Epson Print Academy report

"300 people sitting in a dark room listening to two hippies talk about some weird shit," is how Graham Nash (with Mac Holbert) introduced the topic of digital printing. He was among a slew of luminaries in the room for the Epson Print Academy today in Bellevue. Bruce Fraser, in my opinion a god in the pantheon of digital imaging, described the RAW workflow (best tip—tweak the curve to restore highlight contrast after highlight detail retrieval in the exposure slider). Greg Gorman gave his complicated black and white conversion protocol, after a slide show of his celebrities best friends (the day was otherwise absent of these tangential inspirational slide shows). Rob Galbraith was in the audience, as was Henry Wilhelm.

An instructive moment came just before lunch, as Jeff Schewe demonstrated how to output a print. "Here’s the secret. When you push the "Print" button, you say, ‘Please, please, please, please, please, please." "Print Error" flashed on the giant projection at the front of the hall. Making digital prints is still a major headache.

George Jardine from Adobe gave a presentation on Lightroom, available in beta for the Mac. This could be a killer app, incoporating RAW processing, cataloging, and outputing. A Windows version is coming, perhaps by this summer. Right now I use four programs in my workflow: Photo Mechanic, Bridge, Photoshop and Iview. This sounds like a single, cradle to grave solution.

Rumors are abroad on inkjet papers that emulate fiber photo paper. Crane has one making the rounds of the trade shows, and Hahnemuhle also is rumored to have one on the way.

Here is the single, most useful addition to my arsenal of image manipulation tools: a midtone correction protocol from Mac Holbert. This is especially applicable to black and white images. Here goes (in deep Photoshop geekspeak—civilians should probably stop here).

Copy the Background Layer. Double-click to enter the Layer Style dialog box. Change the blend mode to Overlay, and the Opacity level to 20%. Confine the Blend area at the bottom of the box to between 70 and 170. Alt-Click to bring in another set of threshold arrows to 50 and 190. This defines the feather zone. Then run a High Pass filter (under Other). Adjust the Opacity setting as required.

Comments

[Josh Wand]

Man, wish I could have afforded to go when they were in NYC... sounds like a good workshop. Were there opportunities for schmoozing up the Photoshop Celebrities?

And oooo feathered transitions on "blend if" controls! I'm gonna share that one with my retouching staff on monday!

[Doug]

I saw several people go after Graham Nash's autograph. So, yes, I suppose schmoozing was possible. As it was, I saw a lot of friends from the local pro photographer community at this thing.

[Earl]

So in your opinion, was it worth attending?