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You certainly don’t need to read this long page simply to have good prints made from your film or digital files, but if you are new to digital imaging or have questions about certain aspects of the process, we have tried to provide useful information to help you.

As a lab coming from the photographic tradition, much of this discussion will be couched in photographic terms and metaphors. Artists looking for high quality reproductions of original paintings and drawings are also beneficiaries of the digital revolution in printing.

What follows is a general discussion of the realm of digital printing-scanning, color management, image adjustment, printing methods-all these will be explained so that you can proceed at what ever level of involvement you wish, but with at least an understanding of the terminology and concepts you will come across. Some photographers will have no desire to do anything other than take the pictures and send the film in for printing. Others may want to have their film scanned, then do the file work themselves before sending the prepared files in for printing. Either approach is valid.

Of course, if you use a digital camera, the sections following that deal with film scanning may not be of interest, but issues of file preparation, color spaces, profiles, etc., still apply and are often sources of confusion.

If you already work with digital imaging, you can access the links on the left side of this page for information on each of the services we provide and skip the following discussion of digital imaging basics.

Do you want that print on paper, or paper?

There are now two distinctly different methods for taking a digital file and making a print. A digital file may be sent to a machine such as the LightJet, which can be considered a digital enlarger. Using lasers or LEDs, it exposes traditional photographic color paper to make the print, which is processed normally in a chemical processor under strict tolerances that give it remarkable consistency and accuracy. The second method is inkjet printing, sometimes referred to as giclée printing. Depending on the inks and printers used, the prints can be made on a wide variety of papers, from luster and glossy stock similar to what photographic papers offer, to matte and textured papers from the fine art and offset printing world. This choice is one each of us can make on our own by trying the various methods and there is, of course, nothing that keeps us from enjoying them all. The unifying thread that connects it all is the process of digitizing-scanning-the film-or starting with a file from a digital camera- and using an appropriate software package, such as Adobe Photoshop®, to prepare the image for printing. Herein lies the possibility of artistry that simply exceeds in all parameters what can be done in traditional darkroom printing of film.

If you have the equipment and the time to learn the programs, no one will do a better job on your pictures than you can. The key to it all is that if you use a program like Photoshop, have a basic understanding of color management issues and work with a calibrated monitor and print on a profiled printer, you control the final picture. The digital process of printing the resulting file is more consistent and less subject to the personal decisions of the printer than it is when printing in a traditional darkroom/enlarger environment.

Of course, there are many valid reasons why you might not want to take the time and expense learning to do all of your own digital image manipulation. This is where a lab like the LightRoom comes in. While we are perfectly happy to simply print your files via the method you choose, we are also here to work with you at any level of the digital process. We can scan your film and return it to you unadjusted, a “raw” scan that you prepare for eventual printing. We can also take the raw scan and do the file prep necessary to turn it into the Master Image File that is ready for printing. For our LightJet photographic printing, we even have the Custom print, for which there is no extra charge for any of the digital work. More information on that can be found on the LightJet page. Our basic file prep fees include spotting of all dust and minor scratches, adjustment of color and exposure and the equivalent of digital dodging and burning to best translate your scanned film into a print that faithfully reproduces your image within the characteristics of the printing material. We can also work with you, to apply any interpretation you can communicate to us for your desired final print. If the work goes beyond simply making a great print from your film, into the experimental realm, we may charge a straight hourly rate for this and other work, such as repair of more heavily damaged film.

For most of our customers, the basic scan and file prep is all they ever need. As with any form of printing, you can tweak your pictures forever. I once saw a show of Ansel Adams' work where he displayed about nine versions of his signature image, “Moonrise over Hernandez.” The variations ranged from subtle to extreme. Which one was the “best”? That’s up to the viewer. Adams has been quoted as saying the negative is like a musical score and the print is the performance. Many interpretations are possible.

Why did digital printing become so popular?

