Archives for May 2012

Do you ever have one of those days, where you think everything is in order, but when you start the job everything seems to line up for a problem. Today I had one of those type of days. I have been working an huge printing project for a local hospital. There are 8 total panels on canvas each is 35″ long and 70″ tall. I had proofed each panel and felt I was ready for the printing.  However as I started to print I ran to one problem after another, some being my fault, others out of my control.

1. When printing large like this, you may miss some small imperfections, that will really not show up in a smaller version of a print.  One of these jobs was a long vertical waterfall coming down a series of boulders.  The image was created by using 2 vertical 35mm frames and combining them together to create one final image.  When I viewed the files, they seemed fine, however once printed large I did find some areas where the software I used to combine the files left some areas not blended very well.
2. When printing out a large file always remember to view the preview screen.  For some reason the Epson print driver started to cut off my 70″ long prints at about 43″ but still ran out all the 70″ of canvas.  I finally was able to get around this by moving the printing to Lightroom 64 bit.
3. UPS failures, during one print I had a power surge and it took out the UPS the printer was attached to.  At first I thought I might have lost the printer, but it returned with no problems.
4. Canvas problems between lots of canvas.  If you are using a standard brand of canvas, I strongly recommend checking the lot numbers and making sure a shipment stays in one set of lot number.  I ran into a problem where I crossed two sets of lot numbers and most of the profiling and printer settings didn’t seem to work as well on the 2nd lot.

Overall the lesson learned here is you never really have everything under control.  It’s a rare day where everything swarms like it did today but it can happen.