Daniel Anderson Photography

I am pleased to announce another Digital Printing Workshop to be held in my Door County Wisconsin studio.

As usual, there will be new topics and editing techniques to show you that I have just put into practice.

It has now been almost two decades since I began to investigate the process of taking my existing transparencies and negatives, scanning them and printing these digital files using inkjet printers and I now am able to say that I can surpass my ability to interpret my previous work digitally than I was able to do in the traditional darkroom. The biggest difference is the increased ability that I have to control all parts of the image in the digital realm. All the techniques I brought to bear on a negative or transparency in the traditional darkroom have their digital counterparts but the control is much more precise. It has also been 15 years since I transitioned from film to high end digital capture for all my photography. This has turned out to be very rewarding for my ability to make prints that express my vision much more effectively.

The bad news in all this is that digital printing alone will most definitely not make one a better photographer or printer. It still depends on one's ability to see photographically and to know what it means to interpret a digital file. Digital printing is not "easier" than traditional methods. Just as in the traditional darkroom, working in the digital realm still requires much time, thought and a set of skills to arrive at the final "recipe" that results in a truly expressive print. What I intend to show you in this workshop is how and which digital tools can be employed to help in the successful interpretation of your digital files to make wonderful and luminous prints. We will cover both color and black and white digital printing as the specific Photoshop tools to achieve this level of image control are the same for both. I will also show you how to use some really valuable new tools that are in the newest version of Photoshop.

We will examine each aspect of the digital process by taking various scanned files or digital captures and follow them from the scanning or capture process, then interpreting them in photoshop and finally showing the best methods to print these digital files using an inkjet printer, demonstrating each step along the way. We will emphasize a logical and effective digital workflow that is repeatable.

Some specific topics that will be discussed and demonstrated using Photoshop will include:

• • Workflow for fine art digital printing

• • Methods to achieve precise color control

• • Several excellent methods of achieving high quality B/W prints

• • Discussing and defining concepts of print quality

• • Hardware and software choices and how to get started

• • Paper and ink choices

• • Building master files with an efficient workflow

• • Easy ways to make tough selections with Photoshop

• • Methods to precisely control both global and local contrast

• • Various masking techniques

• • Several dodging and burning methods that allow very fine control

• • Focus slices - a technique for amazing depth of field

• • Sharpening techniques and when to use them

• • Presentation methods