Epson R1900 to 3880

28 Jun Leave a Comment Filed Under: Opinion, Photography, Printing

Epson Stylus Pro 3880

I fig­ured it was time to upgrade. My Epson Stylus Photo R1900 (using UltraChrome Hi-Gloss 2 pig­ment ink) has done tremen­dous ser­vice and pro­duces a very fine color image in either gloss, semi­gloss or matte finish. But I was ready to go to the next level and wanted the Epson Stylus Pro 3880 (using UltraChrome K3 with Vivid Magenta pig­ment ink). Not to men­tion Epson’s $100 rebate good until June 30th!

The rea­sons I picked the R1900 to replace the Epson Stylus Photo 960 I had for sev­eral years still remain the strong points of the R1900:

  • 13” wide paper capacity with rear roll feed option
  • Pigment inks for long print life and many paper choices
  • Gloss Optimizer “ink” to overlay gloss and semi­gloss papers to elim­i­nate gloss differential
  • Five colors of ink plus matte and photo blacks
  • Desktop size

For me, the 3880 brings these advantages:

  • 17” wide paper capacity
  • Professional level image quality
  • Enhanced pig­ment inks for a wider color gamut
  • AccuPhoto™ HD2 Screening Technology which cre­ates smooth color tran­si­tions and better shadow and high­light detail
  • Factory cal­i­bra­tion ensuring printer-to-printer color con­sis­tency and there­fore making 3rd party ICC pro­files more accurate
  • Light Black and Light Light Black inks for supe­rior black-and-white print quality

Many point to the large ink tanks (80 ml) on the 3880 as a sig­nif­i­cant advan­tage over the smaller R1900 ink tanks (11 ml), and it undoubtably is. But I’m not a high enough volume printer (maybe I will be now) to have really been pinched by fre­quent tank changes or the higher ink cost for the R1900.

Of course there are a few down­sides to the 3800 that must be managed:

  • No roll paper feed option
  • No Gloss Optimizer
  • Slightly larger size
  • Wastes black ink when switching from photo to matte black and back (both ink tanks share the same print head noz­zles and tubing)

So how do I plan to manage the short­coming of the 3880?

 

  • No roll paper feed option — for really long prints such as panoramas, I’ll have to go to a print lab such as White House Custom Color (they do 10” x 30” prints). Another pos­si­bility is cut size paper from Red River Paper, who carry my favorites (Arctic Polar Satin and 60# Polar Matte) in both 13” x 38” and 8 ½” x 25” sizes. Both ways should be fine for “ordi­nary” panoramas.
  • No gloss opti­mizer — this one may be tricky, although the reviews I read online sug­gest that gloss dif­fer­en­tial is very well con­trolled with this ink set. But I don’t gen­er­ally like high gloss papers anyway, so I’m fig­uring that the very low gloss satin and luster papers that I prefer won’t shown an objec­tion­able gloss dif­fer­en­tial. More on that in a future post, perhaps.
  • Slightly larger size — its just a few inches wider than the R1900 at 27” vs. 24 ¼”. My small rolling printer cart will still handle it. And since it does roll, I can move it away from the wall when I need to fold out the paper feed tray.
  • Wastes black ink on swaps — I’ll just have to get over that and try to batch my media types together as much as pos­sible. Eric Chan esti­mates that a photo to matte black swap wastes about $0.85 and the swap from matte to photo black wastes about $2.25.

There are a number of excel­lent reviews of this printer on the internet, so rather than doing another one, I’ll refer you to the reviews that were most helpful to me:

Although its not a review exactly, Eric Chan’s printer notes and resources page has a vast amount of infor­ma­tion about the very sim­ilar Epson Stylus Pro 3800. And he’s begin­ning to add spe­cific 3880 tips as well.

As an aside, I get all my everyday printing sup­plies (paper, ink, card stock, envelopes, etc.) from Red River Paper. And ground ship­ping is free (for orders over $25, but that’s all of them) by using the Red River Paper sponsor tile on The Digital Story website.

Organizing in Aperture: An Example

26 Jun 5 Comments Filed Under: Aperture

One of my favorite fea­tures of Aperture is its flex­ible orga­ni­za­tional ability for both images and the byprod­ucts of those images, such as photo books, and web sites. Lightroom simply cannot match these abil­i­ties — its lit­eral folder struc­ture and sep­a­rate col­lec­tions just can’t take you there.

An Example Project

To make my point more clear, I’ve assem­bled this mock Aperture library project as an example. All the pieces of the project (images, albums, books, web sites, etc.) are kept within the project; there’s no need to dupli­cate the folder struc­ture as col­lec­tions which Lightroom requires. Looking at the simple project to the left, you get the idea.

