pcode

Some time ago I purchased an Epson Stylus Photo R3000 printer, as I wanted to be able to print at A3 size, and get good quality monochrome prints. For a while I struggled a bit to get good quality color photo output from the R3000 using Gutenprint, as it took me a while to figure out which settings proved best for generating and applying ICC profiles.

Sidenote, if you happen to have a R3000 as well and you want to be able to get good results using Gutenprint, you can get some of my profiles here, not all of these profiles have been practically tested. Obviously your milage may vary.

When reading Gutenprint’s documentation they clearly indicated that you should use the “Uncorrected” Color Correction mode, which is very much good advice, as we need deterministic output to be able to generate and apply our ICC profiles in a consistent manner. What kinda threw me off, is that the “Uncorrected” Color Correction mode produces linear gamma output, which practically means very dark output, which the ICC profile is going to need to correct for. And while this is a valid approach, it does generally mean you need to generate a profile using more color patches, which means using more ink and paper for each profile you generate. A more practical approach would be to set Composite Gamma to a value of 1.0, which gamma corrects the output to look more perceptually natural, which consequently means the ICC profile has less to correct for, and thus can be generated using less color patches, and therefore using less ink and paper to do so.

Keep in mind that a printer profile is only valid for a particular combination of Printer, Ink set, Paper, Driver and Settings. Therefore you should document all these facets while generating a profile. This can be as simple as including a similarly named plain text file with each profile you create, for example:

Filename ............: epson_r3000_tecco_photo_matte_230.icc
MD5 Sum .............: 056d6c22ea51104b5e52de8632bd77d4

Paper Type ..........: Tecco Photo Matte 230

Printer Model .......: Epson Stylus Photo R3000
Printer Ink .........: Epson UltraChrome K3 with Vivid Magenta
Printer Firmware ....: AS25E3 (09/11/14)
Printer Driver ......: Gutenprint 5.2.13 (Ubuntu 18.04 LTS)

Color Model .........: RGB
Color Precision .....: Normal
Media Type ..........: Archival Matte Paper
Print Quality .......: Super Photo
Resolution ..........: 1440x1440 DPI
Ink Set .............: Matte Black
Ink Type ............: Standard
Quality Enhancement .: None
Color Correction ....: Uncorrected
Image Type ..........: Photograph
Dither Algorithm ....: EvenTone
Composite Gamma .....: 1.0

You’ll note I’m not using the maximum 5760×2880 resolution Gutenprint supports for this printer, as the quality increase seems almost negligible, and it slows down printing immensely, and might also increase ink consumption with little to show for it.

While the Matte Black (MK) ink set and Archival Matte Paper media type works very well for matte papers, you should probably use Photo Black (PK) ink set and Premium Glossy Photo Paper media type for glossy or Premium Semigloss Photo Paper for pearl, satin & lustre media types.

The following profiling procedure uses only a single sheet of A4 paper, with very decent results, you can use multiple pages by increasing the patch count, the increase in effective output quality will likely be underwhelming though, but your mileage may vary of course.

To proceed you’ll need a spectrophotometer (a colorimeter won’t suffice) supported by ArgyllCMS, like for example the X-Rite Color Munki Photo.

To install ArgyllCMS and other relevant tools on Debian (or one of its derivatives like Ubuntu):

apt-get install argyll liblcms2-utils imagemagick

First we’ll need to generate a set of color patches (we’re including a neutral grey axis, so the profile can more effectively neutralize Epson’s warm tone grey inks):

targen -v -d 3 -G -g 14 -f 210 myprofile

printtarg -v -i CM -h -R 42 -t 360 -M 6 -p A4 myprofile

This results in a TIF file, which you need to print at whatever settings you want to use the profile at. Make sure you let the print dry (and outgas) for an hour at the very least. After the print has dried we’ll need to start measuring the patches using our spectrophotometer:

chartread -v -H myprofile

Once all the patches have been read, we’re ready to generate the actual profile.

colprof -v -D "Tecco Photo Matte 230 for Epson R3000" \
           -C "Copyright 2018 Your Name Here" \
           -Zm -Zr -qm -nc \
           -S /usr/share/color/argyll/ref/sRGB.icm \
           -cmt -dpp myprofile

Note if you’re generating a profile for a glossy or lustre paper type remove the -Zm from the colprof commandline.