A digital print can be sharper, have truer color, better control of exposure and contrast than a traditional print, but it is still ultimately dependent on the quality of the original film or digital camera file to determine the quality of the print. The print may be sharper, but we can’t bring an out of focus image into focus. We can strive to preserve shadow and highlight detail, but it has to be there to begin with and even then you may still see more when inspecting the film with bright transmitted light or viewing a file on a monitor than a print viewed with reflective light can hold. That’s just the laws of physics.

The cost of digital printing is comparable to traditional printing, even less in some cases. The initial cost of the scanning and file prep is the big stumbling block for the casual photographer. We need to get paid for that work, of course, but I think our prices are quite reasonable. If you factor it into multiple prints, done at the time of the original order or later, it’s hardly an issue. The jump in image quality easily justifies the initial expense. Cost is always a valid consideration, but when it comes to image quality, few photographers, once they have seen the advantages of digital printing, ever go back to traditional methods. However, for our LightJet prints we also offer what we call the Custom print, described in that section of the web site, that involves no scanning or prep charge.

With this in mind, let's take a look at digital imaging, starting at the beginning-your film.

Shoot... Scan... Prep... Print

Shoot the picture. Scan the film. Prepare the image. Make the print.

These four steps are the foundation of digital imaging-although shooting with a digital camera skips the second step! The final product will only be as good as the weakest link in this chain. Shooting the picture, of course, is your job. You can do as much of the rest of it as you wish, farming out any of the remaining three as needs be.

Our scans on an Imacon Flextight 848 CCD scanner. A very good drum scanner, such as the Tango or Primescan, can, in some circumstances, give a better scan. How much better is open to debate. The cost difference for a drum scan of equal size can be considerable, often 3-5 times as much as our high resolution 16 bit scans on the Flextight. We can produce a drumscan for you, but at a higher cost. If you simply must have the best scan money can buy, and you have the money, then we recommend the drumscan. The truth is, though, it might be worth giving the Flextight a try-you’ll be surprised at the quality of the scan it produces. If you are new to digital imaging, you should be prepared to experiment a little in the beginning to educate yourself. All of the information we offer on this site is from our own experience-your mileage may vary!

For those readers new to digital imaging and scanning, we’ll discuss here some of the basics that you will find useful with any kind of digital printing you decide on. The talk gets a little technical, and although I've done my best to simplify these explanations, please don't hesitate to call on our toll-free line if you need clarification of any point.

Preparing files from digital cameras

Of course, digital cameras are the norm in photography these days. Starting with a digital files means no scanning of film, but a certain amount of preparation is always required for the finest prints, no matter what the source. Just as a raw scan will seldom produce the best print, simply shooting with a digital camera won't guarantee that, either.

If you are new to digital photography, it's quite likely that your camera is set to produce jpeg pictures. This is fine for snapshots, but this digital file format doesn't hold all the information your camera is capable of capturing. With some point and shoot cameras, this may be the only option. With more professional cameras and those aimed at advanced amateurs, there should be the option to record pictures in what is called the RAW format.

RAW files are often called the"digital negative" and like film negatives, you can produce a "machine" print that makes a nice snapshot. But for the best print, the one that squeezes the most shadow and highlight detail and color accuracy, you must work with the RAW file, which gives you access to all the data your camera recorded, and leaves its interpretation up to you. It's the same as the film equivalent of machine prints vs. custom darkroom work, whether done by the photographer or a lab like The LightRoom. There are books on working with RAW files and online tutorials, should you care to try it yourself.

Our services at The LightRoom now also include working with your RAW files if you need us to. Since we don't need to scan anything to produce a Master File, our one-time fee for this work is typically $25-40 rather than $75. You can upload RAW files directly to us via our FTP Upload page, but there is one thing you have to do to them first!

All digital camera manufacturers make cameras with proprietary RAW formats. It's a veritable tower of digital babble out there. To make sense out of this mess and stave off future incompatibility issues, a group of concerned photographers is working to convince manufactures to agree on a RAW standard that will be uniform throughout the industry.