All the images from the shoot are imported into the library project “The Big Shoot.” Projects are the pri­mary con­tainers in Aperture for images. All images are grouped into projects which are simply abstract file col­lec­tions. Abstract because, for a given project, the images can be any­where on the disk — scat­tered among Finder folders as ref­er­enced files or stored by Aperture within its Library file.

Within the project can be any or all of Aperture’s other orga­ni­za­tional tools. In this example you’ll see:

  • An album named “A Subset:” albums are simply alter­nate group­ings of images that are already in the project. Just drag the images into as many albums as make sense for your project as sub­di­vi­sions and group­ings. Images still live in the project, but can also be held in albums as pointers back to the images in the project. These pointers are tiny uses of disk space — there’s never a need to dupli­cate a file within Aperture.
  • Two smart albums named “Keepers” and “Picks:” smart albums use search cri­teria to auto­mat­i­cally group images and then behave like reg­ular albums. In this example, I’ve set up the “Keepers” smart album to gather all images that I’ve flagged in the project and the “Picks” smart album to gather all the images that are rated four-star or above. There is no limit to the number of smart albums you might use or the com­plexity of the search cri­teria for each.
  • A photo book named “The Book:” books are a great fea­ture of Aperture that has no match in Lightroom. A book is just a spe­cial­ized album in that you can drag images from the project, or another album, into it in order to col­lect the images to be included in the book. Aperture’s built-in book for­mat­ting tools are quite good and the ability to order the printed book right from within Aperture is wonderful.
  • A web site named “Web Sharing:” another type of spe­cial­ized album is the web page. Like a book, you gather images together and then create web pages con­taining them that can be exported straight to your MobileMe web site or to a folder to be uploaded to your own web server.

There are other orga­ni­za­tion tools in Aperture as well: Light Table, Slideshow, and Web Journal. Each is another spe­cial­ized album with its own fea­tures and for­mat­ting tools. And then there are folders. Again, these are not lit­eral Finder folders, but are abstract tools that can hold any­thing. Put them within your project to group together mul­tiple books or put them at the top level of the library hier­archy to group other projects. There are end­less exam­ples and uses. Thankfully Aperture 3’s folders are all blue; the blue and yellow folders in Aperture 2 were nothing but confusing.

To dig deeper into Aperture’s orga­ni­za­tional tools check out Robert Boyer’s excel­lent ebook The Definitive Guide To Organizing Your Image Library Using Aperture.

Aperture or Lightroom? Both at 3.

19 Jun 7 Comments Filed Under: Aperture, Opinion, Photography

Both Aperture and Lightroom have been updated to ver­sions 3 since my dis­cus­sion of their dif­fer­ences back at ver­sion 2. The recent upgrades have been kind to both, although I would say that the changes to Lightroom were more evo­lu­tionary than those of Aperture. To update my old post, let me point out the impor­tant changes I see in the two pow­er­house photo work­flow applications.

Aperture

Quick Brushes — but all adjust­ment bricks can be brushed either in or out.

The most sig­nif­i­cant change to Aperture, in my view, is the addi­tion of brushes to make local­ized, instead of image-wide, adjust­ments. Yes, Lightroom fans, this is mostly a “catch up” fea­ture for Aperture since Lightroom added brushes in ver­sion 2. Happily, Aperture has taken it a little far­ther with the ability to brush in or brush out effects and the choice of more effects (even curves) than the set pro­vided by Lightroom. But still, its mostly catch up.

Yes, curves. Aperture added another “catch up” fea­ture in a flex­ible imple­men­ta­tion of the curves adjust­ment brick. Along with brushes, cer­tainly one of the most requested fea­tures and one of the biggest gap in fea­tures with Lightroom.

In another move to match Lightroom, Aperture now also has adjust­ment pre­sets. Once you find adjust­ment set­tings that you like enough to use over and over, you can save them as a preset And, in Aperture, those pre­sets are added to the existing adjust­ments rather than replacing them as Lightroom does.

The Curves Adjustment Brick — many have been waiting for this

I may be going against the grain here, but I don’t see much value in the iPhoto-like addi­tions of faces and places to Aperture. But I know lots of people like both fea­tures, so I’ll simply say that “auto­matic” facial recog­ni­tion is here along with a map based method for geo-tagging your images. If those are impor­tant to you, Lightroom has nei­ther (although you can add geo-tagging with a plug-in).