Evaluating Your Profile

After generating a custom print profile we can evaluate the profile using xicclu:

xicclu -g -fb -ir myprofile.icc

Looking at the graph above, there are a few things of note, you’ll notice the graph doesn’t touch the lower right corner, which represents a profiles black point, keep in mind that the blackest black any printer can print, still reflects some light, and thus isn’t perfectly black, i.e. 0.

Another point of interest is the curvature of lines, if the graph is bowing significantly to the upper right, it means the media type you have chosen for your profile is causing Gutenprint to put down more ink than the paper you’re using is capable of taking. And conversely if the graph is bowing significantly to the lower left, it means the media type you have chosen for your profile is causing Gutenprint to put down less ink than the paper you’re using is capable of taking. While a profile will compensate for either, having a profile compensate too strongly for either may cause banding artifacts in rare cases especially with an 8-bit workflow. While, I haven’t had a case yet where I needed to, you can use the Density control to adjust the amount of ink put on paper.

Visualizing Printer Gamut

To visualize the effective gamut of your profile you can generate a 3D Lab colorspace graph using iccgamut, which you can view with any modern web browser:

iccgamut -v -w -n myprofile.icc
xdg-open myprofile.x3d.htm

Comparing Gamuts

To compare the gamut of our new custom print profile against a standard working colorspace like sRGB follow these steps:

cp /usr/share/color/argyll/ref/sRGB.icm .
iccgamut -v sRGB.icmiccgamut -v myprofile.icc
viewgam -i -n myprofile.gam sRGB.gam srgb_myprofile
Intersecting volume = 406219.5 cubic units
'epson_r3000_hema_matt_coated_photo_paper_235.gam' volume = 464977.8 cubic units, intersect = 87.36%
'sRGB.gam' volume = 899097.5 cubic units, intersect = 45.18%
xdg-open srgb_myprofile.x3d.htm

From the above output we can conclude that our custom print profile covers about 45% of sRGB, meaning the printer has a gamut that is much smaller than sRGB. However we can also see that sRGB in turn covers about 87% of our custom print profile, which means that 13% of our custom print profile gamut is actually beyond the gamut of sRGB.

This is where gamut mapping comes in. This is where declared rendering intents actually affect how colors outside of the shared gamut is handled.

While a Relative Colorimetric rendering intent limits your prints to the shared area, effectively giving you the smallest practical gamut, it will however offer you the best color accuracy.

A Perceptual rendering intent will scale down colors from an area where a working space profile has a larger gamut (the other 55% of sRGB) into a smaller gamut.

A Saturation rendering intent will also scale up colors from an area where a working space profile has a smaller gamut into a larger gamut (the 13% of our custom print profile).

Manually Preparing Prints using liblcms2-utils

To test your profile, I suggest getting a good test image, like for example from SmugMug, and applying your new profile, using either Perceptual gamut mapping or Relative Colorimetric gamut mapping with Black Point Compensation respectively:

jpgicc -v -o printer.icc -t 0    -q 95 original.jpg print.jpg
jpgicc -v -o printer.icc -t 1 -b -q 95 original.jpg print.jpg

When you open either of the print corrected images, you’ll most likely find they’ll both look awful on your computer’s display, but keep in mind, this is because the images are correcting for printer, driver, ink & paper behavior. If you actually print either image, the printed image should look fairly close to the original image on your computer’s display (presuming you have your display setup properly and calibrated as well).

Manually Preparing Prints using ImageMagick

A more sophisticated way to prepare real images for printing would be using (for example) ImageMagick, these examples below illustrate how you can use ImageMagick to scale an image to a set resolution (360 DPI) for a given paper size, add print sharpening (this is why having a known static resolution is important, otherwise the sharpening would give inconsistent results across different images), then we add a thin black border, and a larger but equidistant (presuming a 3:2 image) white border, and finally we convert the image to our custom print profile:

A4 paper

convert -profile /usr/share/color/argyll/ref/sRGB.icm \
        -resize 2466^ -density 360 -unsharp 2x2+1+0 \
        -bordercolor black -border 28x28 -bordercolor white -border 227x227 \
        -black-point-compensation -intent relative -profile myprofile.icc \
        -strip -sampling-factor 1x1 -quality 95 original.jpg print.jpg

