How I Made the $19.95 Print

By Ctein

[Note: The example print sale ends Sunday night. —MJ]

I came upon the scene right after visiting Pier 24 in San Francisco. Happily for me, I was carrying my trusty Olympus Pen E-P1 with my favorite lens, the 45mm ƒ/1.8 (reviewed here). ISO 100, open up two thirds of a stop to compensate for the bright sky, ƒ/5.6, and Ctein's your uncle.

Once I got a good look at this photograph on my large monitor I knew it was something special. Lovely exquisite detail everywhere, delicate tracery in the clouds and tones on the bridge tower, and an amazing degree of sharpness. My, do I love that lens.

In order to eke the very last bit of quality out of that data, I super-sampled the image in Adobe Camera Raw, pulling it into Photoshop as a 16-bit, 28-MP (6144x4608 pixel) file in ProPhoto RGB color space. Why the upsampling? Because I have a (possibly superstitious) belief that ACR, having access to all the Raw camera data, will do the better job of extracting every last bit of detail from the file, and I know from experience that more pixels get me better results when I run deconvolution routines to maximize sharpness.

Wonder what you can get out of the 12-megapixel camera when everything is pushed to the max? Check out the rivets in this 100% scale detail (the full image file is 6100x4600 pixels).

Once I had the image in Photoshop, I ran the ContrastMaster plug-in from Photo Wiz to kick up the gradation and tonal separation in the subtle, fine detail just a bit. It did a great job of restoring the delicate tracery in the clouds and the subtle variations of light on the bridge tower that I had seen in the original scene. It also kicked up the noise (just more subtle, fine detail so far as the algorithm is concerned).

And here's the moon and some support cables, again at 100% scale.

Next I ran Topaz Labs' InFocus with a one pixel de-blur radius using the blur function calculated for this particular photograph. Deconvolution algorithms like this produce a genuine increase in resolution and sharpness. I use them routinely on all my digital photographs...just a touch. They'll also sharpen up and enhance any noise or grain in the photograph. Between the two plug-ins, I had more noise in the sky than I really wanted to be seeing. Normally I have no complaints about the noise levels in this camera at low to moderate ISOs, but here I was really pushing hard.

I needed some careful noise reduction. I didn't want to lose any of the fine detail and subtle gradation in the bridge, and noise reduction algorithms always clobber a bit of that. Time to make a mask so that I could apply noise reduction, using Topaz Lab's DeNoise, to the sky alone. Making that mask required lots of fine tuning and a certain amount of pixel painting where the bridge cables were almost the same tone as the sky. There are limits to what even the best masking software can do. I had a couple of hours of fiddly work getting the mask just so. Such is life.

This is the mask I created so I could selectively apply noise reduction to the sky and not the bridge.

From that point on, it was pretty straightforward work. A few masked curves adjustment layers for dodging and burning to get local brightnesses just as I wanted them, another curves adjustment to get the overall tonal placement just so. Surprisingly, no color correction; the camera had nailed it perfectly. That almost never happens.

I printed the finished photograph out on my Epson 3880 printer as a 17x22-inch (15x20" image area) print. The printer settings were 16-bit output (I've never seen this make any difference in a print, but I figure it can't hurt), 2880 dpi with high speed off, and finest detail on.

Twenty minutes later I was looking at a very decent first print. A bit of curves tweaking to get the  print tones just so, a little more dodging and burning, a bit of pixel painting to catch a bit of cruftiness that it slipped past my masking, and there it was. A superb print of a photograph that still makes me very happy every time I look at it.

That's it for this time, folks. I'll be taking next week off, while I deal with all the orders. See you again in two weeks. Meanwhile, keep those cards and letters coming in.

Ctein

Featured Comment by Sven W: "Hmmmm...is this exercise a measure of a Micro 4/3 camera or Ctein's excellent post-processing skills?

"Quote #1: '...I think exemplifies the very best that a Micro 4/3, 12-megapixel camera can do. It's not a hero experiment; I can go out any day and make photographs of this technical quality. I just can't see any possible way to make a much better one.'

"Quote #2: 'I had a couple of hours of fiddly work getting the mask just so. Such is life.'

