The search for (soft) proof...

As I've mentioned previously here, I shoot JPEG for work (mostly) but occasionally switch to raw for tricky conditions and almost always for sport. My personal work, such as it is, is also shot in raw.

Cricket, in overcast conditions (it's England...!). Nikon D3, 300mm f2.8 plus TC20E3 converter (= 600mm), 

1/1000sec @ f8, ISO 1800. This is the raw file, cropped to use and sharpened, but otherwise as rendered by

Aperture with no further processing. It looks "flat" here and when seen larger in Aperture, looks very 'flat". 

How you could leave this unadjusted, as some say they do with raws, is a puzzle. I wasn't putting in enough

contrast previously, but even then I knew this would have needed more...

For all the advantages of shooting in raw the biggest single disadvantage is that, if it allows you to process your own images, then obviously EVERY IMAGE YOU SHOOT NEEDS TO BE PROCESSED. There's no JPEG engine doing it for you, which means that decision have to be made on white balance, contrast, saturation, highlights and shadows etc etc etc.  Now, Adobe's ACR, Apple Aperture, Capture One and all sorts of other raw processors come with a set of default raw conversion settings, but what I've found is that these are really only a starting point. I certainly don't understand how anyone can say "they only check for dust spots and that's it for raws", since none of the raw converters really, really, make your files look like what was in front of the camera without you, the shooter, making some further decisions.

Indeed, although JPEGs are much-maligned by some, most decent modern DSLRs make a very good job indeed of rendering what the sensor saw as a useful JPEG - provided considerable care is taken at the shooting stage to get exposure and white balance correct. Most DSLRs also now let you change contrast, hue, saturation, sharpening and other settings for rendering JPEGs.

But there are still advantages to shooting raw, so it's worth knuckling down and learning what needs to be done.

More after the break...





My problem is that I have to teach things to myself, I'm not learning anything from work - there's no photographic development on offer. I'm not supposed to do anything other than caption my images, though I'll tell you now that I believe that to be a fundamentally flawed policy, as it's surely the photographer who knows how his images are supposed to look? And I don't believe there's sufficient attention paid at the production stage to optimising images for print. Some of this, and probably some of the reason for the photographers "officially" not adjusting their own images is, I'm sure, an acute lack of time and/or staff.  But that's not an excuse not to do it...

I'd got ongoing issues with some (not all) of my JPEGs from raws when they appeared in the papers. They looked muddy, lacking "pop", shadows were blocked up.  I said I'm a self-taught digital darkroom user and I was struggling to establish what was causing the problems. With the word out on Twitter - "HELP!!" - I'm grateful to both Neil Holmes  http://www.nh97.com/wp/ and Edmond Terakopian http://photothisandthat.co.uk/  who came back to me with advice. Edmond Terakopian, in particular, offered me some of his considerable experience in processing for newsprint, and I think I'm on top of the problem now.

So what was going on?

Well, some of it is still down to the pre-press optimisation being done, and also to the vagaries of the presses themselves, both of which are out of my hands. What is under my control is the processing in my preferred raw converter, Apple's Aperture. It's here that I've made some changes.

Unfortunately, part of the problem was down to me - oh dear, doh! Even without the extra brightness and contrast that newsprint likes its images to have, my JPEGs from raws were being left too dark even on the monitor, though it took some thought and reprocessing to make me see it. I calibrate the screens on both my Macs, and so I have turned down the monitor brightness (the desktop was at 140Cd/m2) which has helped. The desktop is now at 110 Cd/m2 and I feel I get a truer indication of how bright the default raw image is.

My pictures were also still too "flat" - especially those shot in overcast conditions (that would be cricket in England...). The next thing to do is make sure a proper black and white point is set, either using Levels, or after some experimenting over the last few days, Curves. This improves the contrast anyway (though bear in mind if you've shot a low contrast subject, it still needs to look low-contrast). To improve the brightness for newsprint - if needed - the mid-tone slider is pulled to the left in Levels, or the mid-tones pulled up in Curves. Aperture lets you add multiple curves, so after any "brightening curve" I add another, a "classic S curve" which improves the overall contrast without moving the black and white points like the Contrast slider does.

Edmond suggested, and reading around the internet also indicated, that images needed to be a little brighter and more contrasty than might look "ideal" on a computer monitor. So there's another step which has helped me too - Like Photoshop, Aperture lets you "softproof" images in other colour profiles (View > Proofing profile, select your desired profile, then turn on by View > Onscreen Proofing). In the library of many computers are a selection of common profiles, such as Adobe RGB, plus any that are added alongside software such as Aperture, Photoshop, or that from the camera manufacturers. There was no sign of any newspaper ones on either Mac, but a quick trawl of the internet brought up ISOnewspaper26v4, available from WAN-IFRA . This is not specific to my paper, but is a pan-European and world-wide newsprint ICC profile. Installing it for Aperture to use, I looked at a few images that had not printed well and found that the on-screen softproofing matched the way the pictures had actually appeared in print pretty well. Now I'd got something to aim at - Game on!!

And here is the processed image - a black point set using Curves, then that curve made into a "Classic S' to 

suit, some highlight recovery (the cricket whites always clip). This image seemed to have good brightness on the softproof, but if necessary the curve (below) could have been pulled up at the midpoint. Add a little definition (local contrast) plus a little lift of the shadows in Highlights and Shadows (which I've found improves the repro in the paper)

- I think it stops the darks blocking up to black so easily. You might be able to tweak the curve to do this, but I find Highlights/Shadows a slightly more intuitive solution for me, at present.

A screengrab from Aperture's adjustment window for this image - you can (just) see the curves window to see the adjusted black point (base of the diagonal line pulled right) and then an S curve is made from this. On the blog,

 with these images all as sRGBs, the difference between the "straight" and "soft-proof" views (which this is) is 

not so visible as it is on the screen of my iMac.

And here is the curve - I "fixed" a control point at the mid-point 

before dragging the black slider to the right - which limits 

the midtones darkening - and then put in another point at the 

1/4 (ish) and 3/4 mark to drag down and up respectively 

to add the contrast I wanted. This isn't a particularly 

harsh curve as S curves go.

This is still very much a learning curve (no pun intended...), but I am very pleased to report that the pictures I've seen in print over the last few weeks, processed in the new way and soft-proofed before exporting as JPEGs for the paper's system, have all repro'ed significantly better than even the best did before. Overall brightness and contrast is much better, colour is better in hue and saturation, and skin tones are appearing at more natural colour and luminance levels.

If anything, the printed images still seem a little "harsh" to me (the best way I can describe it), so there may be some refinement to work on and learn. Some of this may be down to the press, though I know that the best images in national papers can look very good indeed, which is encouragement to carry on thinking and experimenting.

Of course, this is one of last weekend's images, so I've still got to see how it appears, if selected, in the sports pages of the paper.

Fingers crossed...!