The other day I visited Paul Butzi in his studio near Carnation. He is the landscape photographer I met at the Poncho Auction, where I asked him how he had made prints so large. I had unknowingly complimented him by thinking they were silver, he told me, and so I wanted to know more about his workflow. Paul is extremely generous with his knowledge, and even publishes the curves he uses to tone his prints on his website.
As a former software engineer Paul is not shy about his poor opinion about the Photoshop interface. "Stupid" was one of his gentler exclamations. Like me, he tends to create a complex stack of adjustment layers when working for some time on an image. He is thrilled to be out of the darkroom, and is ecstatic about the possibilities that digital manipulation offers, particularly the freedom to create a print only once and have those manipulations saved. To go back and replicate a silver print takes as much effort as it did the first time. With digital there is no cost in replication—all the effort has previously been expended. You just open the file and print another one.
He is working from 4x5 black and white film and scanning the negs on a Microtek scanner. I have been seeking a solution for my panoramic format negatives (I hate how my Coolscan won’t give me a sharp scan corner to corner—and I have to stitch two halves besides—and my Epson 4870 just isn’t sharp enough overall), and had hoped that if this scanner was good enough for Paul, it might work for me. Well, there was no tray that fit my format, and we had to tape the negative I brought to a full frame glass carrier. It was an imperfect and inelegant solution, which made me take this scanner off my list.
He likes to scan in transparency format (so that you see a negative on the screen) and invert in Photoshop. It makes for a much softer scan than I’m accustomed to seeing, but in 16 bit mode there’s plenty of pixels to fill out the unused portion of the scale (this is a counter-intuitive notion, but then you draw in the right and left sides of a levels adjustment, you’re not shrinking the room that the pixels fit in. The room—the 0 to 256 levels—remains the same, but you’re stretching out a fixed number of pixels to fit all the available space, instead of them just occupying the middle. In a smaller bit mode you can begin to see gaps in the histogram.)
I made an error in bringing one of my files to print, rather than seeing him print one of his. I should have watched his decision-making process at work over an image he wanted to bring to fruition. But what was encouraging, in a way, was that we did not make a print that was an overwhelming improvement over what I already had made with my Epson 4000. In fact, I think I prefer the look of the QTR output over the Epson profiles that Paul has tweaked. Paul is a better printer than me, and vastly more experienced, but this is a case where personal preference may lead me down a different path.
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