Archive for December, 2009
The above image of a back-lit oyster shell was a CombineZP merge of four photos using different focus points. A Nik plugin (Duplex) was used within CS2 to produce the overall tone.
This second image was also a CombineZP merge though there was a bit of fill flash as well as the back lighting and the colors are natural.
Have a heartfelt holiday season in whatever way you choose to celebrate.
I haven’t posted in a while as a huge portion of my time has been allotted to scanning and restoring old negatives and photographs for a project for my wife. She’s putting together a collage type presentation of the history of Berkshire School development.
The restoration of old b&w photographs is challenging due to deterioration and damage. Many hours were spent experimenting with the numerous options in the scanning software to achieve the best results and retouching the scanned images in CS2. None of the techniques were difficult, just time consuming.
Another challenge presented itself in the printing process. I purchased an Epson R1900 back in May with the thought that I would be doing little if any b&w printing. The R1900 is not the best choice for b&w printing as it uses color ink instead of multiple shades of black ink to produce shades of gray .
I had a custom profile made for Ilford Gold Fiber Silk paper as it came highly recommended for b&w prints and got some pleasing results. I liked the overall tone of the prints though I got the usual slight “color shifts” when viewing under different lighting conditions (due to using color ink).
A problem occurred when I had to change an empty cyan ink cart — actually the cart wasn’t empty but I was getting the dreaded “this cart is not a genuine Epson ink cart” error message even though it was an Epson cart. After the change I had a major color shift toward cyan. After talking with Epson tech support I never did discover the true reason for this though I suspect there is a variance in Epson inks and it shows up more strongly when printing in b&w than color on the R1900.
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