I just had a very unpleasant surprise and wanted to pass on a warning to others. As most of you probably know, with a pigment-ink printer, one should print periodically to avoid clogs and also protracted, ink-hungry self-cleaning. I have done that with my Prograf Pro 1000, EXCEPT: It never occurred to me that because the printer has a separate black ink installed for matte papers--as some new Epsons do as well--I needed to also print specifically on matte papers to to protect the head. I print very little on matte papers. I hadn't done so for many months, and I never did so for maintenance r ..read more

I have been working on restoring 55 years old photos that had been taken with point and shoot cameras that most likely did not even have a flash. Needless to say that the prints have not only faded but their colours are now either mostly magenta or green with the odd pink one. I knew that using curve adjustment layers in normal blending mode to darken faded colour also affected the hue and saturation of the colour. What I did not realise was that the luminosity mode protects the hue but increases the saturation as well as decreasing the brightness of the colour. This is also true using the hu ..read more

This image was taken with my 100mm Macro. The exposure settings were 1/180 (to avoid hand held camera shake) at f8 (for certainty of depth of field) and ISO to 3200 to get the right exposure. The image has not been severely cropped, just straightened. There is significant noise when it is magnified on screen to 100%. The noise is hardly noticeable on an A4 print, but I would like to improve it. I have tried to do this in Photoshop using the menu options Filter/Noise/Reduce noise but the preview shows little change when the sliders are taken to the extremes to test the effect. As a result, I ..read more

The Mixam website has functionality to share the contents of a book produced by them. While it is not perfect (letters are missing in the text, for instance), it does give a good overview of what the final product will end up looking like. I started working in this book when my grandson was 5-years old, which lead to the creation of the "bugs". Early last year (January through February), when he was 6, we worked on the text. This year, I created the book. While I like what I see, I am not thrilled with Mixam's service. The book was supposed to ship around April 16 and the latest ship date t ..read more

These are intended to bring to mind "Spring". The Saxfrage flowers are about half an inch wide. I incorporated the single flower as relief from the general spreading clump. Neither are perfect but which of the cherry blossoms is the better image ..read more

I received notification of a webinar to be hosted by Datacolor & DxO Labs which could perhaps be of interest to some CIC members. Link attached.......... https://lp.datacolor.com/DxO-Webinar...-Webinar-03-24 ..read more

I can't afford photoshop at the moment, are there any alternatives to it? I have no idea where to start despite reading overwhelming articles on the topic like this: https://pctechtest.com/22-best-photo-editing-software I wanna buy to own, Needs to be Mac compatible. Thanks in advance ..read more

Good evening people I have an LG 32UN880 ultrafine monitor and I want to calibrate it for some printing. I have a Calibrite Display colorimeter and the software which goes with it. I know that LG supply their own software which I have tried but my question is whether or not this LG software gives a hardware or software calibration. I phoned LG and they didn't know! If it is hardware I assume it is better than software. Please does anyone know? Thank you ..read more

Hi all, I am considering buying a printer. I haven't printed much for some years but now feel I'm missing out. I'm not sure how to go about it. I have no experience with the latest printers and have forgotten all I knew last time I did it. I probably would print a lot for some of the year and then not much for other times. Good B&W is important to me and I'd probably stick to A4 using a print shop for anything larger. I'm not bothered about any non-photo printing or scanning as I already have an office printer for that. I'm worried about two things: 1 Cost and 2 Drying out nozzle heads o ..read more

I have not been entirely happy with the prints from my Canon Pro 10S using Lightroom. I liked the user interface but not the final output. I tried soft proofing in Lightroom but was still not satisfied. I have found that I get much better colour rendition (by which I mean what you see on screen is close to what you get on photopaper) using the Canon software. That is rather a shame as I had got accustomed to the Lightroom print module and quite liked it! Having installed Canon's Print Studio Pro I can print from several Lightroom modules via the menu options: File/ Plug-in Extras/ Canon Prin ..read more