A3 paper

convert -profile /usr/share/color/argyll/ref/sRGB.icm \
        -resize 3487^ -density 360 -unsharp 2x2+1+0 \
        -bordercolor black -border 28x28 -bordercolor white -border 333x333 \
        -black-point-compensation -intent relative -profile myprofile.icc \
        -strip -sampling-factor 1x1 -quality 95 original.jpg print.jpg

A3+ paper

convert -profile /usr/share/color/argyll/ref/sRGB.icm \
        -resize 4320^ -density 360 -unsharp 2x2+1+0 \
        -bordercolor black -border 28x28 -bordercolor white -border 152x152 \
        -black-point-compensation -intent relative -profile myprofile.icc \
        -strip -sampling-factor 1x1 -quality 95 original.jpg print.jpg

Automatically Preparing Prints via colord

While the above method describes a way that gives you a lot of control on how to prepare images for printing, you may also want to use a profile for printing on plain paper, where the input is output of any random application, as opposed to a raster image file that can be very easily preprocessed.

Via colord you can assign a printer an ICC profile that will be automatically applied through cups-filters (pdftoraster), but keep in mind that this profile can only be changed through colormgr (or another colord frontend, like GNOME Control Center) and not through an application’s print dialog, sadly. To avoid messing with driver settings too much, I would suggesting duplicating your printer in CUPS, for example:

• a printer instance for plain paper prints (with an ICC profile assigned through colord
• a printer instance for matte color photographic prints (without a profile assigned through colord)
• a printer instance for (semi)glossy color photographic prints
• a printer instance for matte black and white photographic prints (likely without a need for a profile at all).
• a printer instance for (semi)glossy black and white photographic prints (likely without a need for a profile at all).

One caveat of having a printer duplicated in CUPS is that it essentially also creates multiple print queues, which means if you have sent prints to multiple separate queues, you’ll have a race condition where it’s anybody’s guess which queue actually delivers the next print to your single physical printer, which may result in prints coming out in a different order as you had sent them. But it’s my guess that this disadvantage will hardly be noticeable for most people, and very tolerable to most who would notice it.

One thing to keep in mind is that pdftoraster applies an ICC profile by default using a Perceptual rendering intent, which means that out of gamut colors in a source image are scaled to fit inside the the print profile’s gamut. Fundamentally the Perceptual rendering intent makes the tradeoff to keep gradients intact, at the expense of color accuracy, which is most often a fairly sensible thing to do. Given this tidbit of information, and the fact that pdftoraster assumes sRGB input (unless explicitly told otherwise), I’d like to emphasize the importance of passing the -S parameter with an sRGB profile to colprof when generating print profiles for on Linux.

To assign an ICC profile to be applied automatically by cups-filters:

sudo cp navigator_colour_documents_120.icc /var/lib/colord/icc/navigator_colour_documents_120.icc
colormgr import-profile /var/lib/colord/icc/navigator_colour_documents_120.icc
colormgr find-profile-by-filename /var/lib/colord/icc/navigator_colour_documents_120.icc
colormgr get-devices-by-kind printer
colormgr device-add-profile \
         /org/freedesktop/ColorManager/devices/cups_EPSON_Epson_Stylus_Photo_R3000 \
         /org/freedesktop/ColorManager/profiles/icc_c43e7ce085212ba8f85ae634085ecfd3

More on Gutenprint media types

In contrast to commercial printer drivers, Gutenprint gives us the opportunity to peek under the covers, and find out more about the different media types Gutenprint supports for your printer, first lookup your printers model number:

$ grep 'R3000' /usr/share/gutenprint/5.2/xml/printers.xml 
<printer ... name="Epson Stylus Photo R3000" driver="escp2-r3000" ... model="115" ...

