Focus on Imaging at the NEC has become something of an annual pilgrimage to see what the photographic industry has to offer.

This year felt better than last – maybe due to the return of Canon. Always good to look over their new lenses, but they remain weak in comparison to Nikon with their wide angle zooms (yes the new 16-35 Mk II included) still too soft on a full frame digital SLR when compared to similar Nikon lenses. Come on Canon, you need to step up a gear as with the introduction of full-frame sensors to the Nikon range, Nikon are back in the game. This competition is good and should drive the market forward to the benefit of both Nikon and Canon users. Sony will wade in later in the year with a full frame 25MP sensor SLR that is likely to shake things up further, particularly when Nikon use this sensor in their own body. Canon is making a mess of fixing its 1D MkIII focus problems and this can’t be doing its reputation any good at all – is really been caught napping.

New inkjet paper was in evidence. I have been using the new Harmon Baryta gloss (identical to air-dried fibre based silver halide darkroom paper) and matt paper for about 5 months now and I am really hooked on its wide colour gamut and deep detailed blacks. Harman were promoting their newly released Warmtone gloss baryta (to give it its full proper name – Gloss FB AL Warmtone) a gloss baryta paper with nil or minimal optical brighteners giving a warm gloss paper intended primarily for black and white printing, whereas its close cousin - Gloss FB AL – with optical brighteners works well with both colour and black and white. Free A4 sample packs were being given out which I eagerly accepted and can’t now wait to try out. Similarly Hahnemuehle had two new papers to show, namely their Baryta and Bamboo papers. For my taste I found the Hahnemuehle Baryta surface to be a bit too textured, although no doubt it will appeal to many. Unless I missed it, it was a pity that Epson didn’t manage to have samples available of their new Exhibition Fibre paper that started to ship in the States at the beginning of the month. This paper is intended to compete with the other Barytas and is reported to be the brightest and sharpest of the bunch – which is good and bad in almost equal measure. Being blindingly white the level of optical brighteners is worrying and likely to have an adverse effect on its longevity. But as it wasn’t at Focus, I can’t say that I have seen it to be able to personally pass comment – a pity because a few sample sheets would have made for an interesting comparison.
"Spanish Moss"
As usual there were some photographic prints displayed around the exhibition hall, many illustrating the work of college students. It wasn’t always clear how far through their courses these students had progressed and whilst there were some interesting images many of them were not properly sharpened and showed that a better grasp of print sharpening was needed. Print sharpening really must comprise of three core elements – capture sharpening, creative sharpening and finally output sharpening. Single stage sharpening will always be inferior and largely inadequate. Many of the prints that I saw didn’t appear to have enough sharpening applied whether single or multiple stage. This is an easy mistake to make, if the relationship between the image displayed on the monitor and the printed image is not clearly understood. Custom and practice has it that for sharpening, images should be viewed on the monitor at 100% magnification. Unfortunately this is now one rule of thumb that should be killed off forever. With modern monitor resolutions and image output resolutions this advice is totally wrong and will inevitable lead to inaccurate sharpening. If your display resolution is close to 100 ppi and you are printing at 240 ppi then viewing at 50% gives a truer impression of the final sharpening – certainly a lot closer than viewing actual pixels (100%). Similarly a display at 75 ppi with print output at 300 ppi ought to be view at 25%. It should also be remembered that Photoshop isn’t good at odd zoom levels as it applies strong antialiasing at these odd levels – which has an untrue softening effect. Better to stick to viewing images at 50%, 25%, 12.5% etc rather than 66.6%, 33.3% etc. Soft-proofing applied sharpening is far from perfect, however by at least understanding the relationship between monitor and print, it can at least be made to behave predictably.