because the numeric measurement of black (or any other shade of gray) is conceptually more complex than, say, reading a ruler. Also, it requires another, sometimes expensive tool. Besides, I can hear the counter refrain as I type this, "Black is black and nothing more need be known."

Hogwash.

True, one can argue that ultimately the maximum density of a print will not be the ruling criteria of whether or not it is a good print. Some use this kind of argument to sidestep the issue of measuring tonalities. But, the same could be said of f/stops or shutter speeds; in and of themselves, they don't determine a good or bad photograph, but few photographers would therefore decide to ignore them.

Measuring density is one of the foundations of understanding the thousand and one steps we take to arrive at a finished photographic image — whether that is a traditional wet-darkroom print, a digital print, or a commercially printed book. Along with all the other aspects of technology we try to master in our pursuit of the fine photographer, I would propose that all of us photographers need pay a lot more attention to the numbers involved in measuring tones — density in particular.

In my next post, I'll cover a couple preliminaries about measuring density. Finally, in a third installment, I'll share my methods and tools.

Chasing Highlight Tones

Here at LensWork, we are so involved in the world of offset printing that I forget sometimes how foreign this world is to most photographers. Here is an example.

At the very highlight end of the scale, photographers often don't mind having a perfectly pure white tone in their prints. We call these 8-bit RGB 255, or 0% tone, or 100% white — the terms can be confusing. In the world of commercial printing, it's all about ink coverage, so I tend to think of pure white as 0% ink coverage.

Now, 0% tones are a problem in printing. It's theoretically the whitest white the paper can produce, but is problematic in two primary ways:

Any area that graduates from light grey to pure white will cross a threshold where, somewhat suddenly, there is no ink at all. Where this transition takes place leaves a squiggly line of demarcation that can be seen, somewhat similar to banding.

The second area where 0% ink coverage is a problem is when that tone is on the edge of the image, often in a sky. The tonalities in the print simply float off into the paper without defining the edge of the image.

In either case, the existence of pure, toneless white can be very distracting and one of the sure signs that the prepress folks didn't do their job.

One of our preflight checks is to examine every image before printing to be sure there are no pure whites. Photographers often send us images that have a pure white. If we find a pure white, we throttle back the tonal range of the print to be sure there is a very slight tone printed when the image is reproduced in ink. You don't want to pull back too far or the highlights start to look gray; not far enough and the press may not be able to physically print the dots. You'll need to find out what your printer is capable of producing and use that as your throttle point.

In our case, because the presses at Hemlock are so good, we dial back the highlights to 2%. That means that any spot of pure white tone in the image will actually print with 2% ink coverage. This is so slight you don't really notice it, but it's there — and most importantly prevents both of the problems that would be created with 0% tones if we didn't modify the clipped highlights.

Fortunately, this is easy to do with Lightroom. It's a good idea to be aware of this with any image you are sending in for reproduction just in case your printer doesn't check for this. Personally, I would never send off a file with pure RGB 255 whites just because I never know how sophisticated the printer is or whether or not they will check for this subtle detail.

Here's how we fix this in Lightroom:

We examine every image destined for ink (this does not pertain to on-screen images) to see if there are any areas of absolute white. If you don't know this trick, it's a good one. In the Develop module, look at the upper right corner of the histogram where you will find a small, upward pointing triangle. This is the highlight clipping toggle. You can either hover over it for a temporary display of highlight clipping or click on it to turn it on.

With the highlight clipping invoked, any pure white areas of the image will appear with a red mask like this.

These areas have no tone at all (well, technically they are 100% white, or 0% ink coverage, which actually is a tone, albeit one with no information at all).

If you see this when you are working with a RAW file, you might be able to pull out some tones that are available in the RAW data by using the "recovery" control in Lightroom — a preferred approach, but not the point of this discussion. Let's assume for now that this option is not available to you.

How do you create a 2% tone to pull back the highlights from clipping? We do it with a simple preset that will create this . . .

from this . . .

Even on the computer screen, you can now see the top edge of the image (barely) helping define the rectangular shape of the image because of that ever-so-slight tone in the sky.

Why not 1%? Actually, the real question is: Why not 5%? For ages in the printing world, 5% dots were considered the target for pure whites because most presses can't print a dot small enough to accurately reproduce anything less than 5%. Even if your file had 5% tone in the highlights like this . . .

The tones in the final image would be lighter because of the loss of subtle dots as they got smaller and smaller. So the above visual on-screen image may look more like this when printed because the highlight dots are just lost in the process of applying those tiny dots to the paper.