Then find the relevant media definition file:

$ grep 'media src' /usr/share/gutenprint/5.2/xml/escp2/model/model_115.xml 
<media src="escp2/media/f360_ultrachrome_k3v.xml"/>

Finally you can dig through the relevant media type definitions, where the Density parameter is of particular interest:

$ less /usr/share/gutenprint/5.2/xml/escp2/media/f360_ultrachrome_k3v.xml
<paper ... text="Plain Paper" ... PreferredInkset="ultra3matte">
  <ink ... name="ultra3matte" text="UltraChrome Matte Black">
    <parameter type="float" name="Density">0.720000</parameter>
<paper ... text="Archival Matte Paper" ... PreferredInkset="ultra3matte">
  <ink ... name="ultra3matte" text="UltraChrome Matte Black">
    <parameter type="float" name="Density">0.920000</parameter>
<paper ... text="Premium Glossy Photo Paper" ... PreferredInkset="ultra3photo">
  <ink ... name="ultra3photo" text="UltraChrome Photo Black">
    <parameter type="float" name="Density">0.720000</parameter>
<paper ... text="Premium Semigloss Photo Paper" ... PreferredInkset="ultra3photo">
  <ink ... name="ultra3photo" text="UltraChrome Photo Black">
    <parameter type="float" name="Density">0.720000</parameter>
<paper ... text="Photo Paper" ... PreferredInkset="ultra3photo">
  <ink ... name="ultra3photo" text="UltraChrome Photo Black">
    <parameter type="float" name="Density">1.000000</parameter> 

Dedicated Grey Neutralization Profile

As mentioned earlier, the Epson R3000 uses warm tone grey inks, which results in very pleasant true black & white images, without any color inks used, at least when Gutenprint is told to print in Greyscale mode.

If, unlike me, you don’t like the warm tone effect, applying the ICC we generated should neutralize it mostly, but possibly not perfectly, which is fine for neutral area’s in color prints, but may be less satisfactory for proper black & white prints.

While I haven’t done any particular testing on this issue, you may want to consider doing a second profile dedicated and tuned to grey neutralization, just follow the normal profiling procedure with the following target generation command instead:

targen -v -d 3 -G -g 64 -f 210 -c previous_color_profile.icc -A 1.0 -N 1.0 grey_neutral_profile

Obviously you’ll need to use this particular profile in RGB color mode, even though your end goal may be monochrome, given that the profile needs to use color inks to compensate for the warm tone grey inks.

The Leica rangefinder

Rangefinder type cameras predate modern single lens reflex cameras. People still use them. It’s just a different way of shooting. Since they’re no longer a mainstream type camera most manufacturers have stopped making them a long time ago. Except Leica, Leica still makes digital and film rangefinders and as you might guess, they come at significant cost. Even old Leica film rangefinders easily cost upwards of € 1000. While Leica certainly wasn’t the only brand to manufacture rangefinders throughout photographic history, it was (and still is) certainly the most iconic rangefinder brand.

The Zorki rangefinder

Now the Soviets essentially tried to copy Leica’s cameras, the result of which, the Zorki series of cameras, was produced at KMZ. Many different versions exist, having produced nearly 2 million cameras across more than 15 years, the Zorki-4 was without a doubt it’s most popular incarnation. Many consider the Zorki-4 to be the one where the Soviets got it (mostly) right.

That said, the Zorki-4 vaguely looks like a Leica M with it’s single coupled viewfinder/rangefinder window. In most other ways it’s more like a pre-M Leica, with it’s 39mm LTM lens screw mount. Earlier Zorki-4’s have a body finished with vulcanite which is though as nails, but if damaged is very difficult to fix/replace. Later Zorki-4’s have a body finished with relatively cheap leatherette, which is much more easily damaged, and is commonly starting to peel off, but should be relatively easy to make better than new. Most Zorki’s come with either a Jupiter-8 50mm f/2.0 lens (being a Zeiss Sonnar inspired design), or an Industar-50 50mm f/3.5 (being a Zeiss Tessar inspired design). I’d highly recommend getting a Zorki-4 with a Jupiter-8 if you can find one.

