Perils Of Digital, Part II, Computers

I'm writing this because in the last 9 days I have produced 300 prints for an upcoming Art Fair at 'Capital Ex' in Edmonton, 810,000 visitors expected. During this marathon printing session during which at one point I had three printers all going at once, I found every bug there is to find. I crashed Photoshop, I found a bug in Epson Print Utility on the Mac which can only be fixed by a cold restart (ie. kill the computer by holding down the power button), I ran out of memory (I have 6 gig) I lost communication with the printer a couple of times and had to restart the printer, I had the machines eat my very expensive 17X22 300 gm. Moab Entrada Paper.

That said, the idea of producing this much work and with consistency and high quality in the wet darkroom would have takenb months and would have been simply impossible. I think I did learn a few things along the way though.

Photoshop crashed because I used some new plug-ins - not a good idea when getting ready for a show. Uwe had touted the wonders of Akvis Enhancer and while I agree it is a good plug-in, unfortunately it doesn't work with the files from my 1Ds2 - too big - back to the drawing board. I look forward to an upgrade as I think this is well worth exploring. Once it works reliably on really large files I will let you know, in the mean time if you are not stitching and use an 8 MP camera, I do recommend trying it. Enhancer separates close tones - ie. it enhances micro contrast.

The bug in Epson Print Utility is that if you run it at the same time as you have the printer window open (the window that lists the prints being printed) or if heaven forbid you try to access the print utility from the printer window, the utility sits bouncing in the toolbar at the bottom of the screen and will not even respond to force quit. Yesterday I accidentally clicked on the utility at the wrong moment and had to restart the computer. Much to my surprise and delight, on doing so, the print que picked up where it left off and finished all my printing (20 more prints) for me.