It was always a guessing game as to how much highlight detail would be lost. Since printers wanted to give themselves as much wiggle room as possible, 5% became the standard highlight dot target.

Like all things, technology has improved in recent years and Hemlock's presses are consistently capable of producing a 2% dot. This is a mere wisp of ink that is barely visible with a good loupe. But even the experts at Hemlock cannot reliably print 1% dots mainly due to variations in the surface texture of paper. That they can consistently do 2% is an amazing feat. Since we are motivated to squeeze every bit of quality out of our printing as we can, we use 2% and dance on the edge of disaster. Wheeeee!

The super-advanced class in all of this occurs when you have an image printed on the back side of the sheet. If the back side image has very dark tones and if the paper is not 100% opaque (no paper is), then the dark tone on the back side can have an affect on the light tones in the image on the front side. This is precisely why so many book designs have no image on the back side of the very high key images. The so-called "bleed through" of the dark tones can make the subtle highlights on the front-side image appear gray.

I guess this is yet another reason why I love the folio concept of individual prints where one does not have to worry about these kinds of issues that we sweat bullets over once we engage the offset press to make a traditional book.

Here is our 2% preset. Download 2% Highlights

This preset is a simple tone curve that remaps tones from one level to another. Notice the very slight downward curve at the very highlight end of the tone curve graph.

Here is the 5% curve preset that is even more visible . . .

The reason we use a preset rather than simply modify this curve is that the end points are not moveable by dragging. The only way to modify either end point is with a preset.

If you want to modify this to some other level, open the preset in a text editor. It will look like this:

s = {

id = "340E9E26-24BA-4558-9AE9-A0C9F48D3DDB",

internalName = "2% Highlights",

title = "2% Highlights",

type = "Develop",

value = {

settings = {

ToneCurve = {

0,

0,

32,

32,

64,

64,

128,

128,

192,

192,

255,

250,

},

},

uuid = "674990D8-49DF-11DB-94CF-000A9599D634",

},

version = 0,

}

If you want something other than a 2% change in the end point, then simply modify the last pair of numbers in the sequence. In the example above, the last two numbers in the sequence are 255 and 250 which simply remaps the level 255 RGB tones down to level 250 — roughly 2%. Simply change the 250 to whatever you want and save the preset with a new name and copy/move it to your Lightroom presets folder. A 1% tone is a remap to 252; a 3% tone is a remap to 247; a 4% tone is a remap to 245; and a 5% tone is a remap to 242.

You're a Photographer

Yesterday, I heard someone say the most interesting thing. They mentioned they'd owned a camera and been taking photographs their whole life, but had only recently had a book published of their work. "Now," he said, "I guess I'm a photographer."

What is it about that particular medium that is so associated the officialdom? A lifetime of making photographs does not qualify one to be a photographer, but a few images and a little glue-in binding and suddenly respect? It is what it is, but I do find it odd. Perhaps because I am a publisher and privy to the inner workings of book publication that removes for me the aura of magic about the making of books. I am not impressed by the fact that someone has a book — or a dozen books — to their name. Any dullard with enough cash can accomplish that.

A parallel story. A number of years ago a wedding photographer friend of mine decided to play around with the digital world and asked my advice for a camera. He explained what he wanted to do and the $20,000 digital camera he was thinking of buying. I advised that he could accomplish the same thing with a $600 camera which he then purchased and used. He was thoroughly satisfied as were his clients with the photographs he produced from it. Sometime later, I asked him how things were going with the camera. "I had to give up that one," he said," because it looked too amateurish for some of my clients. The photographs were great, but it projected the wrong image about me, so I ended up buying the $20,000 camera just so my clients would think of me as a professional." Another victory for symbolism over substance.

The same thing happens with book publishing. Make a Blurb.com book and you're a beginner. Make an offset printed, softbound book and you are a fledgling photographer. Make a hardbound book and you are a serious photographer. Make a dozen hardbound books and you are an important photographer. Just make photographs and you are dog meat. How silly.

You must admit, however, that this is a significant accomplishment — for the printing industry. You are a writer when you are published; you are a musician when you have a CD; you are a photographer when you have a book; wow, what a coup for the king-makers. Like so many things in life, I guess, it's not about substance but rather about power and money.

I suspect not surprisingly, I rebel. Being a photographer is no more about media than it is about equipment. I'm equally never impressed when I meet someone with their Leica dangling like a pendant from around their neck. I want to see their photographs. You have a book? You are represented by So-and-So Gallery, museum collection, or Mr. X's private collection? I'd like to see the images, if you please. Not that my opinion is in any way important, but I'd prefer to form one of my own from seeing your images rather than buy someone else's opinion, sight unseen.