Buying a Zorki rangefinder with a Jupiter lens

If you’re looking to buy a Zorki there are a few things to be aware of. Zorki’s were produced during the fifties, the sixties and the seventies in Soviet Russia often favoring quantity over quality presumably to be able to meet quota’s. The same is likely true for most Soviet optics as well. So they are both old and may not have met the highest quality standards to begin with. So when buying a Zorki you need to keep in mind it might need repairs and CLA (clean, lube, adjust). My particular Zorki had a dim viewfinder because of dirt both inside and out, the shutterspeed dial was completely stuck at 1/60th of a second and the film takeup spool was missing. I sent my Zorki-4 and Jupiter-8 to Oleg Khalyavin for repairs, shutter curtain replacement and CLA. Oleg was also able to provide me with a replacement film takeup spool or two as well. All in all having work done on your Zorki will easily set you back about € 100 including significant shipping expenses. Keep this in mind before buying. And even if you get your Zorki in a usable state, you’ll probably have to have it serviced at some point. You may very well want to consider having it serviced rather sooner than later, allowing yourself the benefit of enjoying a newly serviced camera.

Complementary accessories

Zorki’s usually come without a lens hood, and the Jupiter-8’s glass elements are said to be only single coasted, so a lens hood isn’t exactly a luxury. A suitable aftermarket lens hood isn’t hard to find though.

While my Zorki did come with it’s original clumsy (and in my case stinky) leather carrying case, it doesn’t come with a regular camera strap. Matin’s Deneb-12LN leather strap can be an affordable but stylish companion to the Zorki. The strap is relatively short, but it’s long enough to wear around your neck or arm. It’s also fairly stiff when it’s still brand new, but it will loosen up after using it for a few days. The strap seems to show signs of wear fairly quickly though.

To some it might seem asif the Zorki has a hot shoe, but it doesn’t, it’s actually a cold shoe, merely intended as an accessory mount and since it’s all metal even with a flash connected via PC Sync it’s likely to be permanently shorted. To mount a regular hot shoe flash you will need a hot shoe adapter both for isolation and PC Sync connectivity.

Choosing a film stock

So now you have a nice Zorki-4, waiting for film to be loaded into it. As of this writing (2015) there is a smörgåsbord of film available. I like shooting black & white, and I often shoot Ilford XP2 Super 400. Ilford’s XP2 is the only B&W film left that’s meant to be processed along with color print film in regular C41 chemicals (so it can be processed by a one-hour-photo service, if you’re lucky enough to still have one of those around). Like most color print film, XP2 has a big exposure latitude, remaining usable between ISO 50 — 800, which isn’t a luxury since the Zorki-4 is not equipped with a built-in lightmeter. While Ilford recommends shooting it at ISO 400, I’d suggest shooting it as if it’s ISO 200 film, giving you two stops of both underexposure and overexposure leeway.

With regard to color print film, I’ve only shot Kodak Gold 200 color print film thus far with pretty decent results. Kodak New Portra 400 quickly comes to mind as another good option. An inexpensive alternative could possibly be Fuji Superia X-TRA 400, which can be found very cheaply as most store-brand 400 speed color print film.

Shooting with a Zorki rangefinder

Once you have a Zorki, there are still some caveats you need to be aware of… Most importantly, don’t change shutter speeds while the shutter isn’t cocked (cocking the shutter is done by advancing the film), not heeding this warning may damage the cameras internal mechanisms. Other notable issues of lesser importance are minding the viewfinder’s parallax error (particularly when shooting at short distances) and making sure you load the film straight, I’ve managed to load film at a slight angle a couple of times already.

As I’ve mentioned, the Zorki-4 does not come with a built-in lightmeter, which means the camera won’t be helping you getting the exposure right, you are on your own. You could use a pricy dedicated light meter (or a less pricy smartphone app, which may or may not work well on your particular phone), either of which are fairly cumbersome. Considering XP2’s wide exposure latitude means an educated guesswork approach becomes feasible. There’s a rule of thumb system called Sunny 16 for making educated guesstimates of exposure for outdoors environments. Sunny 16 states that if you set your shutter speed to the closest reciprocal of your film speed, bright sunny daylight requires an aperture of f/16 to get a decent exposure. Other weather conditions require opening up the aperture according to this table:

If you have doubts when classifying shooting conditions, you may want to err on the side of overexposure as color print film tends to prefer overexposure over underexposure. If you’re shooting slide film you should probably avoid using Sunny 16 altogether, as slide film can be very unforgiving if improperly exposed. Additionally, you can manually read a film canisters DX CAS code to see what a films minimum exposure tolerance is.

