I just want to give a shout out to Mima Cataldo and her work being shown at The O’Hanlon Center for the Arts in Mill Valley. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Mima and watching her work progress for the past few Months at The Image Flow. See more of Mima’s work at her website.

Mima is a long time B&W photographer now transitioning from the dark room to a more digital process. While all of the images are shot on a Leica with B&W film, Mima says her “color photographs are hand-colored using Marshall Oils, then re-photographed, adjusted in Photoshop and printed digitally.”

Printed at 20ppi, pixelation and jpg artifacts appear

The big blocky pixels as well as the grid pattern of jpg artifacts is noticeable even at viewing distance and is absolutely not acceptable. Fortunately, we can clean this image up in 3 quick steps. First, let’s get rid of the blocky grid of jpg artifacts. Its important to do this step first before we resample/ enlarge the image, so it doesn’t look worse.

To remove the jpg artifacts go to the menu bar and choose: Filter>>Noise>>Reduce Noise. This is a very powerful and potentially destructive tool if used with a heavy hand. We are only interested in the bottom check box “Remove JPEG Artifacts.” You can experiment with the “Remove Color Noise” slider, but make sure everything else is set to “0″.

The second step is to resample or enlarge the image so that it has higher ppi/ resolution. Ideal resolution for an inkjet print is 300 pixels per inch, which is a 1500% enlargement from a 20ppi image. That’s overkill. If we enlarged it that much, all we would get is a big blurry mess that will really slow down your computer. We just need to enlarge it enough so that the blockiness of the pixels disappears (Image>>Image Size).

20ppi

100ppi

Sure, if you stick your nose up to the print you’ll notice it starts to fall apart, especially if its a detail critical shot like a portrait. But, its impossible to create more detail. The trick is to fool the eye by giving the appearance of detail or sharpness. So, the final step is to add a subtle layer of film grain or noise.

Create a new layer with overlay neutral color.

If we’re going to add noise we want to do it to a separate layer so that we have the most control over how it blends with the image. In your menu bar, go to: Layer>>New>>Layer. Change “Mode” to “Overlay” and check “Fill with Overlay-neutral color”. This will create a new layer in your layer stack filled with solid gray and set to the Overlay blending mode. Now go to Filter>>Noise>>Add Noise in the menu bar. The amount that you add depends on the ppi you set in the previous step. For my image at 100ppi an amount of 9.6 did the trick. You want the noise to be visible, but not so much that it obscures the image. For most images Gaussian and Monochromatic noise looks best, but feel free to experiment. If the noise looks a little too intense you can lower the layer opacity in your layers palette.

Final image with gaussian monochromatic noise added

I hope this was helpful, though I’m not sure how many people actually want to make prints this large. This process is useful for printing at smaller sizes as well when ever a significant enlargement from the digital file is needed. Also, because this is my first tutorial on here, I’d love to hear any and all feed back. Thanks!

I started trying out online printing services and then a couple local places, which were just as unpredictable. The first problem I ran into was no one would print the custom sizes my panoramic shots require and I can’t afford to pay for wasted inches. Next, paper choices were always a gamble and color, of course, was all over the place. I heard from some folks at the Marin Photo Club that a little studio in Mill Valley, CA called The Image Flow was becoming the place to do high end digital printing. One 8×10 later I found myself @ The Image Flow.

Stuart and Damien understood my frustrations with printing and their enthusiasm for the creative process was refreshing. They both come from the world of professional photography where every detail matters and the perfect print is the norm, not a magically random occurrence. I guess they realized I knew a thing or two about digital photography and asked if I wanted to help out at the studio. So, now I’m @ The Image Flow and having a great time, retouching, printing, teaching photoshop, and of course learning a lot. Though it’s still a little odd that I’m commuting everyday to the town I grew up in.

My goal now is to do some cross-blogging here and on The Image Flow blog. I’ll be writing about the projects I’m working on and any tips and tricks we discover. Stay tuned for more!

Anyways, let me know what you think of the site, and hopefully you’ll enjoy browsing as much as I enjoyed creating it.