Being a photographer is a way of life, a state of mind, an approach to the engaging the world, a passion for the experience of the viewer of our photographs, a curiosity about the world — these are what makes a person with a camera or a book into a photographer. It's not about technology, or publishing, or exhibiting; it's about the heart.

LensWork Duotones, Part 2

Is it possible to share the duotone curve setting as well for black and warm gray 11 ink?

— Gladia

We are asked this question with some frequency — in this case, Gladia's comment to my original post on duotone's advantages in offset printing.

We have no secrets and I'd be happy to share — except that it would be a mistake, and possibly and expensive one, to assume that there is some sort of magic in our duotone curve. This is not like guarded secrets of the chemical composition of some product like Coca-cola.

Here's the problem. Our duotone curve has been precisely calibrated for our process — that is to say, the presses we run on, the brand and model of printing plates our printer uses, the plate curves they use, the brands of ink we use, and most importantly the paper we use. Change any of these variables and our curves will not work as they should. In fact, it takes constant tweaking on our part to make sure they don't drift over time in our process without changing any variables. Remember, paper and inks are organic materials and can vary from batch to batch. That's precisely why I personally attend each press run and make on-the-fly decisions to ensure each issue of LensWork is printed as well as it can be.

Believe it or not, we always print LensWork on the same press because even within Hemlock each press requires it's own set of plate curves! This is exacting stuff — and part of the reason we have such a close working relationship with Hemlock. Find the printer you want to work with and stick with them so you can achieve optimum results.

I can recommend that you start simply enough — use the default Photoshop duotones that ship with the program. The bad news is that they are only a starting point. You'll have to actually print images with them on the press and then adjust as needed to dial them in to your materials.

How? We include a couple of step-wedge test targets on every press sheet, both sides. The first target is just black ink. The second target is the same file but with our duotone curve applied. The target looks like this …

On press, we measure the densities of each patch with a calibrated densitometer to be sure the various tonalities are printing to the densities they should. If need be, we can adjust the press a bit, but if the densities are too far off, we re-plate the press and start over. Like I say, it's exacting stuff but there are no shortcuts in the pursuit of quality.

LensWork Duotones?

For some time I have seen and enjoyed the LensWork magazine. I understand it is printed in duotone as opposed to four-color printing. I have this question: Why duotone and not four-color printing?
Secondly: One color is of course black – what is the other color?
Thirdly: Have you any Lightroom preset that emulates this specific variation of duotone that LensWork is using?

— Peter Høvring

   

There are several reasons to choose duotone over four-color printing, chief of which is quality. To be even more specific, consistent quality. What you refer to as "four color" printing is technically CMYK printing, the most common printing industry practice. By dividing full color images into the four colors of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and blacK (hence, C-M-Y-K), a reasonable number of the colors of the full spectrum rainbow can be simulated. Reasonable, but not all colors. (Aside: those colors that can be reproduced are said to be inside the "color gamut" of these inks, those that cannot be simulated are said to fall outside the color gamut.) CMYK printing has been an industry standard for decades and suffices for most printing needs, particularly where absolute color fidelity is not the most important issue. It's good enough for 99% of all commercial printing.

Except for us picky photographers for whom color and image fidelity are all important.

Photographers have recognized that the inherent limitations in the range of possible colors that can be printed using just CMY and K inks. CMYK printing will change the color fidelity of their finely crafted color photographs. Other color schemes have been pioneered for a broader color gamut, probably the most common ones are Pantone's Hexachrome (six colors) color printing for offset commercial printing and the current batch of inkjet printers for personal use that employ extra colored inks to expand the range of possible colors that can be produced. (Additional background information on color theory and printing, and some background info from Epson.) Color photographers can be a bit more satisfied with this expanded color gamut. If you want to see an example of simply superb color printing, buy Bill Atkinson's book Within the Stone. (Bill's website.) Even if you aren't interested in photographs of stones, you will be amazed at the color fidelity in this state-of-the-art printing example.

But what about black and white images? If we want a warm-tone image in LensWork, why not just print using CMYK with a warm-tone tint?

The answer is consistency. The press that prints LensWork is capable of printing 8,000 sheets an hour. They zoom through the press. You can just imagine the challenge of keeping the ink levels in perfect balance throughout the full press run — fighting things like ink temperature and viscosity, plate coating consistency, paper thickness variations, humidity, etc. It's a daunting challenge. If the colors drift even the tiniest bit from dead center, black-and-white photographs can quickly become ever-so-slightly-blueish-black-and-white. Or, a bit too cyan, a bit too magenta, a bit too yellow. Any of you who have done a black-and-white book from Blurb.com or Lulu.com know what I'm talking about. A dead neutral grayscale is almost impossible to achieve.

