Hats Off to JVH Technical

My hat's off to JVH Technical (www.jvhtech.com). Their recent Digital Festival was a not-to-be missed event that I damn nearly missed.

JVH Technical is one of the giclée world's best-kept secrets, if you ask me. Maybe you have heard of John Harrington, but I hadn't until last week when I discovered he and JVH while sourcing an Epson 9890.

During our conversation John invited me to attend the JVH Digital Festival ...and to bring my book, Giclée Prepress - The Art of Giclée. How could I refuse an offer like that? So I attended and boy was I happy that did. This event was totally focused on people like us... giclée printers.

JVH Technical specializes in wide format printing and they have everything for that specialty. You know how it is in this business, usually you source one thing here and other there. Not so with JVH.

Harrington carries everything you need from canvas to coatings, and everything in between. Not only that, they actually know what their products do and dare to recommend things.

Manufacturers attending the Digital Festival included:

● Epson®
● Canon®
● Premier Imaging®
● Chromix®
● Hasselblad®
● Colorbyte®
● Onyx
● Seal/Neschen®
● Microsoft®
● Avery®
● MOAB®

On the educational and informational side of the equation attendees included:

● Mark Fitzgerald / Digital Darkroom (instructor and author)
● Ron Martinsen / ronmartblog.com (relevant photo news & discounts)
● Randy Hufford / master printer and educator
● Douglas Mesney / author Giclée Prepress - The Art of Giclée

The two-day annual JVH Technical event isn't just a bunch of the same ol' guys selling the same ol' stuff. There's a fully packed two-day seminar program with people who really know what they are talking about... talking to an audience that understands what they are talking about. That's a confluence that's all too rare anymore. But wait, there's more...

Prized Event

A highlight of the event is a picture contest...judged by the audience, made up of about 200 loyal Harrington customers (more like fans), all picture professionals.

You couldn't imagine the variety of pictures. There were about 150 entries, from a 5 X 7 printed on an old Epson® 2200 to giant murals printed on the very latest 9900 and 11900 machines. The prints displayed every conceivable level of technical prowess. Some prints were amateurish... those people need my book! However, there's no accounting for people's tastes and possibly what I see, as printing failures, are others' great successes.

The contest prizes were awesome. Folks won iPad®s, Dell® Network Computers, LG® monitors, and so on. There were many smiles as the winners were announced. (Door prizes were of equally high quality.)

Stretching Things

Good trade shows and seminars always stretch one's imagination and this event was no exception. From artwork and advice to technical innovations, the JVH Digital Festival is targeted precisely for printers. Harrington's marketing background serves him well in this enterprise. He has assembled everything a giclée printer needs, and more.

The most interesting new device at the show was, for me, an affordable (about $3K) canvas-stretching machine... the 'Tensador II' invented by John A. Morse, who was there demonstrating it. The compact machine has a very small footprint and handles canvases up to 48-inches wide (another model goes to 60-inches).

If you follow my blog or have read my book you have heard my warnings about what can happen to your thumbs and fingers if you do a lot of stretching. I will be saving my shekels for one of these little sweeties (hmmm, Christmas is coming...).

All In the Family

JVH Technical is a family affair. For example, Ryan Harrington, John's son, does all the install work (which is complimentary) and Kathy Harrington, his wife, was manning the welcome desk (and I suspect a whole lot more).

Although I was in the Embassy Suites hotel, I felt more like I was coming into the Harrington's home and that everyone there was John Harrington's extended family. Even though I didn't know 99% of the folks there, when I walked in I felt like I had joined a circle of friends. Certainly, John Harrington is their guru and they treat him with star-like qualities.

The giclée printing 'industry' needs more people like John Harrington and more events like the JVH Digital Seminar.

Take-Aways

If you're like me, events like the Harrington's Digital Festival always touch your life in some meaningful way... helping you to make key decisions. This was one of those.

What I took away from the event was a clearer picture of the people I write for... people like you. I started writing because of the repetitive nature of the prepress work I do at Vashon Island Imaging, my printing company. There I continue to notice people making the same mistakes over and over again.

Most of my customers never heard of prepress before discovering Vashon Island Imaging. Most of them just hear that we do good repro work and bring their stuff to us. Fair enough. They are artists for the most part, not printers. Their naiveté is therefore excusable.

However, what astounded me was that most of the professional image-makers at the JVH Digital Festival didn't know what prepress is either. Huh? These were people who spent thousands of dollars on giclée printing machines. They didn't understand the fundamental concept(s) of prepress -- even though they just came out of an all-day seminar about digital printing!

That is like finishing cooking school without knowing why bread rises.

The Big Disconnect

The 'disconnect' between people and their printers stems from the fact that nobody teaches how to print. They teach about printers... not about printing.

90% of the high-profile giclée printing presenters are talking about 'buttons' 90% of the time. If this happens, push this. If that happens, push that.

You might ask... 'Why?'... or, 'How does that happen?' In that case they will explain in great detail how the result is from the device or algorithm. Well, it is, but....

Never do they explain why you needed to push the button in the first place or what actually happens when you do.

For example, with all those experts present I thought it the perfect time to ask if anybody knew why a 44-inch Epson® printer stops at 84 inches, requiring the purchase of an expensive RIP software package to make prints longer than that.

What defines the limit? Is it a pixel count, RAM, the OS or what? If you Google® that question you will quickly see that not many people out there know the answer. But I figured this crowd would.

Predictably, 90% of the answers had to do with button pushing. However, John Harrington remembered a formula that had to do with the Windows® operating system itself. He called on Brad Gibson (brad@gibsonphotographic.com) who works at Microscoft®. Brad confirmed that in some instances (not all) the length limit stems from the OS. What about a Mac? I wanted to ask ...but before I could they moved on to other subjects.

