Why Johnny Can’t Print

Why Johnny Can’t Print

From Marc Rochkind’s Blog

http://basepath.com/?p=8 This article is about printing, color management, moniotr calibration, etc. -- very informative!

Below is directly from Marc's post...

His title is a play on Why Johnny Can’t Read, a 1955 book by Rudolf Flesch that argued that schoolchildren should be taught to read with phonics instead of look-say or whole language. (Here’s a review of the book. It’s priced at $3, but only if you go back in time to 1955.) Educators continued to teach whole-language reading (and maybe still do) even though there was no evidence that it worked, and lots of evidence that it didn’t.

What this has to do with printing is that most photographers try to print with a method that doesn’t work either, yet they keep doing it.

Here’s the recipe that most photographers use for printing a picture:

• Transfer the image from your camera to your computer.
• Adjust the colors and the cropping on your screen, using iPhoto, Photoshop Elements, IrfanView, Picasa, or whatever.
• Start up the printer and print the photo.
• If the colors aren’t quite right, which they probably aren’t, go back to step 2 and repeat.
• When you’re happy or ready to give up, stop.

Why doesn’t this work? Why the need for all those test prints just to get things right? Well, suppose you tried to make corn muffins with a recipe like this:

Mix together:
Some all-purpose flour Some corn meal (somewhat less than the amount of flour) Even less sugar A couple of measures of baking powder Milk, about as much as you drink when you’re not that thirsty Not nearly that much vegetable oil An egg
Heat the oven. Put the mix into a muffin pan and bake for a while.
Actually, my grandmother did bake this way, but she had been baking for decades before I even met her. I would fail if I tried this recipe, and then somebody would write a column on Why Marc Can’t Bake.

Everybody, even if they’ve never baked, knows what’s wrong with the recipe: The measures are missing! But nobody (other than serious amateurs and professionals) seems to see that that’s true of the printing recipe, too: The measures are missing.