Aperture has always had a very nice full screen editing envi­ron­ment. Version 3 adds full screen imple­men­ta­tions of the image browser and project views.

The import dialog was always a favorite of mine in Aperture and it has gotten better with many more import set­tings such as meta­data pre­sets, adjust­ment pre­sets, RAW+JPEG han­dling and more.

In an odd move that seems to add more com­plexity than its worth is Aperture’s new trash can. If you delete an image, it goes there, instead of the system’s trash can. So deleting images is now a multi-step process: delete, empty Aperture’s trash and then empty the system trash. Why?

Aperture’s Own Trash

Did I miss a few of your favorite fea­tures? Probably. Apple says they added over 200 new fea­tures in this upgrade and I’ve only touched the ones that most interest me in my per­sonal photo workflow.

One thing that did not change with Aperture 3 is its insa­tiable demand for CPU, GPU and RAM. Woe be it to anyone expecting stellar per­for­mance on any­thing less than the top end class of Macintosh. I’m run­ning it on a Mac Pro with eight 2.8 GHz CPU cores, an NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT video card, and 8 GB of RAM and it runs fine. Your mileage may vary.

In closing com­ments on Aperture 3, I’ve got to men­tion all the bugs, some severe and sev­eral effecting me, that Apple allowed to ship with ver­sion 3.0. That’s not good; many depend on Aperture for their pro­fes­sional work­flows. Granted, if Aperture is a key part of your busi­ness, you prob­ably didn’t just upgrade and go instead of sticking with ver­sion 2 until your testing of ver­sion 3 proved it ready. But still, this is a pro­fes­sional tool and Apple did not do a pro­fes­sional job of deliv­ering the upgrade. The good news, at least for me, is that ver­sion 3.0.3 and sev­eral small OS updates have made Aperture reliable.

Lightroom

The phi­los­ophy of the Lightroom upgrade bares some resem­blance to the upgrade from Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) to Snow Leopard (10.6). Both focused mostly on the under­pin­nings and basic struc­ture. And it that regard, many of Lightroom’s updates for ver­sion 3 are more under the hood.

Lens Correction Options

The RAW image decoding pipeline has seen a near com­plete over­haul, but the user will see nothing but the improved results. Most sig­nif­i­cant of these is vastly better dig­ital image noise sup­pres­sion (which may now be best in class). This is not good news for noise reduc­tion plug-in developers.

A con­tro­ver­sial change is the very new import dialog. It has gained a number of new fea­tures bringing it to near fea­ture parity with Aperture, but in the result has aggra­vated many Lightroom users.

Lens cor­rec­tion is a big deal to lots of pho­tog­ra­phers. Lightroom now has auto­matic geo­metric dis­tor­tion, chro­matic aber­ra­tion, and vignetting cor­rec­tion built in. Profiles are included for most common lenses, but pro­files can also be cre­ated for any lens with an addi­tional free utility. Its sur­prising to see the dif­fer­ence this makes to an image, even one made with good glass.

Oddly, Lightroom still does not have onscreen proofing using ICC pro­files, although it was widely rumored to be get­ting that fea­ture and Photoshop has had it for what seems like forever.

So?

I’m guessing that few people who are invested in Aperture or Lightroom will be changing pro­grams based on the fea­tures in this upgrade. Aperture has closed the gap with Lightroom in all the key image man­age­ment and editing fea­tures. Lightroom has added some impor­tant refine­ments. But the basic nature of the two has remained the same. If you didn’t like Lightroom before, you still won’t.

Lightroom still has its modal struc­ture sep­a­rating the Library from the Develop and Print mod­ules. And it is still a pow­erful image editor with a won­der­fully flex­ible print package for single sheets. But I don’t see its image man­age­ment fea­tures as its strong point and that hasn’t changed with the upgrade.

For Aperture, the story is very good. It retains its “Apple-like” user inter­face and power book printing tools while adding the image adjust­ment tools that have long been missing. The fea­tures gap between Aperture and Lightroom is, for all intents and pur­poses, gone.

The last sev­eral weeks have seen a number of new RAW image for­mats sup­ported by Aperture. Lightroom has done a gen­er­ally better job of keeping up with new cam­eras, but per­haps we’ll now see Apple doing a faster. This will surely be impor­tant to folks who upgrade camera bodies often.

For me? While I have been using both pro­grams for dif­ferent things, the improve­ments to Aperture move it to the top of my list and I’ll be doing all my new work in Aperture alone.

Other Resources

If you’d like to find out more about the improve­ments in both appli­ca­tions, take a look at these sites:

Aperture

Lightroom