"The two quotes imply Ctein spends 2+ hours post-processing a typical image. I suspect that's way more than what most people do for their 'any day' images. Truth be told, I don't have enough post processing skills to spend two hours on one image. ;-)

"I'm not making a pot-shot here...just getting my head around Ctein's level of dedication! I spend around 20 minutes fixing up my images in post and have been thinking about upgrading my camera to reduce time spent in post. Maybe I need to re-think this!

"As an aside, what level of camera would produce the (equivalent) bridge photo as a JPEG? A D7000 or a D800, for example?

"Anyway, thanks for the print offer and the write-up. You've given me some ideas to explore."

Ctein replies: As I said in response to a similar question on Wednesday, "...while I did my usual superb custom printing job (he said immodestly) this is no trickery. The processing I did to turn this into a fine print is pretty straightforward; it is about what is inherent in the medium. It's just ordinary Ctein custom printing magic, not how clever I can be at manipulating pixels. I'm not trying to win some argument by hook or by crook, here. So far as I'm concerned, I won that argument years ago. I'm only giving people an opportunity to see for themselves instead of having to take my word for it."

In other words, this is about what the camera is capable of, not what I am capable of.

As I mentioned in the Comments, I do typically spend hours custom-printing one of my photographs, but the time for any particular photograph runs from less than an hour up to several days. That puts me a cut above most other people, but if you're trying to show what a camera is capable of, you really need a superb print. Otherwise it's like trying to show off your audio system by hooking it up to $10 speakers.

An interesting question you and others have raised: would  a camera with more pixels or a larger sensor reduce the amount of work I do printing? The answer turns out to be no. I've printed everything from six-megapixel quarter-scale sensor to 40 megapixel medium-format sensor photographs. The amount of time it takes to print a photograph to my satisfaction depends entirely on the photograph, not the format.

For example, the fastest-printed photo I alluded to previously is this one. Printed in half an hour from start to finish. From the Olympus. It just happened to be one of those 'perfect negatives' that comes along once in a blue moon and takes very little work, and you just nail it on the second print. (11x14-inch prints, in this case. My printer can't print fast enough to turn out two 17x22" prints in half an hour.)

Contrariwise, this crop from a medium format sensor took quite a few hours of work.

Can't really explain to you the whys and hows in more detail without writing several book-chapters worth of verbiage.

Featured Comment by Alan Fairley: "It sounds like you essentially applied two rounds of sharpening once you had the photo in Photoshop. Did you also apply capture sharpening in ACR? If so, how strongly? As a 4/3 and Micro 4/3 user, I am very intrigued by your workflow. Thanks!

Ctein replies: I routinely apply a modest amount of sharpening and noise reduction within Photoshop to my digital photographs. The results are so dramatically better that it is the norm for me, for any Bayer array photograph I deal with, everything from six megapixel quarter-scale sensor to 40 megapixel medium-format sensor photographs, with or without an anti-aliasing filter.

Usually I leave the Raw conversion sharpening in ACR at the default setting unless I'm dealing with a photograph with pinpoint specular highlights. Then it puts ugly rings around them. Absent that, it's on.

Once I have the photographs in Photoshop, I typically use Smart Sharpen at a radius around a quarter pixel and a percentage in the 50% range, for photographs ACR-converted at normal resolution. Tune to taste. Smart Sharpen is a deconvolution routine; it actually does improve fine detail, not merely enhance edges. I'm quite astonished at how much more detail there is in those Bayer array photos.

I also usually apply a low level of noise reduction using a third-party plug-in (there is no one best plug-in; some work better with some photographs, others with others. No rhyme nor reason to it).

Between the Smart Sharpening and noise reduction, I can produce a photograph with less noise than the original but the same sharpness and detail, the same noise as the original but better sharpness and fine detail, or something in between. Depends on how much of each tweak I use. Usually there is one combination of the two which works very well over an entire photograph.

Sometimes it works a bit better to apply sharpening before noise reduction, sometimes the other way around.

I also happen to own Topaz Labs InFocus which is a deconvolution plug-in. It's more sophisticated than Smart Sharpen but not as good at small radii, because it increments the blur circle in one-pixel steps.

In this particular photograph, since I was supersampling it, I needed to de-blur with a radius more like one-two pixels for maximum quality. I did a bunch of pixel peeping and decided I liked the plug-in better than Smart Sharpen, just by a bit.

By itself, this amount of sharpening doesn't produce killer noise. Yes, there is noise gain, but it's tolerable. What made it a killer was having applied ContrastMaster. It's a plug-in that improves local tonal separation and detail, but it's really hard to tame and it really latches onto noise.

