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Printing Exercise |
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Printing Exercise :
A lot of people starting off in digital think that with all the
automatic features, taking wonderful pictures will be a dawdle. Then
when they got home and load the images onto their screen they are often
sadly disappointed. The all singing new toy camera produced a file
something like this:
Oh dear another candidate for the dustbin? No hold on a minute.
When many of us were messing around in darkrooms, muttering weird
incantations, we would often pull a strip of film from the processing
reel and holding the dripping length of celluloid against an inspection
light we would wonder what the hell had gone wrong? Where had all the
perfectly exposed masterpieces disappeared to?
In this event there were two courses of action. Consign the whole
lot or most of them to the rubbish bin, (incidentally the most useful
and in my opinion the most underused piece of darkroom equipment) or
try and make a silk purse from the pig’s ear. The success of this would
of course be dependant on ones skill and imagination regarding
printing. This is no different with digital. O.K. you can hardly pick a
file up and rub it hard to create friction and hence speed up the
development. It’s no good flapping your hands around in contorted
shapes in front of the monitor holding back and burning in areas of the
image. But the theory is still the same.
The most important skill of the wet darkroom printer is the
ability to ‘read’ a negative and know exactly what needs to be done to
extract the best representation of the subject on a piece of
photographic paper. Digital is no different except in some respects
rather easier. In the first instance you are working on a positive, you
are not peering at the projected negative image on a baseboard. You
have total control with the digital process as you can instantly see
the effect your manipulation of the image is having and if you do make
a mistake a click on the edit menu immediately erases it. But of course
the means of carrying out these manipulations are executed merely with
clicks and movements of the mouse and all this has to be learned. It
isn’t rocket science. Anyone reading my idiots guide will be fully
conversant with the alterations that are needed to turn this awful
image into something worth while, which does its best to represent the
scene and the mood I saw when pressing the shutter release.
However all this apart, with film or digital there is one
unalterable truth. That is, the photographer has got to be able to
bring out what he has captured. He has got to have the imagination to
create a picture that encapsulates the scene rather than just another
technically perfect record shot of the subject. This is a skill that
cannot be taught, it cannot be bought at the local camera shop. No, it
can only be acquired by looking and feeling, trying to cultivate an
artistic sensibility, yes I know, a really “arty-farty” expression but
I don’t know how else to describe it. Some fortunate individuals are
born with this awareness, others acquire it through practice and
experience, others pooh pooh the whole idea and end up happy snappers.
Somebody once said and it is worth repeating. “A negative is the score,
the print the performance.
So let us try reading the picture above and decide what need to be
done to make it a bit more presentable and a better representation of
the scene.
The picture shows a lighthouse at the mouth of a river, the Tyne. A
storm has just passed through and there is a feeling of calm, almost
stillness, the wind has died down and the river has become suddenly
placid. The rain was torrential and has accumulated in large puddles
and areas of wetness. Suddenly the sun tries to break through and the
light brightens and glints in the water, the drab scene is illuminated.
A seagull whirls overhead and calls out to tell his chums that flying
can be resumed.
With digital the first decision is b/w or colour, I’m a b/w
photographer so that’s an easy first call. Then the horizon is
suffering from the digital slope so that needs about 2º anti clockwise
correction. I decided that a lot of work would be needed on the sky,
lifting the contrast and darkening it a little but retaining the bright
area, not letting it burn out too much. Use the polygon lasso tool, run
it along the breakwater down to the sea and then up and across the rest
of the page, up the side and across and down completing the selection
of the sky. Don’t worry about having gone through the legs of the
lighthouse, we can put that right later. Go into levels and boost the
dark and mid tone areas a bit, add a touch of contrast. The sea is just
a flat mess, so get some life into it. This time use the magic wand,
you will have to do the area in two parts but it doesn’t matter, again
boost the brightness and contrast a bit. Now that lovely rain soaked
causeway, this is a fun bit. Use the lasso tool and select the area
then bang the contrast up, and with this area selected sharpen a bit.
Now look at the lighthouse that you completely ruined when you did the
sky. Use the lasso tool again to select the body of the structure, now
lighten it and add contrast then sharpen. Enlarge the screen to 100%
and closely examine the areas around the legs of the lighthouse. Any
bit of the image that hasn’t quite been lassoed perfectly, deal with
using the clone stamp, tidy up the edges and the missed bits. That
about does it apart from putting a thin black border around the print.
I like borders I feel that they hold the picture together and stop
light areas from bleeding out of the frame.
But there is a dilemma. Is the lone seagull distracting? I don’t know,
I have grown very fond of him, in fact I have given him a name,
Jonathan Livingstone, don’t you reckon it suits him?
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