Until that day happens, the next best solution is embrace Adobe's efforts with their DNG, or digital negative, format. Few camera manufacturers provide this option yet, but Adobe has a DNG Converter program available free from their download page that supports most current RAW formats. Visit this page and scroll down to choose Mac or Windows in the DNG Converter section. Simply drop a proprietary RAW file onto the converter icon and it creates a version with a .dng extension, leaving the original RAW file untouched.

Why is this important before uploading files to us via our FTP page? Well, we limit file submissions to image file formats to minimize the hassle of malicious viruses, etc. With new cameras coming out all the time, it would be too much of a headache to constantly need to upgrade our file acceptance protocols to cover them all. But we can take .dng format raw files and work on them for you. If you submit RAW files on a CD, you do not need to make this conversion first.

Beyond this, if you want to submit ready to print files from digital cameras, simply proceed as you would from file of scanned film. Size the file to its desired printed dimensions and include any needed borders through Photoshop's Canvas Size command. Add a one pixel stroke for a trim line. You can size them to 300 ppi or leave the file un-resampled if the resolution falls between 180 and 300 ppi. Do apply any sharpening you might want, or ask us to if you are unsure how to proceed.

Scanning and printing resolutions

Of the several parameters talked about in relation to scanning film or prints, the one most people are familiar with, and the most confused by, is resolution. The resolution of a scan is typically given in DPI, or dots per inch. While those with an intimate understanding of what is actually taking place in a scan can split hairs over this popular terminology, this actually works well and one can read DPI as PPI, pixels per inch. A pixel is the smallest discrete unit the computer screen can display in a picture and as such, determines the degree of detail. Detail in a picture varies with the size of the film and the grain. If we scan at a higher than necessary resolution, no extra detail is added.

We will first discuss scanning resolution, then how that relates to printing resolution. This is where most of the confusion comes in, but it’s really pretty simple.

For sake of an example, let’s use 35mm film, which has a frame size close to an inch by an inch and a half. If a scanner scans at 5000 ppi, the image will contain 5000 pixels along the one inch side and 1.5 times that, or 7500 pixels, along the inch and a half side. Nothing too difficult there. We are scanning a small piece of film and to get all the detail it holds, we need that high resolution. A scan resolution of about 5000 ppi is generally considered to be sufficient to capture all the picture detail 35mm film can hold. From a 35mm frame, this will result in an 8 bit file size of about 107 MB and double that for the 16 bit files we produce here at The LightRoom. Larger film formats can be scanned at lower resolutions and still preserve their greater detail, avoiding the gargantuan files sizes scanning them at 5000 ppi would produce.

The confusion over resolution comes when we make the jump to output resolution, the resolution of the printer. For example, our old ColorSpan Giclée Printmaker took files sized at 300 ppi. It used 8 Hewlett-Packard ink cartridges rated at 600 dpi and was said to print with a “simulated” output of 1800 ppi. What does all this mean? In truth, the results seem to bear out the claim of simulated resolution. Prints on water color paper appear continuous toned, with no dots visible to the naked eye. With a loupe, a pattern similar to the structure of a very fine grained film can be discerned. A resoution of 300 ppi sounds fairly coarse. Many people think of the crude quality of images printed on old 300 dpi laser printers. But those are halftoned images and the ability of the eight ink heads to control dot placement and size is what gives that 300 ppi file such a sharp final output. The Canon 8100 prints best at 300 ppi and is even sharper than the ColorSpan (although for additional reasons than simple resolution.)

If someone asks what resolution we print at, the answer is up to 300 dpi. In truth, I have printed 30x40 images from a digital camera, un-resampled, at about 100 ppi and they look excellent when viewed from an appropriate distance and surprisingly good when viewed nose-to-print. But when talking about scanning film, we need to be clear that a different resolution is required than when printing, because of the need to preserve detail in a small original.