As for the very good question of why I didn't do the masking before I did the sharpening? Well, because I didn't think of it. Normally, I don't need a mask, as I implied above. In this case I was far into the process before I figured out that there just wasn't going to be a set of compromise settings that would work for the clouds, the sky, and the bridge, all at the same time. That's when I built the mask. Had I known when I started I was going to have to go that route, it would've made a lot more sense to do it at the beginning. Given that it took me a couple of hours to create that mask, you can understand why my head didn't want to go that way. (Lazy smile.)

Comments

[andy k]

I've been shooting digitally for six years, and even understand layers in PS and use Aperture 3 extensively. So how come I feel like such a moron every time Ctein shows how smart guys do this? Thanks for the tutorial, but it's like reading how a 3-star Michelin chef does his job.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Looking at that bridge mask -- thanks for showing that, and telling us how long it took.

Sometimes I feel I'm a little impatient about making such things :-).

[Jamin Bickel]

Wait, You're my uncle!?

[Roger Bradbury]

Jamin,

I don't know about Ctein, but surely Bjorn Stronginthearm is your uncle!? : ]

[David Dyer-Bennet]

When writing at greater length, such as in his digital restoration book, the details are more spelled out. (And the sample images for that are available on his web site, too.)

And practice makes perfect. Try out the ideas as you understand them, and work from there. Unless you're pretty unusual, you won't magically become a master printer. But you'll see clear improvements pretty much immediately.

Note that the real expertise is hidden behind innocuous phrases like "to get local brightnesses just as I wanted them" and "A bit of curves tweaking to get the print tones just so" and "kick up the gradation and total separation in the subtle, fine detail just a bit".

[Darel Crawford]

This is a great start for the new Digital Post Exposure Book. I would like to see you publish it as an e-book and skip the traditional book time lag. I am reading the PDF from your website but am really anxious to see an updated, mostly new version.

[DaveC]

Ctein,
Feel like sharing the total hours spent preparing the file? The main reason I ask is to gather evidence that I should spend MORE time at that end of things.
Dave.

[Robert Roaldi]

Thanks, that was a pleasure to read.

[Paul]

What's pixel painting?

[Scott U]

Thanks for the info, definitely quite informative! Just thinking about getting that mask right makes my head and hand hurt :)
I would be very interested in getting a jpg of your mask to use as the wallpaper(1900x1080) on one of my monitors (can be fully watermarked if you want). I will second the interest in a Digital Post Exposure Book, ebook format sounds good to me as well.
Thanks again for this sale, info and all the education you do!
Scott U

[Will Frostmill]

Yes, another vote for a Digital Post Exposure book.

Actually, I would like a three book series:
Vol. 1 The Camera by Mike Johnston
Vol. 2 The Exposure by Thom Hogan
Vol. 3. The Print by Ctein

:)

I bought your Restoring book primarily to learn your techniques for creating masks and manipulating curves. (But I want more details!) I also found it quite useful when I was unexpectedly called upon to scan and print a series of photographs for a funeral service.

Will

[ctein]

Dear Darel and Scott,

That book **IS** somewhere in the queue, but I couldn't tell you exactly where. It's been on my mind for a couple of years; so far it hasn't gelled. That is, I have a ton of disparate facts and tips, but I don't have the coherent skeleton to hang them on. It'll come eventually.

In the meantime, I've been doing an ongoing semi-weekly series of REALLY short columns for Focal Press for their website on the subject of “The Fine Art of Digital Printing.” I figure it's a way to get the authorial juices flowing and get lots of little bits of book content written out in highly abbreviated form. if I manage to keep it up for most of the year, I'll have most of the book, even if it isn't organized into one.

It is definitely my intention to self-publish that book as a PDF. That'll let me keep the price way down; I figure I can price it at $9.95 and make it worth my while. By comparison, the paper version of POST EXPOSURE ballooned in price to over $50 at the end of its run. Paper is just so damned expensive.

I plan to hire my friend Geri Sullivan to come up with a set of design templates for me. She says she can come up with a set that will work well for both on-screen reading and for printing the book out if people want to do that. I believe her; she's really good!

That's about the only detail I've settled on, though. Will it be an expansion of POST EXPOSURE? Will it be a brand-new standalone book? Will I pay for it out of my pocket? Will I try something like Kickstarter? All unresolved.