PhotoShop® uses a 16-bit drawing space in which the image to be output is bitmapped and then spooled to the printer. The size of that 16-bit space limits the size of the bitmap. Our 9880 can't print past 84 inches at 240 dpi without the use of a RIP (we use Colorburst®).

Using RIP software solves the problem because the way a RIP processes the image, it is delivered to the printer 'line by line'... not as a giant bitmapped image.

There are a couple of non-RIP alternatives:

1.) Print from Acrobat
2.) Lower the printing res
3.) Select the 'Coarse Rendering' in Epson® software.

Note that 'Print Preview' does NOT show the spooled file. Instead it shows a representation of it based on your printer setting adjustments, like margins, page size, etc…

OK, that was a pretty specific question. Still, 90% of that audience of professional image-makers didn't know the answer. Need I say more about the subject of prepress?

Adobe®, Epson®, Canon®, Nikon® and the rest of them have done such an amazing job automating everything that 90% of the people are completely satisfied 90% of the time. It is only the lunatic fringe who want more than what they deliver so why bother? ...they probably mutter words like that behind our backs... either that or I am paranoid.

It seems that anyone who knows what prepress is must be older than 60, or so it seems... before automatic anything. Back then the only thing automatic was manual. I guess you could say, prepress is manual labor... something most people don't like it.

Prepress is to printing what cooking is to eating. If you don't know how to cook, your limited to what TV Dinners has to offer.

Hunger for Knowledge

Everyone hungers for knowledge. They flock to events like Harrington's to get new solutions for old problems, to find the latest and greatest.

There, they are sold new machines and taught how to use them. But they never learn how to actually print.

That is like a pilot learning about an airplane and how it works, but never learning about flight and how to fly. Or a chef learning about a stove instead of how to bake. 'What's the difference as long as we make bread?', you might ask. Quality would be the answer.

Most people buy packaged bread. Some make their own from scratch. The latter have control and can make choices that the former cannot.

Those that want control of their printing have to learn more than button pushing. As I explain in my book and classes, one file cannot serve all masters. People think that when they have nailed the picture they can go home and have dinner. Quaint concept.

How could only one picture file possibly look good in all media? The simple answer is that it can't. Any printing professional or prepress artist can tell you that. Every type of media and output device will make your picture look a little different. If that is OK then you need read no farther.

Prepress, at very least, is adapting the picture to look the same on any media you select. However, prepress can be much more than that.

Prepress is what makes some prints look luminous compared to others. Good prepress tweaks pictures to take advantage of a particular media-combination's strengths and avoid its weaknesses.

Automatic anything will only take you so far. Do you think precision flight teams like the Blue Angels® or Thunderbirds® are on autopilot?

Control Freak

Call me what you will, I want control. Ever since I was a kid I've pushed to find the limits, then stepped slightly over to see what happens. My need to control extends well into picture making and every aspect of it. Knowing the limits gives you control, and control brings with it the freedom of choice.

Dissatisfied with button pushing, I started diving deeper into digital when I came out of the darkroom back in the 1990's. 2003 was when I went wide. That was the year I dropped commercial audiovisual art in favor of printed fine art. A lot of other stuff was dropped too, but that's another story.

Attending an Epson® Academy in Vancouver, I got sold on the idea of big beautiful prints. I bought a second hand Epson® 7600 from Phil Borges (and in the process visited his fabulous studio on Mercer Island near Seattle). The printer was installed in Vancouver, making prints for sale at the Michael Goddard gallery there. My stuff complemented his and sold well enough to stay on the walls.

I had become a pretty good printer by the time the economy went bust and the gallery drowned in debt. With the market for my own work temporarily washed up, I turned my attention to other people's printing needs and opened Vashon Island Imaging.

Printing a wide range of work for an even wider range of clients, I began to notice common frequent errors made by just about everyone, and started teaching seminars to get to the root of the problems. Then during the seminars I realized that most lacked any knowledge of the fundamental principles of photography, to say nothing of printing photography. There are two sets of 'rules' involved... two different color systems... two different ways of looking at and seeing the world. No wonder folks get confused.

Like PhotoShop®, prepress is a world unto itself. The sophisticated prepress artist understands and takes into consideration things like the spectral behavior of media and coating surfaces... anything and everything that affects the total 'look' of a giclée.

That's when the idea of the book came to mind. Put everything that a giclée printer needs to know into a single book... a giclée bible. That's what I did. It took about a year and we published it last May. Then I immediately started this blog in order to keep the book current between bi-annual major updates and re-publishing.

For the sake of being complete, the book starts from a picture's creation, then explains in detail the processes of execution including capture, prepress, printing, finishing, display, and archiving. It’s an all-in-one kind of book. As I say, it's the 'Bible of Giclée'.

That is why the more I learn about John Harrington and JVH the more I am reminded of myself, Vashon Island Imaging, the book and this blog.

John Harrington and I both aspire to be 'synergists' ...that is, suppliers whose combined services provide a range that has a synergistic effect for customers.

If customers were to get the same services individually from different suppliers, the net effect would not be the same. Why? Because a full-range life involves the kind of gestalt that produces zeitgeist.

If you understand every aspect print creation, production, display, and archiving, then each aspect plays an intertwined role in every decision at every stage in the giclée printing process.

For example, how a print is displayed affects its black point. Is it under glass? ...What kind of lighting? Black point shift affects the overall contrast range of the picture, as perceived by viewers. Knowing those things you can adjust the print to look its best, as it will be seen.

It's like cooking and eating. Grandma's apple pie really did taste better... because she made it totally from scratch and controlled every step of production.

Understanding prepress, you'll turn off auto anything and take control of your printing, making it pixel perfect.Or, I'll eat my hat... (after I take it off for the Harringtons).