DIGITAL IMAGERY

PIXEL PROPHET PRINT IS THE PERFORMANCE

Martin Christie has always felt that, as a profession, printers get pretty poor coverage in popular media. After all, when television channels anxious to fill available viewing hours with content have made personalities of sewer workers and ticket collectors, and a blocked drain can be a major drama, it seems any daily event can be raised to be the subject of compulsive viewing.

Occupations that involve real drama involving life and death, like doctors, police and even vets, are understandable as high profile. Still, when baking cakes and sewing become headline features, you have to wonder where the list will end.

I suppose food is an obvious candidate because we all consume it. However, there is a certain irony in the fascination of its preparation when so many people seemed to be obsessed with the delivery of fast, precooked cuisine, to the extent that thousands could probably survive without a kitchen at all. Of course, we all need print at some time or other in our lives, whether it’s the basics of birth, marriage and death. Despite the rise of digital technology, paper still plays a significant part in transmitting facts and figures. It will continue to do so as it is the only medium with proven longevity over centuries, apart from things literally carved in stone.

The printed word has played a more decisive part in history than most battles, which is why those in power have often tried so hard to suppress it, but while books and pamphlets can burn, it’s a lot harder to track them all down than today — flick a switch to close down the internet.

When photographs could be printed in more recent times, they have equally had an impact and a lifespan which flicking through transient images on a small screen can never challenge. For over a century now, those images have not only captured history but often changed it for good or ill.

Surprising then it has taken so long for photography to join the list of TV challenges, as the BBC has recruited celebrity photographer Rankin (he does have a first name; it’s John) to host a series with a number of keen amateurhope-to be-professionals. I usually cringe at the portrayal of photographers on the screen, generally playing the expected cliches, clicking away randomly and full of crass remarks. So I was reluctant to rush to watch the series initially, but now, in the interest of balance, I’m catching up one by one online and so far favourably inclined.

Through digital technology, photography has become something everybody does, and almost on a daily basis. Previously the camera would only be dragged out for the special occasion, Christmas or a holiday, and the day-to-day snapping would be left to the professional and the enthusiast. Instead, they learned to do it properly through trial and error.

If you only held a camera a couple of times a year, it was tough to learn because the device didn’t give you much help. You only got to see results when the prints came out, and even then, it would be hard to work out what you’d done wrong unless you’d obviously chopped someone’s head off!

Now you can see what you are doing; it’s a lot easier to get it, if not exactly right, merely acceptable. But actually, because of that, it is much more likely to result in a whole series of very average images, none of which are perfect but are never given a really critical review, so they will do.

And that is the theme of Rankin’s series so far as I have seen, taking photographers who are mostly self-taught and reasonably competent at some level and making them more critical of what they are doing in terms of subject and composition, as well as eventually more professional and commercial. Hopefully, a lot of the new generation of photographers, empowered by digital cameras and phones, will take note. It’s a lot easier to taste a poor dish than judge a bad photograph.

I have often said that modern cameras are so good that it is very easy for anyone to take a great photo — once. The difference is that a professional has to do it every time, in any circumstances, or go hungry; at least, that’s the general theory.

I don’t know if Rankin will go on to feature printing in future episodes, but it is very much a part of the judgement of a truly great photograph. There’s no hiding imperfections in hard print. They may not show on the small screen, but when those pixels hit the paper, the truth is revealed for all to see.

In browsing other photographers for research for this column, I came across an interesting quote from American landscape expert Ansel Adams which, to be honest, I had never heard before. “The negative is the score, and the print is the performance.” I had to do a double-take to get the sense, but he uses the word score in its musical sense rather than a football analogy. The notes on paper are simply symbols until the orchestra brings them to life. It struck me as particularly apt in present digital terms as despite what many people seem to believe, the displayed images are not strictly real but projections of mathematical numbers. You have to grasp that to understand why so many things can go wrong in the complicated digital daisy chain to make them real and why some things, particularly colours, are not always what they seem.

