Are You Well Presented?

Resolution for Printing

The major source of confusion here is the difference between pixels per inch and dots per inch. To be accurate, dpi is a printing term and when Epson says that their printer operates at 1,440dpi you do NOT need a resolution of 1,440ppi in your image. Each pixel in the image is built from around 12 drops of ink, two from each of six colours. In practice this means that you divide 1,440 by 12 to give you a working image resolution of 120ppi. Then, in order to allowfor the variable dot technology™ and its ilk, Epson actually asks you for a resolution of 180ppi in the sized image. The last four words are vital to understand. Every inch run in the image needs180 pixels, so a 10-inch image needs 10x180 = 1,800 pixels. So for a Nikon D200, with a pixel count of 3,872 by 2,592 you can print an image that is 21.5inches by 14.5inches without the need for Photoshop to create additional pixels by interpolation (3,872/180 = 21.5). In practice you can double thesize and get away with it most of the time, so a 40-inch print will still look OK. Conversely, if you scan a 35mm transparency at 3,000ppi, your image might transfer to Photoshop as 1x1.5 inches, but at 200ppi it will still make you a 15-inch print (3,000/200 = 15 inches). To make such a 15-inch print you either have to go to Image Size and change it or, more conveniently, let the printer driver do the job – when you ask Photoshop ‘Print with Preview’ to ‘size to fit’. Providing there are sufficient pixels, there is no need to check the Resize Image box which makes pixels (by interpolation) and increases the file size or deletes pixels and reduces it. Reducing the pixel count (ie file size) is important for web use so that images are displayed accurately and small enough for rapid loading. Make them too large and they will take ages to load and often over-fill the screen so that the entire image is not visible. Even if your program makes the images fit to the screen (such as PicturesToExe – see later), it is still often better to take charge of the size optimisation process yourself, especially if sharpening is involved.

Bear in mind that printers other than inkjet may require different resolutions. Check with your lab before you finalise your workflow. By way of example the Fuji Frontier needs 300ppi, the Fuji Pictography 267ppi and process printing (eg this magazine) needs 300ppi. Newspapers need less resolution and experience will teach you that inkjets made onto rough or art surfaces such as canvas will actually need less resolution. All the usual rules of photography actually apply here, a good crisp original will almost always blow up bigger than a poor,

Making Slide Shows

The requirements for a professional photographer making ‘slide shows’ are different from the public at large. There is a need for top-quality presentations that will run on computers and televisions using CDs, DVDs or self-executing files to run on monitors via a PC or sometimes a Macintosh. The output might be delivered onto a monitor, TV, HDTV or a digital data projector. In addition there may be some requirement to create media that cannot be fraudulently copied and you may have to include text so that your client may order prints. As if this was not enough, you also may wish to have music and fancy slide transitions to enhance the viewing experience. Faced with a wish list like this, it is a daunting task to decide how to go about it. Even when you have a workflow sussed out, you have to ensure that it is robust to all the possible playback options. DVDs are currently at the stage that CDs were some years ago. They may or may not play on a specific machine. Today the quality DVD mastering company will test your product on as many as 20 machines. The best discs only play on about 90 to 95 per cent of players so you should not be surprised if your ‘home-made’ DVD fails to run on your client’s player. A starting piece of advice is to always use top (A) grade blank discs. Those made by Apple, Fuji, Maxell, Sony, Taiyo Yuden, and TDK are regarded as OK, treat all other brands (including some big names!) with suspicion (see www.newcyberian.com). At all costs avoid unbranded products – even if you do manage to write them they may not last. Writing at slower speeds is also helpful, the maximum speed of which your writer is capable will, in many cases, produce a less reliable product.

The desire to compile this section arose from a succession of pleas for help from SWPP members, who related a catalogue of disasters, ranging through expensive support calls, problematic refunds, variable reliability, jumpy shows, degraded images and, all too frequently, media that simply refused to run on clients’ hardware. By way of a benchmark, we are told by the enthusiast salon organisers that 25% of CDs submitted in competitions fail to open and of the remaining 75% a significant proportion are scaled at the wrong size or are surrounded by glaring white, uneven borders.

