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When you're printing at home, you can spend all the time and paper you like fine-tuning your system to get just the look you want. But getting sharp, well-exposed prints with predictable, good-looking color can be a hit-or-miss process when you're using the services of the Web gallery that hosts your shots. Online photo site SmugMug's general manager and house professional photographer, Andy Williams, answers questions and solves problems for thousands of photographers who host their images on SmugMug. He talked to me about the best ways to prepare images for online display and printing, what can go wrong, and some of his favorite image-processing tools and techniques.
SmugMug's printers and paper
Aimee Baldridge: What kind of printers and paper does SmugMug use?
Andy Williams: The paper that we're currently using is called Fuji Crystal Archive, and we've chosen this for its long life and its consistent reproduction of excellent skin tones, really bright highlights, good clarity, and excellent contrast. And it's been rated by Wilhelm at extremely long life. We're actively working on a pure black-and-white printing process right now, and we expect to have it very soon, as well as fine art papers -- canvas, linen, different textures.
We print -- with one of our partner labs -- on Fuji Frontier systems, we print on Polielettronica LaserLab printers, and our largest format stuff gets printed on Durst Lambdas. These are lab-quality, photo-quality printers that typically will offer prints in three different types of resolution: The Frontier is 302 dpi, the Polielettronicas are 254, and the Durst Lambdas are 200 dpi.
AB: Those are all digital silver halide printers?
AW: Yes, correct.
Image resolution
AW: We get a lot [of questions about resolution], which causes a lot of confusion for folks. Because they see and hear things out there -- that 300 dpi is the magic. But why is their photo coming off their camera at 72 dpi? We basically tell them that the dpi is meaningless. Send the photo up to your online print provider in the biggest size that you have from your camera but don't do any interpolation or upsizing. Let the labs do it. We and any good-quality commercial lab will handle the up-resing and will also tell the customer if for some reason the file is not substantial enough to actually make a good print from it.
The funny thing is, counterintuitively, the larger the print, the less dpi you critically need because you're not nose-to-nose to those large prints. You're typically some number of feet away in terms of viewing distance. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't throw up as many pixels as you can, but the smaller prints -- those 4x6s -- we typically look at them up very close. They're in our hands or in a photo album. People think, "Well, we don't need so much resolution for those small prints." But really you do. It's the larger ones [that let you] get away with less. And we in fact can print superb prints from 100dpi and print 30x40 if we need to.
AB: What is the main reason customers return prints?
AW: Out of millions and millions of prints, we get very few returns on a weekly basis. And I'm talking on the order of seven, eight -- ten is a lot. But of those returns, the number one reason is they're too dark. The reason for that is that typically people have their monitors turned up pretty bright. So, what they're seeing on the screen looks proper to them, but when the lab gets it, they're going to print from an image that's actually darker than what the person is seeing. Then, when you combine that with prints using reflective light versus monitors that are backlit, you kind of have a double whammy. So we spend a lot of time working on calibration with people and getting them to understand when a photograph is too dark, and we teach them about histograms.
A histogram is a graphical representation of the pixels in your image. [If] more of that graph is towards the left side, that means you have more dark pixels than light pixels. A typical good exposure is going to have an even distribution, and is going to have a representation of pixels on the left, pixels in the middle, and pixels on the right, which means that you have shadows, midtones, and highlights represented in the image. Once you can focus on just that one thing -- the histogram -- [customers] get it: they know what it looks like in Photoshop, they know what it looks like on the back of their camera, and they can understand why they got a dark print.
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