More About Making Prints

More About Making Prints

by William Lulow

I wrote a piece back in June of 2019 about making prints. I think it is still as important as ever for photographers to make prints from their digital files or from their negatives, whatever format they prefer. One of the reasons is that it is the way images were meant to be seen. We have all become used to looking at our various screens when we are looking at photographs. But just take note of how you view photographs on either platform. When you look at your smartphone, for example, you are looking at an image that is roughly 3.5″ by 2.5″. If you are looking at a tablet, iPad or something similar, the screen size is approximately 10″ on the diagonal. So we are not talking about large prints here. Your computer screen could be substantially larger, but all screens don’t behave the same way. Some screens are sharper than others. The color on one screen may be different than on another. Whenever a screen is larger, it usually takes more pixels to fill it and consequently to make a clear image.

But looking at an image on a smartphone presents a totally different experience than looking at one on a wall in a gallery, say. One of the first things you notice is that you skip from one image to the next relatively quickly. You often “scroll” from one image to the next and thereby don’t really examine any one picture closely.  In order to “study” an image, you have to enlarge it on your screen which means that you often can’t view the total image, only parts of it at a time. This detracts from the overall experience you get.

So viewing a photograph on a screen is somewhat of an unsatisfying experience compared to attending a gallery exhibition of photographs that can be viewed from afar as well as close up. The other thing is that no matter what people tell you, you can never get a high-enough quality image from a smartphone unless you take the trouble to mount it on a tripod (which you can do), or take other precautions to keep the phone as steady as possible. The iPhone 11 has an upgraded camera from some of the earlier models, but its resolution is still only 12MP (megapixels). You can make an excellent 8×10″ print from that resolution, but not much bigger than that. One of my regular DSLRs has 18MP and the other has a 30MP sensor. I always have judged the resolution of any of my images by making a standard 16×20″ print. If the detail in the image was sufficient to make an excellent print that size, I knew I had enough detail in the original image. That was how I judged my image sharpness and “enlarge-ability.” I have been somewhat obsessed with making even larger prints these days for exhibitions. I now like to make 20×24″ prints. One reason is that I like not having to view the picture from such a close range. It is also easier to see and if you do move closer, you can really inspect the print to get a good sense of its quality. And, larger prints make a greater impact, all else considered. (Sometimes small prints can be effective as well. It depends on subject matter and how they are treated).

Now another thing worth mentioning is that when someone hands you their smartphone to look at one or many photos, chances are they have not been through any post-production. They are probably just as they were shot, mistakes and all. Most good photographers, either amateur or professional know that not many people want to see all of your “raw” take when you have been out making images. They are interested in that one, defining image that says what you, as a photographer, were trying to communicate. No one is interested in all the would be “outtakes.” So, making a print of a favorite image is important because you must decide on which one to print and exactly how to crop it, touch it up and make it the best it can be.

A DSLR with an 18MP sensor, creates an approximate 50MB JPEG image which translates to about 60×40″ as a print. If you shot the image in RAW format, it would generate roughly a 90MB file which you could use to fill up the side of a building. There is no doubt that, up to a certain point, the resolving power of the sensor will determine how much the image can be enlarged before it begins to lose some sharpness.

Here is an image I like to use for comparisons:

This was an image I made in Portugal a number of years ago with my Canon 60D and a 20mm f/2.8 lens. This made a perfect 16×20 enlargement which was almost like some of the continuous tone images I used to make in the darkroom. Here is another:

Both of these digital images made excellent quality 16×20″ prints as has been my standard for resolution, sharpness and overall print quality for the last twenty years or so.

One other image I love to use is one I made of the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia at a concert the band gave in Boulder, Colorado back in the early 1970s. This image was made with a 35mm Nikon F camera, probably with an 85mm f/1.8 lens with Tri-X film. Here it is shown blown up to a 34″ x 42″ size with the frame:

When you think of the size of a standard 35mm frame, this image represents a substantial enlargement. Even up close, it stands up to examination for clarity and detail. That’s when I know the original image was made properly.

The other thing about making prints is that it gives the photographer a chance really to show off the extent of how the digital zone system can work. If all the zones I-VII can be shown in the digital print, then you know that exposure and post-processing were both optimal. This should be the goal of every landscape photographer who works digitally, just as it was in the days of film and chemical prints. Sometimes it takes a bit of work in post-processing to adjust the tonal range of the file so that it prints the way you want it to on your particular printer, because just with monitors, printers differ widely on how their inks reproduce digital tones.