from the 2006 Stephen Johnson on Digital Photography

Chapter 14 Printing— A New World

Beauty is the point of departure
and the endpoint

Perfection is the goal
Longevity a necessity

Printing is Joyous and Painful

–Stephen Johnson

Leaving the darkroom behind has opened the doors to photography and printmaking like never before in photographic history. The pent-up passion to make our own prints is finally being released for many people with the introduction of desktop inkjet and dye-sublimation printers of extraordinary quality. There are others who had found the chemicals of the darkroom too harsh for their health and are now freed again to pursue their passion for art. This all amounts to empowerment and a great flow of creative juices.

Printing in the Digital Age
It is also true that a new level of control over the look and feel of prints is now well in place. A constant mantra that I hear is that photographs that were difficult or impossible to print are now hanging on walls and being enjoyed.

Photographic Quality on the Desktop
The advent of very fine dot inkjet printers has revolutionized printmaking for photographers. High-quality dye-sublimation printers presaged the inkjet, but had greater per unit expense and some of their own development issues. Costs continue to plummet and quality keeps rising. It is a very interesting time to make prints.

Direct Control 
Direct interaction with repeatable printing processes is a dramatic step forward for most photographers, giving us control, freedom, and frustration simultaneously. Good working methods can reduce wasted prints and gain consistent control over the printing process. This is not to suggest that things are yet easy for the perfectionist in each of us. Extraordinary prints can still be painful to produce.

Permanence
Initially, inkjet printers were known for fading. The general impression was that they looked good, but were not going to hang around. Their sheer beauty compelled the development of longer-lasting inks mated with stable papers. The advent of inkjet pigment has led to a huge increase in the longevity of color photographs. Long-lasting processes such as pigment and cotton papers are factors that can dramatically increase the life of the finished photograph. Conversely, fugitive dye sets, mismatched papers, and cheap inks can lead to prints fading in months, weeks, or even days.

Accelerated aging tests, such as those conducted by Wilhelm Imaging, have predicted that some of the newer pigment inkjet prints are likely to last many hundreds of years. Some carefully engineered dye/paper combinations are even reaching near the 100-year mark. This is quite a remarkable breakthrough and finally relegates our traditional notions of color print life to a mere memory from the past.

Papers and Paper Qualities
Paper has always exerted a fundamental influence on print appearance. It cannot be otherwise. This is certainly still true in the digital age. It is just that now there are so many more choices than ever before. There is glossy, semi-gloss, matte, 100% cotton rag, smooth rag, and rough rag. None quite match the unique beauty of air-dried gelatin silver; some look very much like platinum, and some treatments look so new as to have no real historical antecedent.

Digital inkjet printing has opened up a whole new world of possibilities. Differing paper material, textures, color gamut and maximum apparent blackness are all considerations in paper choice. Traditionally, 100% cotton rag has been thought of as the most stable paper, and by many of us, the most beautiful. But there are many considerations, mould-made paper can have a rougher texture but may not be rag. Optical brightness can be added to make the paper whiter (blue-white, which glows in UV), but can fade, thus shortening the life of the color balance that was printed toward yellow. The surface texture and its durability are very important considerations in the perceived beauty of the print and in its practical handling.

Perspectives & Techniques from a Digital Photography Pioneer
Exploring the Intersection of Art & Technology

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Studying Printing with Stephen Johnson

Explore printing in the digital age with a classical landscape photographer who comes from the world of large-format color/black & white photography and years in the darkroom and has worked hard and early on for the development of high quality digital photography technology.

Steve has been deeply involved in the development of the digital photography world we now live and work in. His fundamental premise all through this development was that the new digital tools and materials had to equal or surpass traditional methods. Black and White photography arrived in high quality early on the capture side, but only in the last few years has black and white digital printing risen to the same heights.

Explore the possibilities of modern printers and their controls, nuance of tone and image tint, the glow of traditional looks and the subtlety of completely new ways of seeing color and black & white. Available printers in our custom lab include HP, Canon and Epson, all with dedicated black and white workflows and gray plus black inks.

Steve has maintained his deep love of color and black & white photography while leading the transition into digital photography. His digital black and white work dates back through 1992 with the Kodak DCS 200, the Leaf DCB and later through the BetterLight, Kodak dedicated BW cameras and the Foveon BW mode. Steve's use of custom Iris inks, gray inks for Epson printers and development work on the HP Z series black and white modes shows a long-term interest in bringing digital BW into the mainstream digital world. His was the fist digitally derived black and white print offered by Friends of Photography in their Print Collector program in 1995.

In color, Steve' careful use of real world light-filled color has been deeply influenced by his desire to make realistic luminous prints that reveal the pastel world we live-in and love. This is in stark contrast to the heavy, contrasty, over-saturated norm that distorts the real world into almost comic book renditions. His consulting in color printing started with Eastman Kodak in 1989 and has continued through his work with Apple, HP, Epson and Canon.

Classes cover workflow issues, color management, correcting color casts, adjustment layers, custom profile generation, editing and inspection. There being no magic bullet to making good prints, the workshop will also explore old fashioned testing, careful color judgments and interactive honing in on the best print possible.

Discussions typically include an exploration of print aesthetics in the digital age - what makes for a beautiful print? - do the new possibilities enhance our notion of what photography can be? - are we merely trying to imitate traditional photographic processes? Papers and their printing problems and advantages will be weighed, as well as their visual qualities.

Steve has been widely recognized for his printing expertise, by Apple Computer in 1997 with a ColorSync Profiling Excellence Award. In 1999, Folio Magazine declared the printing of Johnson's digital photographs in Life Magazine to be one of the Top 15 Critical Events in magazine publishing in the twentieth century. Stephen Johnson was named as a 2003 inductee into the Photoshop Hall of Fame, recognized for his achievements in Art. Canon named Steve as one of their Explorers of Light in 2006 and sponsors speaking engagements with him around the country. In 2007 X-Rite named Stephen as a founding member of their exclusive Coloratti group of photographers and educators honored for their skills in color management.

For more than 20 years, Stephen Johnson has played an influential role in the development of the photographic tools used today. In the late 1980s, he consulted with various high tech firms on the development of digital scanners and printers. By the early 1990s he was working with Adobe, Leaf and Betterlight on the development of software and digital camera hardware. The mid-1990s further expanded his high tech consultation to include Apple's Advanced Technology Group, QuickTime VR and color management with Gretag MacBeth. The late 1990s brought deep work with Epson on the development of their pigment based printers.

Work in the last 15 years has included the design of the Museum Etching paper with Hahnemühle, and working with Hewlett Packard in Barcelona on the conceptualization, design and performance of the self-profiling Z Series Digital Fine Art printers. The last 5 years have concentrated on working with Canon on their emarging line of large-format and desktop printers. 

His nearly 30 year relationship with Adobe has continued to influence product development on Photoshop with his recommendations continuing to find their way into products including Photoshop CS6's  Camera RAW 7/Lightroom 4 and all subsequent versions.

This record puts Steve in the singular position of photographing with a camera he had deep influence on, editing with software he played real roles in expanding and customizing, printing on printers he helped design, on paper he did design. His has been a truly remarkable career journey, pioneering a level of involvement in the development of the tools of his trade that may be unprecedented.