The past couple of evenings I’ve really enjoyed drinking great wine and chatting with George Jardine, Lightroom Evangelist at Adobe, and Seth Resnick, renowned photographer and imaging instructor, whose D-65 workshop came to Denver. Their hospitality was boundless, and Seth and his wife Jamie ran a fantastic 4-day workshop. Thanks to all of you!

These days the Epson R1900 is getting a lot of publicity and Epson is offering discounts.

One of my consulting clients sent me the following email:

“I’m interested getting up to speed with a good-quality printer at home. (Am planning to use you for higher-end printing.)  You mentioned some new technology is coming out.  When I see promotions like this, I figure new capability must be in the pipe soon.   I generally like to buy technology at then beginning of its lifecycle. Do you have any insight”

My response:

This printer is still at the beginning of its life cycle and represents Epson’s latest efforts/improvements; I don’t expect any newer technology advances from them in at least this calendar year.

Right now Epson’s latest offerings are the addition of orange and green inks on “prosumer” models and Vivid Magenta on “professional” models.

But neither represent a huge leap forward in color reproduction.

If you’re ready to take the next steps toward more “serious” printing this would be a good solution; even better would be the R2880.

I suspect the aggressive pricing in the R1900 is in response to market threats from Canon and to a lesser degree HP. I haven’t really kept tabs on these other printers; I’m sticking with Epson for the time being.

Click for more info about the Epson R1900

These days I’m doing a lot of “giclee” reproductions of original fine art in a variety of media including pastels, watercolor and oils.

I’ve found that Lightroom is an ideal environment in which to work up my master images. In particular, the HSL panel is an extremely useful tool when it comes to matching colors in the original paintings.

I begin with a digital capture, either a raw image from a Canon 1Ds Mark III or a scan of a transparency (from  my Epson 750M Pro). Whether working with a raw capture or a TIF scan, I’ve found that I can match colors much more easily in Lightroom than in Photoshop.

For color management on my Mac, I use a LaCie 319 display, X-Rite EyeOne and Pulse. I’ve found that I really can trust what I see in Lightroom to match the print (of course, this also involves soft-proofing for the chosen media in Photoshop prior to printing.)

If you do fine art reproductions, consider integrating Lightroom into your workflow. It’s made a world of difference in mine.

*I will be publishing a white paper on Fine Art Reproduction with Lightroom this summer… stay tuned!