Let’s take our original 35mm frame, scanned at 5000 ppi. To make the math simpler, let’ s say the printer resolution (and the output resolution of the file we send to it) is 250 ppi. We’re going to take that original numer of 5000x7500 pixels, which was arrived at by scanning an inch by inch and a half 35mm frame at 5000 ppi, and stretch it out. Now instead of having 5000 pixels in one inch, we are only going to put 250 pixels in an inch of the final print. Consequently, our 5000 pixels, spread out 250 to the inch, will stretch over a length equal to 5000 divided by 250, or 20 inches on one side, and 7500 divided by 250, or 30 inches on the other. A slide scanned at 5000 ppi can be blown up to 20x30 when printed at 250 dpi and we don’t have to change the file size. It’s the same as putting the film in an enlarger and magnifying it 20 times.

If we don’t want a 20x30 print, we do the math (or let Photoshop do it) and resize the file to whatever we need. A full frame print 10 inches long would be 2500 pixels at 250 ppi and about 6.7 inches wide, or 1667 pixels. The original scan of 107 MB would shrink to 12 MB.

Since we started with a larger than necessary file for that 10 inch wide print, we can afford to throw away what we didn’t need in shrinking it down and still have enough for a sharp print of a smaller size. What happens in the other direction? What if we need a bigger print but the math tells us that a scan of a certain size will not be big enough for our print without increasing the file size? Where do the extra pixels come from if we need to stretch it out so we still print at 250 dpi or whatever the printer needs? The software has to supply the extra pixels through a process called interpolation, or re-sampling. Basically, the imaging program will fill in the gaps between the now stretched out “real” pixels with a smooth blend of what it expects would be there if the scan was originally of the necessary higher resolution.

Good software, like Photoshop, does a pretty good job at this guesstimation. Remember, we’ve already learned that 5000 ppi in the original scan will capture all the actual picture detail in the film, so even if we scanned at a higher resolution, we wouldn’t necessarily have a more detailed picture than by letting the software do the work instead. The only time there would be some advantage to a significantly higher scanning resolution would be if you were blowing the slide up to, say, billboard proportions or if you were doing radical cropping, like blowing an eigth inch square of the film up to 20 inches square (we’ve done that!) Another option is to resize the printed dimensions without resampling, which will change the output resolution since the file size will stay the same. There isn't going to be a noticeable change in picture detail, however. Re-sampling to a higher resolution, to achieve 300 ppi at the printing size, say, will not make the picture sharper. It will only smooth out ‘jaggies’ that appear on diagonal lines when there aren‘t enough pixels to smooth them out. Whether or not this is necessary needs to be looked at on a case-by-case basis but as a general rule, is seldom necessary unless the resolution without re-sampling falls significantly below 180 ppi at the printing size.

Our Imacon scanner scans 35mm film at 6300 ppi and we've made prints as big as 36x54 on the LightJet. That’s a long way to stretch a tiny piece of film but when viewed from a typical distance for prints of that size, they look good. Up close, well, hey, we’re talking 1300x the size of the original here!

Larger film, scanned at lower resolutions, still yield prints that, to the human eye, retain all their detail, even in large prints. We scan 120 film at 3200 dpi and 4x5 at 2040 dpi on the Flextight. Depending on the film format of the medium format film, that will give a file size of about 270 to almost 400 MB as a 16 bit file.

As with everything else, your own tolerances will lead you to decide if the above recommendations on scanning resolution are adequate. I’ve done a lot of printing for customers who bring us their own scanned images, often scanned at a file size one quarter or less of the final size print. Digital images scale up surprisingly well. The current crop of good home scanners, in the 2700-4000 dpi range can provide quite acceptable scans. Don’t be afraid to try a large print from one and see if it suits your needs. After all, some photograpers are happy all their life with 35mm cameras. Others question the usefulness of anything smaller than 4x5.

Digital camera files do not have the problem of film grain to deal with and a much smaller file will be considerably sharper than a film scan of the same size. When you resize the image for printing, don’t re-sample it and we will determine if that is needed. It usually isn’t and an unre-sampled image is often sharper than one with excessive re-sampling.

