A few years ago, I got up really early one Saturday morning, while it was still dark, and drove to World’s End State Park in Pennsylvania for some fall foliage landscape. It was a great day—about the only downside was that there were six young adults at the Loyalsock Canyon scenic overlook where I started, at around 5:45 a.m., I think after a long night of drinking and smoking, who kept coming over and asking what I thought I was doing, as if I were on their property. So I didn’t stay too long at that vista, which was just fine—a couple thousand feet up the road through the woods, this is what I saw.
It was a wondrous moment to witness—I would have been happy simply to have been there and have it in my memory. But I was also pretty delighted with the shots I took. I walked a bit up and a bit back, shifted this way and that, switched from wide angle to my prime lens and back again. The sunlight was coming through the trees like that for a long time. (Fall and winter are the only time I really love taking landscape pictures around here because the sunlight is at a lower angle and makes better shadows for a longer time.)
No picture I’ve taken, however, has ever taught me more about the huge difference between how an image looks on a computer screen and how it looks when you print from an archival-quality printer. This shot broke my heart a bunch of times when I printed it: it looked too dark, then it had no contrasts, then it had a gross over-saturated look (even if I didn’t fiddle with saturation at all in post-processing). I eventually got to a version that looked in print like the image that I loved on screen but it was hard (and given the paper and ink involved, expensive). That experience was another of those auto-didactic breakthroughs, an experience of learning that didn’t start as something that I was expecting to learn from. It colored my feelings about the shot itself (so to speak)—some of the prints I didn’t like made me feel that the image was cliched or vulgar, that I’d bungled it somehow in-camera, and so on. But that was because I expected a quality print to be a simple matter, when it’s anything but.
It also made me way more judgmental about other people’s photography, the kind that gets sold in booths at art and craft fairs. I recently walked around a big juried show at Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia and there were a few booths with giant aluminum prints of landscape photography, most of which I think were licensed prints of photographs taken by someone other than the person in the booth. The common style was oversaturated, some of them HDR images, and I just really disliked the look. If I have an aesthetic of my own, it’s towards darker, denser landscapes with a wide contrast range—which are harder to shoot and much harder to print. I toy occasionally with taking a bunch of prints to a small craft show and seeing how I fare, but I suspect the prevalence of those shiny, saturated, bright images at most shows tells you what sells.
For preparing images for printing, look at any of Dan Margulis's Photoshop books. Margulis was doing computer photo prepress for print well before Photoshop was on the scene, but was an early convert to Photoshop, and developed many of the techniques for color correction that have been incorporated auto-magic tools in later versions. It's primarily about global manipulation of curves and recombination of channels--nothing about making goofy "Photoshopped" images. His books are the rare computer books that are really inspirational, to make you want to fire up Photoshop and work with some images.