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I have occasionally made A3 prints from my photos but, despite being mildly interested, never really put any effort into optimizing my workflow. Prints cost money, and you need to put them somewhere so why bother?
First of all, prints are cool. A 30x45 print of your photo gives a much richer impression of the scene than a crappy flickr page. Not only is it bigger, allowing your eyes to wander around the image, but the color gamut of a printer (= the displayable spectrum of colors) is much wider than what you typically see on a monitor too.
Second, you can make money with prints. Maybe you actually can't, maybe only after you die, but there is the slight chance that someone pays you 3.3 million dollars for a c-print diptych of a supermarket interior. Thus it won't harm if you are at least prepared.
Third, if you have a serious camera fetish such as I have, you simply want to know what can be done with the binary data you collect on your compact flash cards.
Consequently, in order to become smarter, more hoity-toity and richer, I am now going to make some occasional print experiments. First of which I did on the weekend.
One local print shop in Duesseldorf is engels bilderservice.
It is reasonably priced, fast - and acclaimed by some professional friends of mine, and thus a good place to start. Among other processes, they offer 30x45 cm minilab printing for 4 Eur per sheet.
You can either give them your original file and let the machine handle the uprezzing, color optimization and sharpening or you can give them a preprocessed 400dpi 30x45cm file and ask for a so-called "Repro-Print". Of course I was curious who was better - me or the machine. And: The Sigma DP1 or the Nikon D700.
I prepared the three files you see in the photo for Engels. The two full frame photos are one DP1 and one D700 frame each straight out of Lightroom. These were left at their original size and completely unsharpened, I only messed with the colors a little. The striped print on the left side is from a file I prepared myself. I chose 3 DP1 and 3 D700 files at base ISO and just for laughs added one D700 frame shot at ISO 6400.
-At first I uprezzed the unsharpened files to 30.6x45.8 cm at 400 dpi (as was required by Engels) via Photoshop bicubic upsize.
-Then I sharpened the edges a little bit with USM set to 3 pixels and 20%.
-Then I sharpened the whole images with Smart Sharpening set to 1 pixel and 100%.
-The DP1 file showed rather large jagged edges after this treatment so I mitigated it by manually going over weird edges with the blur tool set to 22%.
-Created the "test stripe file" out of them, set the color space to sRGB and saved the file as a highest-quality jpeg.
-Brought the files to Engels with a friend, then we met three Japanese trade fair visitors at the local Uerige Brewery and fostered some preconceptions.
Two days later when I was sober again I went to pick up my files. Impressions:
1. Me vs the Machine
The machine lost. My self-prepared files look a lot better than what the machine did. They are sharper and the color looks better than the "machine opimized" versions.
2. DP1 vs D700
Not much difference at base ISO, both cameras are capable to deliver nice 30x45cm images. Not much to complain about. The DP1 files I prepared tended to show more jaggies and sharpening artifacts than the D700 ones. Much of these is not or almost not visible in the prints.
3. D700 at ISO 6400
The Nikon D700 is known for its great hi-ISO performance but how far does that get you? Well in a 30x45 print, you do see the noise, and when you plan to print ISO 6400 files at that size or above you have to be OK with seeing some noise. There is a huge quality difference between base ISO and ISO 6400, but the result is still impressive and looks quite a bit better than on screen. I strongly doubt anybody is ever going to pay 3 million bucks for a D700 ISO 6400 shot but maybe I am just too narrow.minded.
Conclusion:
Using a simple workflow (upsize unsharpened files with bicubic, then apply a two-stage sharpening sequence as I described above) gives better results than the auto.routines of a minilab. Do not worry about minimal artifacts in your uprezzed and sharpened file, just eliminate the ugly stuff and leave the rest for the machine to smear. Important is to ask for the possibility of a "repro" print and the required specs (exact measurements and dpi count) beforehand.
P.S: I went to another lab (Kafaii) and they refused the "repro" print saying that their machine would give much better auto results anyways. According to my findings this is bollocks and without getting proven the opposite I will never print anything there.
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