Bit depth and dynamic range

We’ve talked only about resolution here, but there is another parameter of scanning that is equally important, and probably just as vague to grasp. This is usually referred to as the bit depth of the scanner or digital camera file. This is a complex subject and plumbing it to its depths is beyond the scope of this piece. A quick exploration of the topic will do for our purposes.

Scanning film for giclée printing or output on printers such as the LightJet starts with an RGB scan. This means that the color information in each pixel of the picture is made up of Red, Green and Blue elements. Most color we use on computers is called 24 bit color. This means that each of the three R, G and B components of a pixel have 8 bits of information (and 8x3=24.) Eight bits of information means that there are 2 to the 8th power, 2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2=256 different shades each of red, green and blue possible to make up the color of each pixel. Now, 256x256x256 equals about 16.7 million total possibilities for different colors for each pixel in a 24 bit RGB image. Whew! This higher math is getting tiring! But bear with it just a little longer...

A 16 bit scan has about 64,000 shades per channel. Where this becomes important is when we are adjusting exposures and altering contrast or color. Every adjustment to a digital file compresses the tones we start with into something less than a full 8 or 16 bits per channel. Adjust and 8 bit scan too much and the result may be seen as banding in areas of smooth tone transitions such as skies or in low contrast shadow areas, because there are no longer enough discrete "steps" to create a smooth transition from light to dark. A 16 bit scan has far more headroom to make these adjustments before banding becomes a problem.

Scans are sometimes referred to as 8 bits per RGB channel and 16 bit, instead of 24 bit and 48 bit. Thus an 8 bit scan is really the same as 24 bits and 16 bits per channel is really the same as 48 bits. Some scanners use a high bit mode that may be 12 bit (36) or 14 bit (42) but these will be "padded" to 16 bit for importation into a program like Photoshop. Such scanners, while theoretically not as good as a 16 bit scanner, nevertheless, are much better than those that only capture 8 bit scans.

All of our scanning on the Imacon is 16 bit. Drumscans are generally priced by the megabyte and a 16 bit scan at a given resolution will cost more than an 8 bit scan.

Higher dynamic range scans hold more shadow and highlight detail; they encompass the full tonal range of the film. Dynamic range is measured on a logrhythmic scale, with 4.0 being about the most range of what slide film can capture. A scanner capturing, say, 3.6, would have noticeably less detail in the extreme ranges of exposure. Our Imacon 848 has a dynamic range of over 4.0.

Where we do see a benefit to tonal adjustments done on high bit images is in pictures with a long smooth gradation of color, such as a sky. Dark skies lightened a lot as 8 bit images can create a situation where there are not enough discrete steps of color to make a smooth transition from light to dark and the result shows as banding, sometimes called posterization.

A similar effect can come in areas of low contrast, such as dark shadows. When lightening shadows the resulting visible detail may also lack in subtle transiton tones and looked posterized, the colors blocky and lacking in gradations.

The better the intitial exposure in camera, the less likely a scan will need to be adjusted so much as to result in these problems, but since we don't charge more for 16 bit scans, our feeling is that they represent the best way to extract the most from your images. Although 16 bit files do not have more dynamic range than 8 bit files, their increased resolution of tonality allows smoother transitions in areas like shadow detail or skies.

A digital camera used in JPEG mode will only create an 8 bit file. In RAW mode, you should choose to convert the image to 16 bit when you open it from a RAW program like Adobe LightRoom (no relation!), Camera Raw, or Apple’s Aperture.

Calibration and profiling

Once we have a scan of an image, the real work can begin. If you have any digital printing experience, such as using your own inkjet printer to try printing a few of your own pictures, you may know that what you see on your screen doesn’t necessarily match what comes out of the printer. This has traditionally been a big stumbling block to successful digital printing, but over the last few years, giant strides have been made in the field of color management, so that now it is not too difficult to obtain pretty good reproductions of your pictures by following just a few basic guidelines.

