#laumont

Para una celebración especial te traigo una receta bien fácil con la trufa de @laumonttruffles tus especialistas en trufas y setas en quien confiar. Además son líderes en España y referentes a escala mundial En la tienda online de Laumont Shop encontrarás todo el año trufas y setas silvestres de temporada. Tienen packs ideales para regalar estas fiestas y por supuesto todo el año en una…

Shamus Clis­set: It depends on whether they’re shoot­ing dig­i­tal or shoot­ing film.  In both cases, the best thing is to get a really good scan or a really good cap­ture. You can’t make a good print from a bad scan or a bad capture.

We still vastly pre­fer work­ing from film. Get­ting a good drum scan gives you the qual­ity to blow up an image to any size and there’s noth­ing in dig­i­tal that com­pares to it, unless you’re going to spend $35,000 on the huge dig­i­tal backs. Even in that case, I’ve done work with a pho­tog­ra­pher who was using the 80 megapixel Leaf, and we mixed 4x5 neg­a­tives and the dig­i­tal images he had shot. The sharp­ness is pretty com­pa­ra­ble, but you’re lim­ited. The look of dig­i­tal doesn’t com­pare to film. I know that dig­i­tal is so pop­u­lar, and we’re deal­ing with that more and more. Peo­ple are bring­ing us all kinds of dig­i­tal files, and the qual­ity of the files is all over the place.

PDN: Is that due to the tech­nol­ogy, or the photographers?

SC: An image looks great on the screen or on their web site small, then they come to us and they don’t real­ize it’s only really big enough to do maybe an 8x10-inch print of decent qual­ity or maybe a 20x30. Even [with] the Canon 5D Mark II which every­body has nowa­days and we’re get­ting a lot of files from, the biggest print that I’ve done from one of those that I think looked decent is a 30 x40 inch print. Even then you’re res-ing up by 30 or 50 per­cent, depend­ing on what their cam­era set­tings were. So we’re hav­ing to work to keep the qual­ity and integrity of the file, by adjust­ing the tex­ture to make it com­pa­ra­ble to some­thing film-like.

Whereas with film, even if you shoot 35 mm, we can do huge 60 x 72-inch prints that look great. You see grain, but [the prints] have that pho­to­graphic integrity.

When shoot­ing dig­i­tal, it’s very cru­cial that pho­tog­ra­phers shoot RAW. That should be a given, but peo­ple bring us JPEGs or some­times TIFF files. With RAW, you can go back and adjust your set­tings to get the file to a bet­ter start­ing point. When you shoot RAW, there’s a deeper bit depth. You’re cap­tur­ing more of the expo­sure, so you can recover high­light detail, you can recover shadow detail, you can shift up or down the expo­sure range. Then you import it into Pho­to­shop and you have a bet­ter start­ing point.

We’re espe­cially geeky about this part of it because we do big exhi­bi­tion prints. If you’re doing a book and your pic­ture is never going to be big­ger than that, dig­i­tal works fine.

The most com­monly asked ques­tion we get nowa­days is: “If I show you my file, how big do you think we can print it?” They don’t know the res­o­lu­tion. I would rec­om­mend peo­ple find out what the full sen­sor capac­ity is in pix­els, and then divide that by 200 dpi. That’s what your print size is usually.

For exam­ple we recently made some really nice prints from a 5D Mark II. The full native res­o­lu­tion on the long side (5661 pix­els) trans­lates to about 28″ at 200 dpi. That’s a 21-megapixel cap­ture. We printed them at 30 x 40 so we bumped it up about 30 per­cent.  They looked great, but as you go larger and you are inter­po­lat­ing in Pho­to­shop, you’re los­ing sharpness.

Full Interview:

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