A little learning…
A few years back, probably more than a few years back, I remember a print industry spokesperson proclaiming that in the modern world we were no longer just printers and should aim to be considered as print facilitators. I remember it because I found it amusing he hadn’t already noticed we needed to be so much more - mind readers in particular to second guess what customers actually wanted, translators of incomprehensible messages, anticipators of impossible deadlines, and general magicians.
Facilitate, being from the French, ‘to enable things to happen’, is one of those simple descriptions that completely fails to properly describe the complex problems of getting from point A to point B let alone C or D. We actually have a client that uses the word in their title and I always marvel how they ever manage to produce anything for their clients without the exceptional experience and patience of suppliers like us. What would they do without a clipboard and a mobile phone? I do think that had Napoleon the assistance of a modern facilitator on his campaigns he would have never made it from Toulon to Paris, let alone Moscow.
But there’s a big difference between selling a service to management in big companies who don’t know any better themselves, to dealing with print on demand to customers over the counter whose expectations, and available budget are quite different. I can speak with some experience having walked away from a big company that preferred to pay big bucks to people who couldn’t tie their own shoe laces without having a meeting, to just hiring people who could do the job. Working for a small company that appreciates the skills needed is much more rewarding even if it won’t make me rich!
And this is at the heart of the facilitator conundrum - the people using your service have to recognise you are the facilitator: the organ grinder not the monkey to use an old analogy. Once the position of an expert advisor was just accepted, now it is in doubt because the opinions of so many social media supposed experts have already been swallowed and will be regurgitated over the counter. They know what it should cost and how long it should take, as well as how to complain if it doesn’t meet their expectations. Don’t worry we are not alone because the same people will be going to professionals like their doctors with their symptoms already diagnosed by Google and telling them what they need - and the GP secretly hoping that it is as terminal as they fear.
The internet revolution that gives us facts at our fingertips of course is both good and bad at the same time, because you need to balance those facts with more facts that are outside your immediate search criteria.
If you search for tomato for example, the internet will tell you it’s a fruit, however you need to search a lot deeper to discover it’s not great included in a fruit cocktail! That is the danger of the instant expert who only reads the headline facts, not the body of reality with the full story. ‘A little learning is a dangerous thing’ the poet Alexander Pope warned - and he was writing over two hundred years ago when learning was a fairly exclusive luxury.
Of course the misinformation revolution has been creeping up on us gradually over a number of years. What has accelerated it is the App, that once innocuous little button that turns every user into a creative genius. It used to be called a programme and was a piece of software that had to be understood in order to use it. But in the customer led environment where people expect things to be done quicker and easier it is inevitable that the one big saving of time is that spent actually thinking. So much easier to press a button and bypass all that difficult stuff.
Which brings us back to where I left off in the last issue, with machine learning and the infinite number of monkeys. AI being very topical in the media I’ve been trying to ignore all the speculative treatise from those who know very little about it, and listening to those who probably do. One of the more interesting facts I picked up on is that given it draws upon all of the collective cloud resources, this electronic wealth of wisdom is not in fact, unlike the monkeys, infinite. Incredible as it may seem, the very expansion of AI may consume all the available original resources within a very few years, so it will in effect start to eat its own produce.
It has been noticed already that while generative imaging is very good at some things - obviously landscapes and fantasy visas where there is no actual reality to compare- it fails spectacularly on others. It’s pretty good with people’s faces, for example, even if some do tend to end up looking more like Barbie and Ken than a living being. But hands seem to be a challenge as fingers look more like pink bananas. The reason is simple if you apply a bit of purely human intelligence : compared to the billions of library pictures of people’s faces in all shapes and sizes, there are proportionally much fewer choices of hands.
