This workshop focuses exclusively on improving your fine-art digital printing in our first-class Digital Lab, primarily using Epson inkjet printers. Concentration will be on inkjet printing with color pigments and black/gray ink combinations on coated and rag papers. Learn from the digital pioneer how he obtains his impressive results during four days of lectures, printing, and feedback in the studio.

We will cover workflow issues, color management, correcting color casts, adjustment layers, custom profile generation, editing and inspection. There being no magic bullet to making good prints, the workshop will also explore old fashioned testing, careful color judgements and interactive honing in on the best print possible.

Discussions will also include an exploration of print aesthetics in the digital age - what makes for a beautiful print? - do the new possibilities enhance our notion of what photography can be? - are we merely trying to imitate traditional photographic processes? Papers and their printing problems and advantages will be weighed, as well as their visual qualities.

We are also including a one-hour DVD prototype we have made on matting and framing.

Workshop Workings
You bring your photographs. We help you learn about the details of digital printing, then we help you make prints that reflect your visual aspirations. We'll supply paper, ink, computer, printer, viewing light and some awesome teaching with the conceptual hurdles of color management, color balance and B&W tonal control left in the dust of former lack of confidence and understanding. These four days will make a difference in your printing.

We have chosen not to add a lab fee to the workshop and are trying instead to establish a budget for ink and paper. Each student will be provided with their own workstation and printer, 20 sheets of letter sized paper and 5 of 13x19. Prints beyond those numbers can be charged on a print basis. Arrangements cam be made to bring your own paper and adjust ink allocations. You are also welcome to make paper profiles for your own papers during the workshop, but it will eat into your printing time.

This workshop will expand our workshop program's exploration of photography's evolution into a digitally based medium, demonstrating the technology and discussing the implications and opportunities of this dramatic change as it relates to prints. We will then spend 2 days making your prints and working them into as near perfection as we can manage. In that management is the dedication, skill, aesthetics and sensititivty that seems required to make prints of great beauty.

Stephen Johnson

Stephen's pioneering work in digital photography, desktop color separations and digital imaging has included software and product development for clients such as Apple, Adobe, Eastman Kodak, Leaf, Ricoh and SuperMac. His work with Adobe includes the creation of the duotone curves shipped with their Photoshop software.

He was named to the Photoshop Hall of Fame in 2003. Photographic clients have included the Ansel Adams Publishing Trust, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the Friends of Photography. Johnson's photographs have been widely published and collected internationally.

In 1997, Life Magazine described Stephen Johnson as an artist that "...applies science to nature and creates art." His images create "...an intimacy that brings subject and viewer close in ways conventional photographs cannot." 

The Photographer’s Gallery wrote in 1998: “Stephen Johnson's photography rides on the "bleeding edge" of photography's transition to a digital media. Schooled in the traditions of fine-art western landscape photography, Johnson has taken his understanding of traditional photographic processes and brought those skills to bear on the emerging technologies and aesthetics of digital photography. He has pushed technology companies to rise to the best of what imagemaking can be, and pushed his own vision of how we see and record light in the natural world. This has led him to conclude that the way we have traditionally captured images with silver-based photography has been a poor and distortive view of the real and rich world before our eyes. His photographs look almost "unphotographic" in their clarity and purity of color. He shows us a world we know, but rarely see on paper. His is a truly remarkable vision.”