Bridges to be crossed when the river comes into sight, which it has not yet.

pax \ Ctein
[ Please excuse any word-salad. MacSpeech in training! ]
======================================
-- Ctein's Online Gallery http://ctein.com 
-- Digital Restorations http://photo-repair.com 
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[ctein]

Dear DaveC,

Ummm, I have no idea. I just remember the bloody mask took hours (much more than one, likely less than three). I printed this, like, two–three months ago. I've printed a lot of photographs between then and now.

The time it takes me to get to a finished print for my portfolio varies hugely. The absolute minimum it's ever been was half an hour. The worst it's ever been was five days. If I can keep it down to an average of 90 min., I'm really happy.

~~~~~~

Dear Paul,

Think of it as the digital equivalent of print-spotting. You zoom way in and you clean up the little-bitty visually-annoying artifacts and garbage, pixel by pixel. It's a lot better than print spotting, though, because you only have to do it once!

pax \ Ctein
[ Please excuse any word-salad. MacSpeech in training! ]
======================================
-- Ctein's Online Gallery http://ctein.com 
-- Digital Restorations http://photo-repair.com 
======================================

[JK]

Ctein, I'm curious as to why you sharpened the whole image before masking for noise reduction. My routine is usually to mask first so I can perform both NR and sharpening selectively, but I'm always interested in alternative approaches.

[Ed]

Looks killing Ctein.....

And you cook up a magnificent broth "Uncle" but we all cook up our own broth. For me the ingredients to a tack sharp picture are:

1 till 10) A good lens.......zooms and kitt zooms sure have their purpose but stop using them when sharpness will be critical (not buts please, their are exceptions to the rule but to few to count).

11) Focus......I mean mannualy focus. Make focussing an active process in which you decide where the focuspoint should be placed.

12) Check DOF but keep in mind defraction. In good light it is all to easy to turn down youre aperture cranck up the ISO and use you lens fixed focus, but you wind up with not critically sharp pictures. Personally I experiment with lenses but as a go I use 5.6 till 11 unless I want a bokeh rich shot, then I open up.

13) Work from RAW.......again no buts, every camera (except Leica's and the Pro X1 and the odd Nikon) are equiped with AA filters of the optical kind. So sharpening is needed to obtain pixel sharp foto's.

14) Never ever ever sharpen in one step. No matter how advanced your sharpening algorithms are, using a single algorith to the max always gives a lot less desired result then using several steps with different algoritms to a limited amount.

15) Know your software......don't invest in software you have heard about, take time to get to grips with it. Don't rush things.

16) Uncle Ctein layed down the steps:

a) Sharpening

b) Noise reduction (where needed and when needed)

c) Local contrast (verry important and often overlooked).

I use a GF1, Silky Pics for RAW sharpening, RAWTherapee for colorcontrast, local contrast and RL_sharpening and GIMP for pixel editing and G'MIC for some gentle denoising.

The results can be seen here:

http://blogger.xs4all.nl/stomoxys/archive/2012/04/27/757797.aspx

and here:

http://blogger.xs4all.nl/stomoxys/archive/2012/04/28/758036.aspx

Greetings, Ed

[Zeeman]

Thank you, Ctein, for being so generous with your time. I'm looking forward to seeing the print myself, and to learn from it.

Zeeman

[Sven W]

Hmmmm... is this exercise a measure of a m43 camera or Ctein's excellent post-processing skills?

Quote #1: "... I think exemplifies the very best that a Micro 4/3, 12-megapixel camera can do. It's not a hero experiment; I can go out any day and make photographs of this technical quality. I just can't see any possible way to make a much better one"

Quote #2: "I had a couple of hours of fiddly work getting the mask just so. Such is life."

The 2 quotes imply Ctein spends 2+ hours post-processing a typical image.

I suspect that's *way* more than what most people do for their "any day" images. Truth be told, I don't have enough post processing skills to spend 2 hours on one image ;)

I'm not making a pot-shot here ... just getting my head around Ctein's level of dedication!

I spend around 20 minutes fixing up my images in post and have been thinking about upgrading my camera to reduce time spent in post. Maybe I need to re-think this!

As an aside, what level of camera would produce the [equivalent] bridge photo as a JPEG? A D7000 or a D800, for example?

Anyway, thanks for the print offer and the write-up. You've given me some ideas to explore.

[Earl Dunbar]

I think a book (available as e-book as well as hard copy) is a good idea. Viewing web JPEGs loses a lot.

[Richard Tugwell]

I'm with Sven W on this. It's like an advert for large sensors

[Chris Klug]