Now, if it's difficult to accomplish this during the course of a single press run, imagine the difficulty of achieving consistency from issue to issue of a bimonthly periodical, year after year. Yikes.

Instead, we use duotone printing which employs only two inks — black and, in our case, Pantone Warm Gray 11. These two inks can be applied year after year and they will always be exactly the same "colors" because they are made for each press run to exacting spectral standards. If either of them drift a bit in printing — an inevitability — the color of the printing doesn't shift. Since there is no cyan, magenta, or yellow on the press, these bad boys can't rear their ugly heads and mess anything up.

Just as important, duotone printing allows an overlay of the two inks that build to a blacker total density than either of them are capable of by themselves. This increases the richness of black and white images and, with today's presses and stochastic screening, rivals the black density of the best selenium toned gelatin silver papers from a traditional wet darkroom. Amazing.

Duotones are tricky to use because they cannot be proofed except on press. This can be an expensive learning curve, especially for a single book press run. Thankfully, with a bimonthly periodical, we have a chance to tweak and adjust if we need to every sixty days. And — no small consideration — because we use two less ink plates than CMKY printing, there is less press setup and fewer printing plates to pay for.

So, quality — comprised of consistency, better black density, and control — is the short answer to the benefits of duotone printing.

As to presets, here are a couple you can try. If you have a properly calibrated monitor, they'll be a good place to start, but keep in mind that perfectly matching a duotone on a printed page and a backlit monitor image is going to be almost impossible. Nonetheless, here is the Lighroom preset and the Photoshop B/W adjustment layer we use in-house.

Welcome to the LensWork Technology Blog

As you long-time readers of LensWork are fully aware, we tend to concentrate on the artmaking side of photography and the creative process rather than on technology, cameras, or equipment. But, truth be known, as photographers our productive life is very involved with technology. Without cameras, lenses, equipment of all sorts — and now computers, software, email, websites, etc. — our life as creative photographers would be pretty difficult.

Well, after 17 years of publishing LensWork and LensWork Extended without technology discussions, we're comfortable adding such to our repertoire with this blog. 

But with a twist.

It seems self-evident that here in the new millennium "technology" for photographers is much broader thing than merely cameras or other photographic equipment. We've specifically titled this The LensWork Technology Blog for a reason — so we are free to discuss software, computers, PDF publishing, print and book publishing, ebooks, digital printing, folios, website design and marketing, special edition prints and folios, and even blogging itself — that encompass such a variety of skills and tools so important to photography and the creative process to modern fine art photographers. To limit the discussion to just cameras and lenses seems more an anachronism than a useful strategy.

So, in this blog I'll share with you my random collection of thoughts, discoveries, explorations, hard-won experience, and — I fully anticipate — some technological failures and struggles as I wade through this world of technology and its use to create photographic artwork.

I'm particularly excited about the technology of blogging because it offers, almost for the first time in my publishing history, a fully integrated platform that allows an exchange of ideas with LensWork readers and between our readers. Since 2004, we published one of the most popular podcasts about photography on the Internet. To date, there are about 600 podcast episodes available on our LensWork website in which I discuss various aspects of photography and creative process. (Consider yourself invited.) I love doing these podcasts and will continue them in addition to these new blogs. Podcasts however, by their nature, are a one-way street and blogging offers a different opportunity that allows not just a two-way street but also cross-traffic that opens all kinds of lines of communication that further the notion of a community of photographers who share a passion for photographs, the creative process, and the technology required to produce them. I tend to think of LensWork readers as a community and I love the idea that the community, from around the globe, can find each other through these new LensWork blogs.

By the way, I use the term "blogs" (plural) because we're launching three blogs simultaneously, each with a specific focus and purpose —

• this blog on technology,
• another we're titling Ask Brooks in which I'll do my best to respond to questions from our readers (or help them search for answers to their questions within the community of other photographers who follow the blog),
• and finally a sort of relaunch of LensWork Vision of the Heart. Version 1.0 of Vision of the Heart was a podcast-format production that offered commentary on photographs we'd published in LensWork or LensWork Extended. As such, it was intended to be a discussion of images (rather than either creativity or equipment) and was one of my favorite projects for the last few years on our LensWork website. Unfortunately, as a podcast it was simply too cumbersome to produce and bogged down in its own logistics. The blog format, however, is ideally suited for this project so we are relaunching it using blogging rather than audio as the platform. This also will allow you, the LensWork community again, to add your comments and join the conversation.

So, here we go! Welcome aboard.