A device such as a scanner, monitor or color printer can be profiled. What this means is simple. In the case of a scanner, it involves scanning a source image with known colors, then using software to measure the resulting scan, determining how that scan differs from the original film in color, and creating a profile of the scanner. In essence, what happens is that we send the scanner a specific, known color on the film, measure the result in the scan, determine how far off it is and what adjustment would have to be made in scanning to achieve a closer match to that original color. This is done over a wide range of the spectrum and the resulting values are gathered together to make what is known as an ICC (International Color Consortium) profile. Although profiles for every possible film type would seem to be necessary, in practise this isn’t needed, and in fact it isn’t possible, since known targets aren’t available for every existing film type. But a good target for a modern E6 film from Kodak or Fuji will serve for a wider selection of specific films.

In the scanning process, this profile can be selected and applied to our scan. This is the first step in the color management process.

Now we have our profiled scan-how do we accurately view it? We view it on a calibrated monitor. Monitors are calibrated either by eye or with the aid of a device known as a colorimeter. The colorimeter is held against the surface of the monitor while the calibration software creates a series of greyscale and color patches for it to measure. Internal adjustments of the monitor now will but it in a known state-we send it a known color signal and the color it displays will be adjusted to display the correct color. Small discreprancies can still creep in from monitor to monitor, but for the most part, unless the monitor is old and just worn out, the resulting images can match quite well across different monitors. Companies such as Monaco and Gretag MacBeth produce good monitor calibrating equipment. One area where monitors calibrators are harder to use is in adjusting monitor brightness so that it reflects printer output. Since printers simply take an existing file and reproduce it, brightness is controlled in the file preparation and is not adjusted in the printing. While there are irreconcilable differences between glowing pixels on a flat screen monitor and reflected light from a print, we can come fairly close by comparing a printed image to the original file displayed in Photoshop and then adjusting monitor brighness manually to acheive a closer match. If you ask for or sample pack of inkjet papers, you can download from our web site the file used to print the sample and use these to adjust monitor brightness. Typically, modern flat panel displays are all too bright and need to be reined in for accurate work. If your monitor is too bright, your prints will look dark!

Like a monitor, printer paper and ink combinations need accurate profiles for best prints. These profiles can be used in Photoshop’s Soft Proofing ability to simulate how an image will print and are available on our Downloads page. Do not convert your images to these profiles when submitting them to us for printing. That will take place in the printing process.

Color working space

What is a color (working) space and how does it affect our pictures? A color space encompasses a range of colors we can work with. If the color space we choose to edit our pictures in is too small for a given printer, we won't be able to take advantage of all the colors that printer can produce. And if the editing space is too big, we'll see color on the monitor outside the range of what the printer can reproduce. The sRGB space, mistakenly used as the default space in Photoshop 5.0, was designed as a lowest common denominator space to ensure accurate color across a range of monitors and computer systems, such as might be used to view images on the Web. With version 5.5 of Photoshop, Adobe made the default space one called Adobe RGB (1998) and that is better suited for modern printing. At the LightRoom, we generally scan into and edit in either Adobe RGB or EktaSpace, designed by master photographer Joseph Holmes to better match modern E-6 films. If you shoot RAW files with a digital camera, consider using the ProPhoto color space. This wide gamut space may hold more information than can be printed now, but improvements in printing technolgy may be able to take advantage of the larger space later. We do not recommend Pro Photo for scanned film, however.

If you have images created in sRGB and you like the way they look on your monitor, go ahead and print them. Once an image has been saved in a smaller gamut colorspace, converting it back to a better space won't improve it, because its color range will have been truncated. So be careful when saving pictures that they are imbedded with the appropriate profile.

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While the information above may take a while to absorb when you’re looking to produce the very best prints, it’s actually not difficult to get good prints these days, especially from digital cameras. If you are unsure if you want to go to this much trouble, just send in a file and have us make a small print from it as is, and I bet you’ll be surprised at how good it looks!