Grinding it Out

It’s said that one never stops learning. There is always something that can be learned to help improve the way things are done.

Over the last few days I have been grinding away trying to overcome frustrating colour and black & white printing problems. A photograph I had taken was required urgently so that it could be framed. Whenever I tried to print it on my inkjet printer the blacks adopted a purple hue and skin-tones in faces turned pasty and lifeless. In the end I resorted to having the print made by the local photo print shop.

Grinding Away - Constructing a jetty pylon - Viaduct Basin, Auckland, New Zealand

All was not lost however. Graham at the print shop suggested how the printer problem might be solved and gave me an Adobe master colour photograph to scan and use as a test for adjusting images to match printed output. That got me to checking all the colour settings in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, in my scanner and my printer driver. After a number of abortive attempts the colours and blacks printed as required. What a grind though!

What else did I learn? Don’t judge the colours of the final prints until the ink has dried! In the drying process the inks react with the surface of the paper and change colour to the final form, which ends up to be what was wanted in the first place. I now recall noticing this before, but had forgotten.