Reading this post reminds me how much I don't know about post work. Daunting.

[Alan Fairley]

Ctien, I sounds like you essentially applied two rounds of sharpening once you had the photo in photoshop. Did you also apply capture sharpening in ACR? If so, how strongly?. As a 4/3 and m4/3 user, I am very intrigued by your workflow. Thanks!

[Steve Smith]

and Ctein's your uncle.

Actually, Bob is my uncle!

[ctein]

Dear Sven,

Spinning off your second major question as a different comment, because it got me thinking: What would it take in a JPEG for me to be able to produce the same quality of print?

Okay, more native camera resolution, because my clever tricks won't work well on JPEG's, but 24 megapixels would handle it.

JPEGs lose a couple of stops exposure range over the RAW files, so you'd need, probably, a camera with a 12.5 stop exposure range.

No problems so far. The color space would be a LITTLE bit of an issue, but not really a big one in this case; I could make those sky colors work okay even if I started with sRGB (although I'd have to do a little trickery in Photoshop).

I think what screws me, though, is the 8 bit depth of JPEGs. I don't think I can “clever” my way out of that one. There are two sets of problems. The first is that if I make any tone and color adjustments to the sky, it's really hard to avoid some banding in the print. I might be able to make it work; I am dubious.

The real killer, though, is the need to enhance local contrast to restore the delicate tracery in the clouds. That's not a camera issue; I've discussed this as a general digital printing problem in the past. In this particular photograph, I have to do more than a small amount of local contrast enhancement to get it to look right, and that will just fail for those clouds in eight bits. There will be banding and contouring and all sorts of horrible artifacts.

So, I think this is one that I couldn't print as well from a JPEG, no matter how good the file.

pax \ Ctein
[ Please excuse any word-salad. MacSpeech in training! ]
======================================
-- Ctein's Online Gallery http://ctein.com 
-- Digital Restorations http://photo-repair.com 
======================================

[ctein]

Dear Ed,

I can't imagine anyone going wrong following your recipe!

It differs from mine in a couple of interesting particulars.

I'm not sure about that zoom vs. prime lens thing. I've just run a bunch of tests on my group of lenses to figure out what lenses are the best to use when I have a choice of several, and I haven't analyze them yet, but I think the results may be counterintuitive.

I just about always use autofocus. This particular photograph was auto-focused.

I almost always sharpen a single step. I tried multi-step sharpening methods. Did not see any improvement with them, did see a lot more work.

I am sure this is all dependent on what lenses, cameras, and software one uses.

In the three steps of mine that you laid down, local contrast enhancement comes early in the process. Maybe not always before sharpening but definitely before noise reduction, because it frequently has a substantial effect on the noise.

pax \ Ctein
[ Please excuse any word-salad. MacSpeech in training! ]
======================================
-- Ctein's Online Gallery http://ctein.com 
-- Digital Restorations http://photo-repair.com 
======================================

[Peter Hunter]

The obvious corollary to this exercise (in my opinion) is to see how good a print can be produced from today's technology and services without having to resort the sort of post processing indicated here. For example, 5 mins of general / local adjustment if necessary, then off to the online photo lab / printer of your choice.

[Ed]

The multistep sharpenning is also using multiple algorithems:

1) In SilkyPics I use normal sharpenning (as the camera sort of demands it).

2) In RAWTherapee I use the RL sharpenning which does not create halos and can adress problems with DOF and to some extend motion blur as well (if you forgot to take the tripod with you).

3) In G'MIC a more the cool GIMP plugin which I regard as an essential Swiss Army knife to any photographer, I can also use Octave Sharpenning......Octave sharpening is harsh if left to its own devices but can perform local magic by using diffent layers and different amounts of USM blur per layer. It can be used on the entire print, but its better not to do that.

4) G'MIC also contains a tool called "Hot Pixel Noise" to remove some arefacts that Octave sharpening can produce (all applied sparingly and masked (or on selections) pleas).

And 4) answers Ctein's question as well. If noise is a problem (which it rarely is since I'm a base ISO till I drop kinda guy) then noise cancellation enteres the arena, to me as a last step and only in those area's were I now need it. That is BTW the result of the threestep proces and the limitations of the software I'm using, since I have now way of directing noise reduction in either Silky or RAWTherapee..... If I'm not satisfied with the endresult because of noise in some region of the picture I denoise in Silky (soft algoritm meanig it won't deal with all the noise but leave image detail intact) and then in RAWTherapee....which has a slightly more agressive noise cancelation algorithm. Then I build a layercake with the original and the filtered image and use a mask to combine both in GIMP.