An initial search of the options very quickly came up with 17applications for DVD slide show authoring. Excluding Adobe Acrobat products, everything cost less than $100 and some we found were freeware. Some of the software writes shows directly to your CD/DVD, others produce either an image file or an executable file written to your hard drive. The latter has some advantages in that most people will have their CD/DVDwriting sorted out at the time of machine installation. We know of too many instances where the installation of slideshowwriting software has resulted in crippling the existing CD/DVD writing system (although, to be fair, we have also had one instance of it reversing a fault!). In some instances we have found that installing CD/DVD writing software has put more than 500Mb of garbage into the system. Interfering with file associations is another bugbear.

Our first port of call in searching was the ‘top-ten reviews’ at www.toptenreviews.com. Here we found they favoured ULead Picture Show, Proshow Gold and DVD Slide Show Builder (in that order). Of these only Proshow Gold will build an executable file and they appeared to have ignored PicturesToExe, the defacto standard for all enthusiast, audio visual-making software (which we will refer to as P2E). We have therefore taken top ten’s skeleton information and added our own.

In our own tests, P2E built a show of 242, full resolution JPEG files in 19 seconds including automatic transitions. This was significantly better than the top ten review winner, ULead Picture Show which was initially headed for more than 100 minutes until we aborted and tried a simpler approach, which made a show in 5m 05s from the same files. With slightly more sophisticated transitions it took 10m 08s to complete a DVD show. This it seems is the price that you have to pay to transcribe into ‘movie’ format. So if all you need is an exe file, with music and transitions, you need look no further than P2E, especially as it has the ability to build in security in the form of ‘die-by’ dates, when a CD will cease to function and is also robust against copying. You can migrate from P2E into DVD format by using ULead Movie Factory. The subject forum was less than encouraging – some found it worked OK, others reported problems. In addition many of the forum responses reported corruption of their computers and delivered dire warnings about ensuring that your ‘system restore’ was up to date. Such comments should fill professional users with dread; we would not entertain such software near one of our inservice workstations! Having said that, we managed to install the ULead program and keep the system running, although we did get an irritating little pop-up trying to send all data DVDsto ULead’s player until we killed it in the Folder Options box of the Control Panel. Such tactics are second nature to geeks but will often flummox casual users; they really are the bane of this badly designed style of software and are all too common. There are a number of other options for creating an AVI file and then writing it to DVD; Nero will for example do the job. Newcyberian lists eight programs for encoding data to MPEG and a further 12 for authoring and mastering at: http://www.newcyberian.com/dvdauthoring.html#dvdfeatures

We had ambitions to report on the workings of a number of slide show-making applications but have been frustrated by the number of horror stories. It is impossible to know if the reported problems are the result of user incompetence orsimple hardware conflicts, but the upshot is that a number of people we spoke to had worked their way through several solutions before finding a compromise that worked. It seems that there is no universal, fast and easy solution. At least they are not big investments to make. Many photographers provide both DVD and CD including, sometimes, a number of formats. This covers the options well but could confuse the user. Rest assured that your reputation will suffer if you fail to providea working disk, even if it is your client’s equipment that is at fault. You also have to ensure that you do not get dragged into acting as your client’s IT technician! A non-working CD or DVD is a particular problem if it is all you are to provide, ie a ‘noalbum’ deal – in those circumstances you have little option but to get things working.

The combination that seems to work most frequently is ProShow Gold or Pictures to Exe in combination with ULead Movie factory, we have even found people who use this set-up and report almost zero failures. It would be a good starting point. Tom Lee also reports almost zero failures using PicturesToExe, creating an AVI file there, before moving to Nero 6.6 to write the DVD. Tom reduces his files to1,024 pixels maximum, ahead of running P2E, which speeds the job up, improves the smoothness of transitions and reduces the encoding time to around 15 minutes, far faster than many reports we have heard. To finish his workflow off professionally, Tom uses a TDK LPCW50 to do ‘on-body’ printing to the CD and then a bespoke CD case sleeve to complement the slide show. His slideshows are time limited, with ‘Print Screen’ disallowed and he provides two versions, one as a continuous running show with music and another which may be stepped through, one at a time, which also includes the image reference number. Tom asks his clients to mark up a laserprinted contact sheet into ‘must haves’, ‘outright rejects’ and ‘not sures’. He uses the ‘not sures’ as fillers and backgrounds as he builds the album pages. He finds that the vast majority of his clients have computers and, for the small number who do not, he provides larger paper proofs.

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Photo Quote: I never have taken a picture I've intended. They're always better or worse. Diane Arbus