For Reading Camera Club’s first meeting of the New Year, we were pleased to welcome Mark and Judy Buckley-Sharpe from Harrow club. Mark and Judy specialise in all aspects of photo printing, and their journey began in the darkroom days, when they produced predominantly monochrome, later turning to colour, both negatives and Cibachrome from slides. This brought back memories from all the ex-darkroom workers present, reminding them how relatively easy things are these days without enlargers, safelights, test strips etc. They explained many of the older techniques before moving on to digital printing, giving a wealth of information about all the intricacies of this. We saw many examples of their prints, and found out how they were produced, also what a difference the paper used makes, stressing that for optimised printing, colour profiles should be obtained from the paper manufacturers. This was illustrated by the same shot on several different papers – the difference was amazing.
They also talked about colour casts, and checking these with hand-held filters. They then went on to discuss the various inks available for printing, i.e. pigment and dye, and stressing the importance of sticking to one or the other. Finally, the problem of Adobe RGB versus sRGB was aired, and Mark and Judy felt that overall it was best to stick with sRGB as most equipment was set to this as default and it was difficult to spot the difference, illustrated by a pair of their prints.
An excellent evening, informally presented, giving printers some excellent ideas to try out and non-printers perhaps the urge to have a go.
Report submitted by Dorothy Wood