Quick example: When shooting XP2 on an overcast day, assuming an alternate base ISO of 200 (as suggested earlier), the shutter speed should be set at 1/250th of a second and our aperture should be set at f/8, giving a fairly large field of depth. Now if we want to reduce our field of depth we can trade +2 aperture stops for -2 stops of shutterspeed, where we end up shooting at 1/1000th of a second at f/4.

Having film processed

After shooting a roll of XP2 (or any roll of color print film) you need to take it to a local photo shop, chemist or supermarket to have a it processed, scanned and printed. Usually you’ll be able to have your film processed in C41 chemicals, scanned to CD and get a set of small prints for about € 15 or so. Keep in mind that most shops will cut your filmroll into strips of 4, 5 or 6 negatives, if left to their own devices, depending on the type of protective sleeves they use. Some shops might not offer scanning services without ordering prints, since scanning may be considered a byproduct of the printmaking process. Resulting JPEG scans are usually about 2 megapixel (1800×1200), or sometimes slightly less (1536×1024). A particular note when using XP2, since it’s processed as if it’s color print film means it’s usually scanned as if it’s color print film, where the resulting should-be-monochrome scans (and prints for that matter) can often have a slight color cast. This color cast varies, my particular local lab usually does a fairly decent job, where the scans have a subtle color cast, which isn’t too unpleasant. But I’ve heard about nasty heavier color casts as well. Regardless you need to keep in mind that you might need to convert the scans to proper monochrome manually, which can be easily done with any random photo editing software in a heartbeat. Same goes for rotating the images, aside from the usual 90 degree turns occasionally I get my images scanned upside down, where they need either 180 degree or 270 degree turns, you’ll likely need to do that yourself as well.

Post-processing the scans

Generally speaking I personally like preprocessing my scanned images using some scripted commandline tools before importing them into an image management program like for example Shotwell.

First I remove all useless data from the source JPEG, and in particular for black and white film, like XP2, remove the JPEGs chroma channels, to losslessly remove any color cast (avoiding generational loss):

$ jpegtran -copy none -grayscale -optimize -perfect ORIGINAL.JPG > OUTPUT.JPG

Using the clean image we previously created as a base, we can then add basic EXIF metadata:

$ exiv2 \
   -M"set Exif.Image.Artist John Doe" \
   -M"set Exif.Image.Make KMZ" \
   -M"set Exif.Image.Model Zorki-4" \
   -M"set Exif.Image.ImageNumber \
      $(echo ORIGINAL.JPG | tr -cd '0-9' | sed 's#^0*##g')" \
   -M"set Exif.Image.Orientation 0" \
   -M"set Exif.Image.XResolution 300/1" \
   -M"set Exif.Image.YResolution 300/1" \
   -M"set Exif.Image.ResolutionUnit 2" \
   -M"set Exif.Photo.DateTimeDigitized \
      $(stat --format="%y" ORIGINAL.JPG | awk -F '.' '{print $1}' | tr '-' ':')" \
   -M"set Exif.Photo.UserComment Ilford XP2 Super" \
   -M"set Exif.Photo.ExposureProgram 1" \
   -M"set Exif.Photo.ISOSpeedRatings 400" \
   -M"set Exif.Photo.FocalLength 50/1" \
   -M"set Exif.Image.MaxApertureValue 20/10" \
   -M"set Exif.Photo.LensMake KMZ" \
   -M"set Exif.Photo.LensModel Jupiter-8" \
   -M"set Exif.Photo.FileSource 1" \
   -M"set Exif.Photo.ColorSpace 1" \
   OUTPUT.JPG

As I previously mentioned I tend to get my scans back upside down, which is why I’m usually setting the Orientation tag to 3 (180 degree turn). Other useful values are 0 (do nothing), 6 (rotate 90 degrees clockwise) and 9 (rotate 270 degrees clockwise).

Keeping track

When you’re going to shoot a lot of film it can become a bit of a challenge keeping track of the various rolls of film you may have at an arbitrary point in your workflow. FilmTrackr has you covered.

Manual

You can find a scanned manual for the Zorki-4 rangefinder camera on Mike Butkus’ website.

Moar

If you want to read more about film photography you may want to consider adding Film Is Not Dead and Hot Shots to your bookshelf. You may also want to browse through istillshootfilm.org which seems to be a pretty good resource as well. And for your viewing pleasure, the [FRAMED] Film Show on YouTube.