Call me Ishmael. Some months ago – never mind how long precisely – having some money in my pocket and nothing particularly interesting to do with it, I thought I would buy a printer . . . . .
I could probably keep this up, and it would be fitting, as home printing of photographs is an exercise a bit like chasing that white wale; why am I doing it, what I’m hoping to get out of it, it’s all going to end badly somewhere out in cold ocean, adrift.
I’m not new to digital printing. In the distant past, I’ve used various Epson photo printers, including one that I remember costing as much as my Leica, and which died a death of neglecting as ink dried in the tubes or some such thing. I also have some professional experience printing on those giant roll feed plotters that architects use, and once upon a time knew enough to be able to hand edit the Post Script when some bearded academic insisted on printing posters from LaTex. All that experience aside, I’ve never really felt like I’ve mastered the variables having never really understood color management that well and never having been able or willing to spend enough money on consumables to ever really sort out the workflow.
I now have the money, and I know a bit more about color management, but instead of making checklists on how to use Canon Image Pro 1000 (there’s a ‘Graf’ in there somewhere that I’m missing) I’m writing this blog post.
Where is this going? Oh yeah, I also bought a new monitor, a BenQ something other 27 inch 4K 99% of some color scheme model. It was supposed to be able to charge my MacBook over USB-C. It doesn’t. Oh well. And I bought a color profiler thingy, so now I’m in theory very well color managed. I think. It’s a little hard for me to tell as I don’t think my color perception is that accurate. Kate’s is much better, so I check with her when I’m in doubt. Anyway, the prints look pretty similar to what is on the screen, as similar as colors on a reflective media can look to light emanating from some magic window.
Are those oranges quite the same? Is that guy’s arm really that orange (goes out to the construction site to check . . . yep, it is, wonder if the people who printed that fencing had a color profiler thingy).