It is the daily challenge at the counter with print on demand, explaining why some things

A hexadecimal color value is a six-digit code preceded by a # sign; it defines a color that is used in a website or a computer program.

that look perfect on screen just cannot be reproduced in print — at least not in the time scale and price range, the customer expects. In recent columns, I have compared the different characteristics of RGB and CMYK, between projected colour and printed reflective colour, and the problems encountered getting one as close to the other as possible.

Interestingly, as customers are an endless source of inspiration for me, a new request came in recently. You get used to designers producing a Pantone reference to match the colours on their website, but this one produced a Hex number. If you haven’t spotted it before, it’s hiding in the bottom box of Photoshop’s colour picker below LAB and the other usual suspects. Hex is a sort of simplified code used mainly for web colours, and as such, it’s not a bad reference for matching the hue the customer expects. There are even handy online colour charts so they can choose and see the result slight variations can make. In this case, the Hex code turned out to be a nearperfect 100% magenta print, and the customer never needed to know the difference between additive and subtractive process. So you do learn something new every day.

GET READY FOR WINDOWS 11!

You may not be familiar with the eighties spoof rock documentary This is Spinal Tap, but one of the many epic heavy metal cameos is the guitarist boasting that his stage amp volume control ‘goes up to eleven’ instead of the normal ten, so it’s got to be better, right? It was a statement that in the technological world, numbers would count as much as quality.

I couldn’t help remembering it when I heard about the release of Microsoft’s latest incarnation, Windows 11, coming soon to a computer need you. Microsoft has had a few issues with numbers in the past, missing out on a few in sequence to disguise a few embarrassing failures. Many of you reading this will be far too young to remember any of those, but suffice it to say that when this column started, we worked with Windows 98, relating to the year it was introduced, not the version. Subsequent versions of the operating system trialled various names to make them sound more modern and less dated, but it looks like they are sticking to numbers, at least for the next two.

One of the reasons for software upgrades is to sort out bugs and general glitches that only get uncovered in long term use and combat possible security threats from those who are also developing software. But it also enables Microsoft to introduce more features that are just as useful for them as they are intended to be for you. A brief review reveals more applications to keep you exclusively in the Windows family.

Businesses are generally reluctant to update their software immediately, not wishing to be the guinea pigs that discover unexpected issues. That’s why Windows XP, which had a long and stable history, stuck around for so long. In fact, Windows 7 appears to be still running on at least 100 million machines, despite Microsoft ending support for the operating system a year ago.

Apparently, one of the additional consequences of the pandemic, with workers and students struggling at home, has been the dusting down of old desktop PCs to tackle jobs that couldn’t be handled on a phone. No doubt there will be a few A4 inkjet printers, with hopelessly clogged heads, being thrown at walls as well!

Certainly, any new PCs bought towards the end of this year are likely to come with Windows 11 already installed, and the update will be available free to the current ten users. So it’s well to be aware of its impending arrival.

I may be an old cynic, but I am experienced enough to know that with every march forwards, there is likely to be at least one step backwards, even if it is a small one.

The one common fact about software “improvements” is that they require more computing power. More features mean the use of more memory, processing power and storage space. So increasingly, there will be pressure on business to upgrade their hardware as well as software simply to keep up — something they are often reluctant to do in good times, let alone hard ones.

For anyone digging an old desktop out of the loft, they may be frustrated to find it will struggle to run a lot of modern software at peak performance anyway. Windows, for example, may give you a minimum specification to run, but that’s only the operating system functioning, not juggling all the other programs you’ve installed. And they all want to be updated too!

The problem is that the software companies tend to work in their own isolation and assume that their product has priority. With the increasing use of machine learning — artificial intelligence running in the background to learn more about how you work and want to work — there is a real danger that in trying to be helpful, the machine can actually get in your way.

As an industry, we rely so much on speed and efficiency to be profitable, so these considerations are important as wasted time is money, not just frustration. Hopefully, Windows 11 will be a step forward and not just another number.