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Rangefinder Magazine
December 2003

Digital Photography by John Rettie
Is Digital Really Good Enough?

If you scan photography forums on the Internet you’ll find there’s still plenty of controversy as to whether digital images are acceptable for magazine reproduction or large fine art prints. One person posted that he was sticking with film since none of today’s digital images will have as good quality as those that will be produced in a few years’ time. He reasons that when we have to go back and use digital images captured today the quality will be so inferior that we will not be able to use them.

Does this line of reasoning mean that old photographs taken back in the 1950s are no longer valuable just because their “quality” is not as good as images captured on more modern film? On the contrary, I am finding images I shot 30 years ago that should have been thrown out—they were poorly composed or the exposure was slightly off—have value today just because they are old and different from the hundreds of perfectly exposed and composed shots captured at the time by other photographers. And that’s not counting the images that are unique because other photographers did not capture the scene.

I recently had an image published in Popular Science that was taken on my 6-megapixel Canon EOS-10D camera. It’s a full-page vertical image cropped from a double-page horizontal picture. There is no way anyone could tell it’s a digital image—especially when compared to other images shot by another photographer who was using 120 film. Ironically, those pictures don’t look nearly as good.

Arizona Highways will not accept digital images for publication in its glossy magazine.

Peruse the Arizona Highways web site, arizonahighways.com, and you’ll find an article by Peter Ensenberger, Arizona Highways Director of Photography, who says the magazine will not accept digital images for publication since the quality is not (yet) good enough for their glossy magazine. For an opposing viewpoint, go to Steve Johnson’s web site, www.sjphoto.com/. A well known landscape photographer, Johnson has been selling fine art digital landscape images for a number of years. He’s been producing beautifully detailed images using Dicomed 4x5 and Sinar 4x5 view cameras, producing images of 6000x7250 (43.5 megapixels) and 6000x8000 pixels (48 megapixels) respectively, which he claims deliver better resolution and dynamic range than film. Certainly he has managed to capture a whole series of impressive images taken in U.S. National Parks during the past decade.

Recently a group of publishers developed a set of specifications that it hopes will clarify the minimum requirements needed by magazines, newspapers and book publishers to produce acceptable results. The group is called DISC (Digital Image Submission Criteria), and it hopes to develop further information and guidance as the industry moves forward. A look at some initial specifications published on its web site (www.disc-info.org) shows nothing unexpected. For example, it suggests that the maximum print size from a 6.0-megapixel camera (3000x2000 pixels), for a magazine printing at 150 LPI or 300 DPI, is 10x6.7 inches. Yet my picture used by Popular Science was reproduced at almost twice this recommended size, and the quality is perfectly acceptable.

	Steve Johnson, a well known landscape photographer, sells beautiful fine art digital images

Reality is that the differences between digital cameras are akin to the differences in film sizes and types. After all, a Kodachrome 25 image is quite different from one captured on a 1600 ISO film, and both are very different from an 8x10 transparency. Yet each has its own place in photography.

Part of the problem encountered by photographers submitting digital images to magazines is that the editors and art directors have not yet come to grips with the different workflow encountered with digital images. They then use the quality issue as a cop out.

I have an editor that says it’s more difficult to put a CD-ROM into his computer and fire up an image-viewing program than to hold a sleeve of 20 35mm slides and look at them over a light table. Yet when I sent him a link to a page of 20 thumbnail images on my web site, he was enthused—especially when he could click on an image and immediately see it blown up.

I’ve found that web galleries are the best way to show images to clients. Plus, they save having to send proof images via e-mail, snail mail or FedEx. What’s more, I can look at the pictures on my computer screen while the editor or art director views them remotely. Consequently, we can discuss image content and decide on the best ones for final use.

Currently I use Photo Mechanic to sort through images and produce a quick and simple web page of images. I’ve found it to be the quickest and easiest program for these needs. The only thing I have to do is upload the folder with the thumbnails and larger images to my server. There are several other programs that can produce web galleries, such as Quickie web album, iView mediaPro and, of course, Photoshop’s own Web Photo Gallery. I plan to try them out in the future as some of them can create more attractive pages fairly easily.

Extensis pxl SmartScale
One of the complaints that some photographers pitch at digital images is that once they are captured there is no way of increasing the size of the image without significant degradation. Whereas if a larger print with film is required, bigger files are obtainable by using more expensive scanners to produce a bigger digital file. The argument is that one can use the film image as storage and produce digital files of the required size by scanning as needed. There is some merit to this argument, although there is still a limit to how much a film image can be blown up while retaining sufficient detail.

Extensis’ pxl SmartScale is a Photoshop plug-in that can scale up certain images by up to 1600%.

Since digital imaging has taken hold, several companies have tried to develop programs that can blow up a digital image and maintain detail. In theory, it’s all but impossible—after all how can a program really create detail when it’s not there in the original?

In my experience, Photoshop’s built-in extrapolation algorithms seem to work pretty well in most cases. Recently I tried to create a larger digital file from a picture that was only about 1.5 inches wide at 300 pixels per inch. I really wanted it to be three or four times bigger for use in a magazine layout. I guessed it would be an ideal test for a new program called pxl SmartScale. Extensis, the publisher, claims it can resample images up to 1600% with no discernable loss in printed quality. Try as I might, though, the image I had would not scale up beyond 200%. I also tried Photoshop, and the quality was almost identical.

While I can see that some images lend themselves to scaling better than others, I am not sure that the cost of this program ($199) is worth it over the built-in scaling offered by Photoshop. Fortunately, one can download a demo copy of the program to experiment with. I suspect it is probably worth using on certain subjects that do not have sharply defined edges such as those of cars in my test image! In practice, I reckon you’ve got to have a decent-sized image in the first place, in terms of the total number of pixels, to be able to resample and get an acceptable image.

Photoshop CS Down and Dirty Tricks by Scott Kelby describes how to achieve dozens of special effects.

Quick Book Review:
Photoshop CS Down and Dirty Tricks
Even before Photoshop CS reached the stores a new edition of a popular Photoshop book hit the bookshelves. Normally, it seems to take several months for books to reflect a new edition of Photoshop. Not in this case. Undoubtedly it’s partly due to author Scott Kelby’s close relationship with Adobe as president of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals. More likely though, it’s his sheer ability to produce tons of articles as editor-in-chief of Photoshop User, Nikon’s Capture User and Mac Design magazines.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Photoshop CS Down and Dirty Tricks (New Riders Publishing, $39.99) is that all the special effects are new, instead of rehashing ones published in previous editions. Kelby explains how to reproduce them in step-by-step instructions with screen shots of each step.

In all, there are dozens of effects in the 300 plus pages of this full-color book. What’s more, there’s no need to start at the beginning and work through chapter by chapter. Each “trick” is described in detail so that any Photoshop user can get started right away and learn how to replicate each effect with his or her own images.

Although the book is aimed at all users of Photoshop, a majority of the tricks are applicable to professional photographers. For example, a whole chapter is devoted to producing looks that could be used in a portfolio, whether on the web or in a printed book.

Throughout the book there are “quick tips” on each page that include descriptions of new features to be found in Photoshop CS.

In the introduction Kelby mentions how dated the tricks now look in earlier editions. He says the effects described in the new CS edition reflect the ever-changing style in photography—or is it art—that’s produced by graphic artists and photographers who use Photoshop day in and day out.

John Rettie is a photojournalist who resides in Santa Barbara, CA. He has been using a camera as a professional for 33 years, a computer for 23 years, and has combined his knowledge of both for the past ten years. Readers can contact him by e-mail at john@johnrettie.com or by snail-mail c/o Rangefinder Magazine.