Now most these are adaptations of techniques described by Ctein in jis brilliant book about photorestotion (from start to finish) that any photographer should have lying und his or hers pillow if only for the brilliant use of maskiug techniques. The use of limited local contrast enhancement comes from the book on printing by Uwe Steinmuller (Fine Art Printing for Photographers) which should accompany it.

Of course since I use GNU software (out of principle) I had to adapt a lot, and the nice thing about adapting recepies is that you make them your own, because you have to study the why as well as the how.

And Ctein you can realy on your autofocus as much as you like (in non critical situations I do as well) but if I need selective focus I only trust my eye to see what I want to be in focus.

About the zooms, I know of one exception to the rule and that is my own old legendary Nikon 80-200 F4.5. That becomes a hard to handle but hard to beat 160-200 F4.5 on my Pana.....that is tack sharp. The old pana kittlens is also nice, the Oly 9-18 not so much, that lens needs some manual adjustments to shine (starting of with CA correction in SlikyPics).

Greetings (and thanx to Ctein for his nice words),

Ed

[ctein]

Dear Peter,

Yup, worth people's while to try out the different non-custom printing services available to them.

There's a lot of difference in quality and you can't generalize across the stores in a chain, even. Depends a lot on whose running the shop. I hear great things about Costco printing in Minneapolis from several folks. They can sell a large print for only a bit more than it costs me to make. And it looks pretty good!

'Course, it doesn't come close to how well I can print, but it's not supposed to, not at an order-of-magnitude lower prices. But it's more than good enough to make most people very happy.

pax / Ctein

[xfmj]

Nice photo!

But Ctein (and Mike, too)--

Thanks a lot for reminding me that I needed to buy that Oly 45mm. Ponied up for it this weekend, and the lens is just great. Really hits a sweets spot in how it renders, especially for the price.

This blog did me right with the Panny 20 and now this Oly 45. Those and the E-P1 I've felt are like Goldilocks' "just right." But damn I just laid my anxious hands on the OM-D sample at the store when I bought the lens. The shutter delay (well, the lack thereof) and focus speed on the OM-D are really something.

As an amateur, I do not feel compromised at all by buying into u43rds. The systems are really delivering now. They are a delight to carry and use.

Thank you for spreading that word.

[Peter]

Ctein - that wasn't really my point, but never mind

[David Dyer-Bennet]

If it's an advertisement for large sensors, it's an advertisement for sensors larger than 35mm full-frame; I've had to do everything Ctein describes for various bits of pictures from my D700, including masking the sky to apply more aggressive noise-elimination there than elsewhere.

For this kind of photography, medium-format (or large) was the film answer; people doing this kind of big art in 35mm were rare, and pushing the limits of the technology (as Galen Rowell did; for good reasons involving weight he had to transport). Well, I'm sure (never having had the pleasure) that a Phase One back would make the post-processing for this sort of image a relative picnic; but it would make the transportation, setup, and tear-down a LOT more work.

[Richard]

DDB - I sent you a couple of files for your opinion.

[ctein]

Dear DD-B,

Well, err, no, a Phase One back would not have made the printing of this particular photo a "relative picnic." I've used a Phase One back; I know what it can do and can't. It does not magically make perfect files, it merely makes better ones. And in this case it does not make ones that are so much better that this would have obviated my printing.

A Phase One back would have eliminated the upsampling in ACR. Some other steps in the workflow would have changed. It still would have been a several hour printing job, just a somewhat different one.

Bigger does not making printing easier.

As for whether bigger is better in general, that is so off the point of this exercise that it doesn't even bear debating. Again, to make the film analogy, if a pro is demonstrating to you how 35mm film is suitable for professional work, pointing out to them that 8x10 makes a better photograph does not begin to address what they're saying. It's not even on topic.

pax / Ctein

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Okay, I'm wrong. I thought it would eliminate the need for noise reduction in the sky, and hence the need for the mask.