It struck me as obvious when I tried to edit a skin care picture supplied by a customer in which hands were an ugly shade of red not really appropriate for the subject of the poster. I’ve been using Photoshop’s AI driven masking tools with some success in recognising people, and individual parts of them, as well as sky, background etc. for some time. So I assumed hands would be an easy spot for an intelligent machine as they were perfectly obvious to me. Wrong. Because the only human parts in view were the hands - no head, no eyes - it couldn’t see them because it had no reference.
This is just a simple example of how computer logic can be faulty, and the risk of relying on it alone. When it failed in this case, other smart tools were available to rectify the problem as I will describe shortly. But it underlines the danger of reliance on one click solutions. No doubt the software will get smarter but it will still need experienced or at least sceptical humans to guide it. Of course I’m not expecting customers to be in this select group anytime soon, hence this cautionary tale.
So to go back to basics why do we need selection tools for digital printing in Photoshop? Well in an ideal world, we wouldn’t. Everything would come in perfectly exposed, crisp, composed and ready to print. But as you can count those on one finger, almost all customers' offerings need some help - the degree of help being related to how valuable the job is.
Modern cameras are very good, but they do need a little bit of human assistance regardless of their advertised abilities. The human eye can take several minutes to adjust properly to lighting conditions, but people expect a camera to do it in a sixtieth of a second, as well as process all the captured colours accurately. Our brains know what colours familiar items are, a camera processor is only making a calculated guess.
So if we accept that images are not going to get much help at point of capture, the only option is to adjust at point of print, on the assumption that the customer is never going to believe their expensive phone was a waste of money.
The most common tasks are simply adjusting overall exposure to compensate for printing on paper rather than projected on a bright backlit screen. No reason the customer can judge that without prior example, even experienced photographers may have no idea what their images look like outside of the web.
There have always been selection tools in Photoshop, they have just got a lot, lot smarter, saving you time if you know which ones to use - or which combinations to choose. Often no single action does the complete trick.
But you can start in the basic PS workspace with a choice of select subject, or background or sky. If there are bits the marching ants have missed or added you can add or subtract by holding down the Alt button (on a PC) and using the lasso to capture and remove them. Then you should be able to separate one from the other and edit accordingly.
For more advanced selection you need to go into Filter>Camera RAW filter. This opens a whole new dialogue panel with a whole new box of tricks. There’s a lot of them, and at first they may look a bit daunting but essentially they are much more precise tools than those in the standard settings.
They are almost identical to those available in the Develop module in Lightroom, but I’m going to concentrate on Photoshop as it’s probably more familiar to most of you, and I keep mentioning Camera Raw because that’s where most of the new gems are found. If you really want to take image manipulation to a new level, that’s where you need to be.
As usual I can always rely on customers for a regular supply of working examples, in this case not the usual happy snappy phone stuff, but some professionally shot high resolution files - just not prepared for print.
I could have printed as presented but as the job was several hundred pounds, and I could see the originals were of good photographic quality,
It was worth indulging the customer with a little bit of careful correction.
The images were obviously of a theatrical type of event, and needed to retain that dark and slightly menacing look rather than be brightened and end up looking too cheerful.
In darkroom days with film this would be done with classic dodge and burn techniques but it would take hours, so if a customer asked ‘can you do anything with it ‘ the answer would be a rolling of the eyes and an intake of breath. The magic of digital is that when you have a nice big file with lots of pixels you’ve got lots of detail that helps Photoshop dissect colour and shape. In this case each of the eight individuals can be isolated from the background while still keeping shadow in the foreground below waist level as they are all being lit from above. The central figure gets a little more adjustment so he stands out from the group, but the individual faces of the others are also just lifted enough so they can be recognised.
This is where the human eye scores over just pressing ‘Auto’ and applying an average tone or contrast across the whole picture. It still looks as it’s mean to, just now transformed into print.
Result : one happy customer and one likely to come back and/or recommend our services to others, especially as the prints are going to be on display for lots of others to view and comment on. Always remember your product is the best advert you can produce. You may not always get the credit you deserve for a job well done, but you will certainly get it for a bad one!
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