Hi all,
Recently I have been looking at making better photographic prints, in
particular prints that might have appeal to the kinds of people who buy art;
especially oil, acrylic and water-colour paintings.
Any kinds of "normal" photographic prints have a negligible market in New
Zealand, and most galleries refuse to hang them. A typical response when I
show them an A4 print includes "Yes, but I would want to see a 'print' ".
Whatever a 'print' is. Off-set; etc, yes. NO gloss. No photographic paper
print. Maybe Giclee.
It is very clear to me that composition, content, often simplicity, and often
striking colours, are important in this area of art. And surface
characteristics.
The kinds of extremely fine detail that we as photographers are so fond of
don't necessarily rate highly in the art world. The owner of the printing shop
whose services I am considering using, showed me one very sharp image of
the head of a mountain parrot (kea (wikipedia)) that one of his clients made,
with the idea if showing me the kind of image standard he prefers.
I think he and I will be having an interesting conversation about this area of
printing. Printing *my* images.
So I am looking hard at getting some prints done on Hanemuehle cotton rag
paper and also on fine canvas; as previously noted.
Many of my better images need some extra attention, such as highlights
reduced / eliminated, fussy areas reduced or removed, faults including dust
removed.
Of course I also have to attend to general lighting level, contrast, colours
and
sharpness.
So I have been looking for a program with brush / clone / "airspray" tools that
can be finely tuned and which are capable of being adjusted to being applied
very gradually in tiny steps.
I have my W'95 8.2 GB machine but options there are running out as it fills
up and programs do not have the free space to use. My laptop runs W'98,
but it has limited space also, and its main role is to store (mainly) digital
images prior to writing to CD.
This last week or so I have had the luxury of using my son's XP machine,
and I am now much more amenable to the idea of getting a 2nd hand XP
machine with lots of HDD space and much memory. It is amazing that quite
capable machines are available for ± $500 NZ; compare that with the $5,000
NZ I paid for my W'95 machine with *two* 640MB HDDs 11 years ago and I
thought I was (and was) getting a bargain. Two HDDs; what extravagance!!
Embellish will run on all machines, has a small footprint, and can do small
paint jobs quite well. Hopeless for sharpening. Has great save options.
Irfanview is a great little program and I have two versions, including one for
the W'95 machine. It does practically all the manipulation I need but cloning
and painting etc are not available. Has great save options.
Adobe Photodeluxe is very capable and I like it. However, I no longer have
the space on the W'96 machine for it to run for big images, and it does not
run well on XP.
I have Photoshop 5.5, but it takes a lot of room and the paint tools etc are
hopeless.
Recently I downloaded Picture Window Pro trial, and was ready to part out
with the $89US ($130 NZ) it costs. However, as far as I can tell the paint etc
tools are far too basic and coarse for my needs.
SilkyPix doesn't do any of these kinds of image manipulation. It works on
what you've got, and that's it.
Last night I downloaded all 12MB (two files without the Help) of the XP
version of The Gimp. Download took about 80 minutes !!
With a lot of experimentation over about 3 hours I was able to ascertain that
several of the brush, clone etc tools can be screwed down low enough to
make fine, incremental adjustments, and although they are small tools, if the
image is at 200% or 300% when editing, that doesn't seem to matter.
So, the way I am thinking is that The Gimp might well become my main tool
for extensive manipulation, and that the $130 NZ that I was prepared to part
out with for PWP will go a long way to getting me a 2 - 3 GHZ machine
already loaded with XP.
Contrast this with the likely cost of the 1400 dpi archival pigment prints I am
considering - (which I would hope to recoup).
Photo rag A4 $33, A3 $42, A2 $66
60-year fine art canvas A4 $43, A3 $$61. each.
Interesting.
Brian
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